Going Up (And Down) the River: The Geographies of Art, Agency and Resistance Across and Within Carceral Space
Topics: Cultural Geography
, Political Geography
, Social Geography
Keywords: carceral geography, incarceration, prison, art, cultural geography, political geography, power, resistance, ethnography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 57
Authors:
Adam C. Morse, University of Oregon
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
This paper is an examination of the geographical circumstances in carceral environments that affect the construction of artistic practice. This work seeks to qualify how the geographies of art - the creative expressions that are performed and articulated in space - function as agency and/or resistance, within carceral space. Carceral populations, who have been removed and disappeared (Wacquant) by urban space, are further stripped of their voices and self-expression as bodies that become geographically relocated. Drawing from de Certeau (1984) and akin to the work of Fleetwood (2020) and Harbert & Gaines (2016), I investigate prisoners’ artistic geographies in spaces of confinement as they become tactics of circumnavigating prisoners’ public disappearance(s). Through ethnographic and interview-based methods I evaluate a variety of prison arts programs, including music, theater, drama, visual art and design, examining how resistance may operate as agency but not always as resistance, as carceral artists demonstrate varying imagined and/or material motivations within their aesthetic, personal geographies in asserting their presence and existence. This work elucidates how and why creative expression is accessed by subaltern populations, to better illustrate the inequalities neoliberal incarceration preys upon and further perpetuates.
De Certeau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fleetwood, N. R. (2020). Marking time: Art in the age of mass incarceration. Harvard University Press.
Harbert, B. J., & Gaines, C. (2019). Sounding Lockdown: Singing in Administrative Segregation at the
Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. In Popular Music and the Politics of Hope (pp.
299-316). Routledge.
Going Up (And Down) the River: The Geographies of Art, Agency and Resistance Across and Within Carceral Space
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
This abstract is part of a session. Click here to view the session.
| Slides