Jennifer Turner

Unlocking carceral atmospheres: designing visual/material encounters at the prison museum

Using a variety of devices from visual displays, material objects, sensory engagements and embodied performance, museums select and narrate particular moments in history to an increasingly active audience. Thus far, focus on specific elements of museum design has eluded the altogether more pervasive, intangible and complex sensations designed, engineered, co-constituted and also arising unexpectedly from these sites: atmospheres. This article draws upon a particular museum experience – that of the prison museum – to interrogate how atmospheres are a key component of re-telling the past. Here, the authors explore the production and consumption of what they term ‘carceral atmospheres’. Focusing on two prison museums, the article explores how visitors unlock experiences of incarceration via the variety of atmospheric sensations calculated and provoked in these museum settings through visual/material manifestations and cues. The authors conclude that understanding atmospheric design is vital to gaining a deeper appreciation of how heritage sites function in the 21st century.

Between crime and colony: interrogating (im)mobilities aboard the convict ship

Recent literature in carceral geography has attended to the importance of mobilities in interrogating the experience and control of spaces of imprisonment, detention and confinement. Scholars have explored the paradoxical nature of incarcerated experience as individuals oscillate between moments of fixity and motion as they are transported to/from carceral environments. This paper draws upon the convict ship – an example yet to gain attention within these emerging discussions – which is both an exemplar of this paradox and a lens through which to complicate understandings of carceral (im)mobilities. The ship is a space of macro-movement from point A to B, whilst simultaneously a site of apparent confinement for those aboard who are unable to move beyond its physical parameters. Yet, we contend that all manner of mobilities permeate the internal space of the ship. Accordingly, we challenge the binary thinking that separates moments of fixity from motion and explore the constituent parts that shape movement. In paying attention to movements in motion on the ship, we argue that studies of carceral mobility must attend to both methods of moving in the space between points A and B; as micro, embodied and intimate (im)mobilities are also played out within large-scale regimes of movement.

Doing time-travel: Performing past and present at the prison museum

[From introduction] The transformation of former prisons to sites of “dark tourism” reflects a recent trend in the use of decommissioned buildings for alternative purposes, such as museums and other heritage sites, which particularly emphasise “representations of death, disaster or atrocity for pedagogical and commercial purposes” (Walby and Piche, 2011: 452). Prisons are spaces that hold a morbid fascination for visitors who are unlikely to ever encounter such a space in their everyday lives (Strange and Kempa, 2003). Far from a traditional tourist site, the prison museum is built upon consumer desire to access the inaccessible; to glimpse a life on the ‘inside’ and all its assumed horrors from the comfort of being on the ‘outside’ (Turner, 2013) – with the choice and liberty, of course, to enter, to leave, to accept or to reject any given exhibition or display (see Hall, 1973). Prison museums cater, on the one hand, to a market of visitors seeking such tourist experiences for entertainment (Adams, 2001; Schrift, 2004). On the other hand, they function to educate visitors about penal pasts, shaping contemporary understandings through engagement with carceral histories (see, for example, Baker, 2014: 1). In this chapter we attend to the ways in which a particular prison museum – the Galleries of Justice, in Nottingham, U.K. – informs and entertains while making the past usable in the present.The file associated with this article has a special embargo of 12 months from publication with the permission of the publisher.Bargaining with reading habit is no need. Reading is not kind of something sold that you can take or not. It is a thing that will change your life to life better. It is the thing that will give you many things around the world and this universe, in the real world and here after. As what will be given by this historical geographies of prisons unlocking the usable carceral past routledge research in historical geography, how can you bargain with the thing that has many benefits for you?

Criminals with ‘community spirit’ : practising citizenship in the hidden world of the prison

Contra the notion of prisons as discrete, ‘hidden’ spaces, contemporary research has stressed a range of connections, transactions and exchange. The relationship between the offender and the outside communities—captured in the policy rhetoric of rehabilitation and the promotion of good citizenship—is just one of these connections. This paper explores contemporary, liberal imaginations of the ‘ideal’ citizen; it goes on to critique formal rehabilitation programmes and highlight informal mechanisms developed within the prison environment which disrupt these constructions. Ultimately, this allows a deeper appreciation of how, despite attempts to practise citizenship in an environment that renders conventional rights and responsibilities absent, the prisoner remains altogether ‘less than ideal’.

