Beneath the Skin: Bodies, Carcerality and Racial Capitalism
Topics: Urban Geography
, Ethnicity and Race
, Health and Medical
Keywords: Racial Capitalism, Carceral Geographies, Political Ecologies of Health
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59
Authors:
Dirk Kinsey, Temple University, Department of Geography and Urban Studies
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Abstract
Approximately 4.5 million people in the US are currently on probation or parole. People living under criminal justice supervision within their home communities face not only social, economic, and political marginalization, but also a variety of chronic health conditions, infectious diseases, and mental illnesses at rates much higher than the general population. While scholars examining the uneven production of space have applied racial capitalism as an analytic to a variety of scales and empirical cases, emphasis on the production of health and bodies as both the outcome of, and constitutive of racial capitalism requires further examination. Building on work which recognizes bodies as constituted through relations that are simultaneously biological and social, this paper approaches mass supervision in the US as one of many means through which anti-black racism materializes in living bodies. In this paper I argue two primary points. Firstly, the health outcomes experienced by people living under supervision point to a further means by which racial hierarchies premised on notions of biological difference are reified, and that these health disparities amongst others should be considered constitutive of racial capitalism’s need to (re)produce difference. Secondly, examinations of the production of bodies as differentially valued requires an approach that can account for the complex interactions between material and discursive realms, and both structural and experiential pathways. More nuanced approaches to these complex interrelations offer more accurate accounts of how carceral power shapes individual and community health and also the means of examining how difference becomes fixed under racial capitalism.
Beneath the Skin: Bodies, Carcerality and Racial Capitalism
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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