Research

Research in the Crime and Carcerality:

  • Brings together new disciplinary configurations of researchers with a focus on the lived experience of spaces of crime and carcerality – whether within ‘traditional’ spaces (such as prisons or detention centres) or those aligned with expanded conceptual notions of carcerality (such as schools, transport practice, urban or even marine management);
  • Interrogate how these spaces function and search for ways to engage with relevant stakeholders to identify research opportunities, share knowledge and expertise;
  • Explore innovative methods to engage with the often vulnerable carceral populations and less-visible research fields associated with this area of academic research;
  • Share knowledge and expertise to enhance undergraduate, taught postgraduate and research postgraduate teaching and scholarship in this area at Oldenburg, across disciplines.

Our current research is situated in four areas:

Women's  Imprisonment, Social Control and the Carceral State (WISCA)

Women have remained largely absent from studies into key issues such as control, exclusion and experiences of confinement. Yet female prisoners are particularly important because many reform agendas are trialled on this relatively small and seemingly more manageable group. This research provides a vital expansion of carceral geography and qualitative criminology into the German-speaking, interdisciplinary field. It does so through a project on understandings of social control and women’s imprisonment.

Spaces of care and control: Apparatus and modes of carceral concern

Whilst much research of crime and carcerality focuses on the politics of intentional, detrimental spatial exclusion and confinement, there is a need also to consider how crime and spaces of carcerality are also ones of control and care. Focused on how historical workhouses functioned as sites of care in the 18th century, to the contemporary workings of the youth justice estate in the 21st century, projects here stretch and reorient understandings of crime and carcerality within theories of institutional ‘care’ and ‘concern’.

The prison-military complex

What is the relationship between prisons – spaces of control, spatial exclusion and confinement – and institutions of the military? This research interrogates the complex relations between prisons and the ways in which they are embedded in (post) military infrastructures and staffed by (past) military personnel at a time at which prisons worldwide see an increasing relation (and reliance) on the two.

Carceral geography beyond boundaries: Carceral seas

This project pushes the very boundaries of what we understand spaces of incarceration, bounding, containment and confinement to be. By thinking of spaces other than traditional institutions of incarceration through a conceptual lens of ‘carcerality’ we may be able to better understand lived experiences, modes of governance, and the politics of control – historically and today. This research explores offshore spaces as ones of crime and carcerality. Work considers the politics of containment of people at sea (on the prison ship) as well the bordering practices that characterise modern marine governance (in the shape of boundary making spatial management tools such as Marine Protected Areas).

(Changed: 19 Jan 2024)  | 
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