Conceptualizing the carceral in carceral geography

Carceral geography has yet to define the ‘carceral’, with implications for its own development, its potential synergies within and beyond geography, and effective critique of the carceral ‘turn’. A range of explicatory alternatives are open, including continued expansive engagement with the carceral, and attendance to compact and diffuse carceral models. We trace the origins of the term ‘carceral’, its expansive definition after Foucault, the apparent carceral/prison symbiosis, and the extant diversity of carceral geography. We advance for debate, as a step towards its critical appraisal, a series of ‘carceral conditions’ that bear on the nature and quality of carcerality.

Fixed-term and temporary: teaching fellows, tactics, and the negotiation of contingent labour in the UK higher education system

This paper autobiographically considers the role of teaching-only staff as a contingent labour force in the contemporary higher education system in the UK. The aims are twofold. First, whilst much attention has been paid to the role of the research fellow, there has been less consideration, in the UK context, of the teaching fellow as an alternate form of postdoctoral experience. Accordingly, this paper gives voice to the teaching fellow—a member of academic staff who is not allocated writing and research time as part of their contract—whose views are often marginalised in ongoing debates concerning the plays of power in the neoliberalised academy. Second, the paper raises these voices to bring into consciousness the impacts of the teaching fellow experience for the fellows themselves and the faculties they work in. It is argued that teaching fellows face challenging circumstances with regard to their career trajectories in the academy. Accordingly, this paper considers the ways in which fellows, through tactics of place-making, presence and visibility, and collaboration, negotiate the challenging structural and institutional conditions that underscore their contracts. It is contended that exploring the teaching-only workforce is vital for critically assessing the workings of the contemporary academy and questioning the unequal power relations that shape work places in a culture where contingent labour is expanding; becoming less of a fixed-term and temporary feature of the university system but, rather, a stable and enduring one.

Introduction. Between Absence and Presence: Geographies of Hiding, Invisibility and Silence

Special Issue: BETWEEN ABSENCE AND PRESENCE: GEOGRAPHIES OF HIDING, INVISIBILITY AND SILENCE

Rethinking mobility in criminology: Beyond horizontal mobilities of prisoner transportation:

Typically, to be incarcerated is to be fixed: limited within specific parameters or boundaries with liberty and agency greatly reduced. Yet, recent literature has attended to the movement (or mobilities) that shape, or are shaped by modes of incarceration. Rather than simply assuming that experiences are inherently ones of immobility, such literature unhinges carceral studies from its framing within a sedentary ontology. However, the potential of mobility studies for unpacking the movements enfolded in carceral space and imprisoned life has yet to be fully exploited. When attending to mobilities, criminologists have investigated the politics of movement through a traditional horizontal frame of motion (between prison spaces, between court and prison, etc.). This paper contends that studies of mobility in criminology could be productively rethought. Drawing on movements of convicts from Britain to Australia aboard prison ships, this paper argues that straightforward, horizontal mobilities at work in regimes of control and practices of resistance marry together with vertical mobilities. Paying attention to the complex mobilities involved in carceral experience leads to a more nuanced understanding of regimes of discipline and practices of resistance that shape how incarcerated individuals move (or are unable to move) within carceral spaces, past and present.

The Artistic ‘Touch’: Moving Beyond Carceral Boundaries Through Art by Offenders

Highlighting the 2011 Koestler Award ‘Art by Offenders’ Exhibition, Turner demonstrates how prisoners may interact with the world outside of prison, despite their incarceration. Drawing on a range of prisoner artwork, Turner argues that prisoners producing art and ‘outsiders’ interacting with it has a number of important purposes. In the sale of artwork, prisoners contribute to a system of production and economic exchange. Furthermore, as well as generating their own income, the celebration of these pieces through specific awards helps in the self-production of creative individuals legitimised in the arts community and wider society. Finally, Turner draws on literatures of ‘touch’ and hapticality to consider how production and consumption of this artwork may enhance prisoners’ ability to ‘touch’ the world outside of prison.

Complicating Carceral Boundaries with Offender Art

Highlighting the 2011 Koestler Award ‘Art by Offenders’ Exhibition, Turner demonstrates how prisoners may interact with the world outside of prison, despite their incarceration. Drawing on a range of prisoner artwork, Turner argues that prisoners producing art and the outsiders interacting with it have a number of important purposes. In the sale of artwork, prisoners contribute to a system of production and economic exchange. Furthermore, as well as generating their own income, the celebration of these pieces through specific awards helps in the self-production of creative individuals legitimised in the arts community and wider society. Finally, Turner draws on literatures of ‘touch’ and hapticality to consider how production and consumption of this artwork may enhance prisoners’ ability to ‘touch’ the world outside of prison.