Luca Follis

Power in Motion: Tracking Time, Space, and Movement in the British Penal Estate

This paper tracks the impact of prison transfers (and mobility considerations more generally) on the spatio-temporal regimes pursued within the British Penal Estate. I argue that what appear from outside as static spaces of detention are in fact nodes within a network deeply crisscrossed by internal patterns of mobility and the problematics of time–space coordination. I explore the power relations that shape prisoner patterns of movement and highlight the distinctive states of deprivation they generate.

Edgework, state power, and hacktivists

Comment on Coleman, Gabriella. 2014. Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: The many faces of Anonymous. London and New York: Verso.

Resisting the camp : civil death and the practice of sovereignty in New York State

This article is an empirical engagement of Giorgio Agamben’s “spatial theory of power.” It explores, through the case-study of civil death in New York, the continuum of exclusion that is capped on one end by homo sacer and the sovereign on the other. I argue that civil death has had a long-running history in America, intimately connected to the expression of sovereign power and its deployment in the penal sphere. I show that despite the longue durée of this disability, and its efficacy as a tool of political and social marginalization, this practice has proved highly unstable for sovereignty and has generated significant resistance in the courts, civil society and prisons themselves. The contested status of civil death, I contend, underscores the dynamic character of resistance to sovereign power and its role in framing the conditions under which state authority can be articulated and maintained.

The Province and Heritage of Humankind: Space Law’s Imaginary of Outer Space, 1967–79

This chapter offers a close reading of the negotiations surrounding the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the Moon Agreement of 1979, focusing on the competing normative and political rationales that informed the former’s success and the latter’s perceived failure. In particular the chapter argues that uncovering the broader meaning and purpose of the Moon Agreement – and to some extent the Space Age – involves probing the ideological and material divide between developed and developing nations over the role distributive justice and equity could play in space exploration.

Discipline Unbound: Patuxent, Treatment and the Colonization of Law

This article engages Michel Foucault’s thesis that post-sovereign law would be increasingly colonized by the disciplinary norm. It explores, through an analysis of prisoner litigation surrounding Maryland’s Patuxent Institution and its defective delinquency statute, how disciplinary power is enabled, understood, and resisted through law. I argue that Article 31B (as the defective delinquency statute was known) set up a zone of expert prerogative and discretion actively maintained and legitimated through jurisprudence. Yet, paradoxically, law also functioned as a conduit for resistance and contestation pitting the epistemological premises of discipline against the functions of legal jurisprudence and the foundations of criminal law. I contend that this dual character of law’s engagement with discipline (i.e., at once open to expert “colonization” and site of structural incompatibility and resistance) illustrates the intractability of the relationship between the disciplinary and law. That is, law both constitutes disciplinary space (and within this normative envelope, discipline can be “unbound”) and remains in a state of tension with the forms of power that develop within it (which by their very premises seek to exceed the limits law would place upon them).