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- Convenors:
-
Luisa Schneider
(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Julienne Weegels (University of Amsterdam)
Marcio Zamboni (Universidade de São Paulo)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 22 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel examines confinement arising from the political, legal, social, economic and spatial abandonment of certain categories of people in society and within institutions. It analyses how people seek to escape confinement, or lessen its impact, by creating relationships of care.
Long Abstract:
Over the past decade, a neoliberal paradigm shift and ongoing socio-economic crises have led to a weakening in public service provision and welfare. As states prioritize whom to support and whom to abandon, the rights and protections of people who have come to be deemed politically unwanted 'surplus populations' have been curbed along gendered, racialized and class lines. This not only exacerbates marginalisation and social suffering but also creates increasingly harrowing parallels between incarceration as a method of punishment and other zones of confinement (Besteman et al. 2018, Gilmore, 2007, Schneider 2021, Weegels et al. 2020). Such zones no longer need prison walls to immobilise, but instead manage to police, confine and abandon certain categories of people within "free society". The construction of prisons as 'a kind of moral space which tags inhabitants as unethical and immoral people' (Ugelvik 2012: 273) can lead incarcerated people to feel abandoned, unwanted and uncared for by society and its members. However, people in and outside prison find new and innovative ways to create meaningful, connected and caring lives in the midst of deprivation. In particular, many seek to escape such political, social, economic, legal and spatial abandonment by creating relationships of care within confinement and in wider society (e.g. Cunha 2008). This panel invites scholars who examine the logics of care and abandonment in contexts confinement (prisons, migrant detention centres, hospitals, asylums etc.) to discuss the possibilities and limits of theoretically and empirically exploring care and protection in contexts of confinement.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how technologies of care oriented towards the containment of ‘dangerous classes’ involve a project of subjectivation centred on women to enforce a gendered family model by engaging state programmes and prevention practitioners.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how initiatives of care and control of populations treated by the Chilean state as crime-prone have become technologies of optimistic coercion. Focusing on the lives of women in prison-family-neighbourhood circuits and their participation in crime prevention programmes, this paper studies how they relate to state institutions and NGOs. Specifically, it examines how technologies of care aim to empower women heads of household under market logics that they ambivalently live as a kind of ‘optimistic coercion’. Building on ethnographic research conducted between 2018 and 2021 with practitioners of crime prevention programmes and the prisoners’ families targeted by such initiatives, the paper addresses carceral domesticities as containment of problematic populations. It draws attention to how the safeguarding of social order and security policy is intertwined with the reproduction of carceral domesticities among low-income households. It addresses the ways in which technologies of care oriented towards the containment of ‘dangerous classes’ involve a project of subjectivation centred on women to enforce a gendered family model by engaging state programmes and prevention practitioners. The paper concludes by analysing how these women contest the forms of carceral domesticity they encounter, opening up spaces of subaltern self-affirmation for themselves and their households, at a time when the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism in Chile is undergoing its greatest crisis since its brutal imposition during the Pinochet dictatorship.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the use of poetic writing to describe caring relationships expressed in artistic forms in the cultural centre of a Swiss psychiatric hospital, viewed by users as a place of “freedom” within an institution of constraint. How to write ethnography in a hopeful, caring and poetic way when dealing with intense psychic suffering?
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores poetic writing in order to describe caring relationships expressed in artistic forms in the artistic centre of a Swiss psychiatric hospital. Poetics has the evocative power to talk about suffering in a metaphoric, allusive way. It can also dramatize and overstate. Yet, some traumatic life experiences cannot be expressed otherwise (cf. Giordano, 2020).
This paper interrogates how we can incorporate emic and etic artistic materials within an ethnographic description involving mental suffering while acknowledging the political, oppressive structures at play in the creation of these aesthetics. Expressing experiences in a poetic, metaphoric, allegoric form becomes a way of caring for one another. Yet, the social realities of mental suffering are not always a matter of sublimation. How to translate affects and senses in a poetic way without mystifying suffering, occulting negative emotions as well as contextual elements in a place where psychological suffering and its sometimes violent manifestations towards oneself or others are part of the shaping and ontological rationale of the institution ? How to write ethnography in a hopeful, poetic and caring way, in particular towards persons that took part in this project, and simultaneously acknowledge the complex web of affects that constitute the social and political reality of the field? This paper explores such questions through concrete challenges at play in three ethnographic situations around the artistic centre of a Swiss psychiatric hospital.