Carceral Worlds - by Hanneke Stuit & Jennifer Turner & Julienne Weegels (Hardcover)

About the Book

"We are living in what might be considered a 'carceral world'. Practices, performances, spatialities, imaginaries, and experiences of incarceration are widespread. Carceral Worlds offers a necessary and timely contribution to understanding these realities of our globalized present. The book interrogates the central implication of prison systems in population management and expands our perspectives of security, imprisonment and confinement to account for the historical and social constructions that drive the connections between prisons and the capitalist system. Crucially, it addresses the intersection of the carceral beyond traditional spaces of incarceration and imprisonment to interrogate, for example, infrastructures of labor; religion; the prolonged effects of colonial heritage on the everyday; ecological concerns; homelessness; migrant detention; and city management as part of the production of our 'carceral world'. The volume brings together work on an international scale with case studies from across the Global North and Global South. Bringing together multidisciplinary contributions that speak to the themes of the conditions, experiences and imaginaries of carcerality, this book will be essential reading for those interested in questions of carcerality in relation to the management, control, and securitization of populations around the globe"--

Book Synopsis

We live a world in which the number of prisons is growing and experiences of incarceration are increasingly widespread. Carceral Worlds offers a necessary and timely contribution to understanding these carceral realities of the globalized present. The book asks how the carceral has become so central in life, how it manifests in different geographical locations and, finally, what the likely consequences are of living in such a carceral world.

Carceral Worlds focuses on carceral practices, experiences and imaginaries that reach far beyond traditional spaces of confinement. It shows the lasting effects of colonial carceral heritage, the influence of prison systems on city management, and the entrapping nature of digital infrastructures. It also discusses new urbanized forms of migrant detention, the relation between prisons and homelessness, the use of carceral metaphors in the everyday, and the carceral implications of the uneven distribution of climate risk across the globe.

The volume brings together work from scholars across the world and from a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, offering a fresh approach to the carceral as a central vector in modern life.

Review Quotes

"This diverse, multifaceted collection affirms the richness of contemporary carceral studies bringing important insights and provocations from social science and the humanities to bear on a range of literal and literary carceral worlds and imaginaries. Significantly, running throughout is an insistent current of abolitionist thought that has the potential to enable and energize the necessary ongoing pushback against carceral power. The collection is forceful but pragmatic, ambitious but attritional and makes a timely contribution to our collective understandings of the detrimental, deliberate dynamics associated with the desire to secure and the will to confine." --Andrew M. Jefferson, DIGNITY - Danish Institute Against Torture

"'Carceral Worlds', brings together a diverse and fascinating collection of essays and reflections that challenge, inform, and advance the theorization of the carceral and the varied legacies with which it is articulated." --Dominique Moran, University of Birmingham

"Carceral Worlds investigates how the concept of the carceral and its bordering holds and are held. Attentive to assaults on geographic liberatory practices and the resonances of carceral states beyond the prison, nowhere in this conceptual work do the authors forget on whose bodies the hold lands. Collectively, the authors offer a profound meditation on how the carceral bleeds its logics across tight epistemic and institutional walls, how the punitive polices a global ordering of spatial distinctions and temporal inequities, and ultimately, how the carceral is a predatory form of life that sustains racial capitalism." --Kathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary University of London

About the Author

Hanneke Stuit is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is author of Ubuntu Strategies: Constructing Spaces of Belonging in Contemporary South African Culture (2016) and co-editor of Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Spaces, Mobilities, Aesthetics (2016).

Jennifer Turner is the leader of the Crime and Carcerality Research Group at the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany. She is author of The Prison Boundary: Between Society and Carceral Space (2016) and co-editor of Carceral Mobilities: Interrogating Movement in Incarceration (2017) and The Prison Cell: Embodied and Everyday Spaces of Incarceration (2020).

Julienne Weegels is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is co-organizer of the Global Prisons Research Network and convenor of the Anthropology of Confinement network.