[URBANTH-L]AAA 2008 CFP: Penal Cities and Carceral States: Activism,
Anthropology and Mass Incarceration
Nina Brown
nbrown at mica.edu
Fri Mar 14 20:41:06 EDT 2008
Call for Papers
Proposed Session
American Anthropological Association (AAA), Nov. 19-Nov. 23, 2008 Hilton
Park and Towers, San Francisco
Penal Cities and Carceral States: Activism, Anthropology and Mass
Incarceration
Kristi Brian (Temple University) and Nina Brown (Maryland Institute College
of Art)
As the United States continues to outpace the rest of the world in
incarceration rates with over 2 million people in prison and nearly 5
million people on parole, probation or house arrest, more North American
lives are affected by imprisonment than ever before. This panel will
highlight the convergence and collaboration between activists and
anthropologists working to uncover the myriad ways in which policies and
practices of confinement are changing our national landscape.
The papers on this panel will explore Angela Davis' paradoxical notion of
"the multiple invisibilities of imprisonment" through ethnographic work that
makes visible the lives disappeared by the workings of penal cities and
carceral states--the very lives that fuel the profit of the prison
industrial complex. Because the prison system is one of the clearest
manifestations of state-based social control, the incarcerated, formerly
incarcerated and their families inevitably form concrete understandings of
the state's intervention in their lives. As those social actors most
affected by the prison system problematize the state, the visible impact of
the expansion of "get tough" law and order politics, new forms of
surveillance, and extremely aggressive technologies of confinement serve to
decenter our understanding of criminality. This panel will consider how
these conceptualizations of the state and criminality inform the various
modes of resistance or community activism that emerge both inside and
outside of prisons.
As anthropologists concerned about the growth and influence of penal
institutions we are being increasingly informed by incarcerated men and
women witnessing the prison boom from the inside, ex-offenders turned
community activists, and the family members left at home during their loved
ones incarceration. This panel will highlight these perspectives and also
include papers that illustrate the critical connections prison activists are
making between the military industrial complex, the prison industrial
complex and the global export of U.S.-styled warehousing of the condemned.
We invite paper submissions addressing the following or related areas:
- Intersections of imprisonment with gender constructions, hyper masculine
policies of confinement, or constrained motherhood
- Ex-offender and environmentalist collaborations addressing the three
Ps--police, prison and pollution
- Collaborations between prisoner-led initiatives and law enforcement
personnel or community organizers
- Activist and anthropologist collaborations to address mass incarceration
- Prisoner narratives or prison-based ethnographies
- Urban social policies leading to increased arrests and incarceration
- Populations detained as a result of immigration and homeland security
policies
Please send 250 word abstracts by March 27th to Kristi Brian
(kbrian at temple.edu) or Nina Brown (nbrown at mica.edu)
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