Short Abstract

The panel examines carcerality, understood as the racial capitalist politics and practices that restrict freedom, rights, and access to resources, and explores continuities between past and present configurations of imprisonment, coerced labor, deportation and forms of resistance.

Long Abstract

Abolitionist scholarship and activism use the notion of carcerality to understand the racial

capitalist politics and practices that restrict freedom, rights, and access to resources.

Carcerality, in this sense, is not confined to prisons—it is an effect produced by a range of

practices, institutions, and infrastructures that entrench the unequal distribution of life

chances and expand realms of unfreedom. Criminalization operates across diverse fields of

law, society and culture to justify the deprivation of rights and freedoms for groups of

people. It serves both as a practical gateway to carcerality and as its rationalization. These

two connected concepts help us critically understand the expansion of prisons, asylum

camps, and detention centres, as well as diverse forms of coerced labour, pervasive

surveillance, and the policing and deportation of workers, marginalized populations, and

dissent—even genocide.

How can anthropology address and challenge the current expansion of criminalization and

carcerality? Thinking beyond binaries such as public–private, state–corporate, citizenship–

non-citizenship, and economic–political, this panel invites contributions that trace the

connections between various forms of confinement, coercive social control, and the

production of (disposable) labour. Prisons, workhouses, factories, and plantations share an

entangled history. How can we conceptualize forms of unfreedom, coerced, or surplus

labour across institutions, spaces, and practices usually considered separate? What kinds of

resistance and imaginaries have emerged to challenge carcerality and criminalization as

both practice and effect? How do criminalization and carcerality operate within the current

authoritarian turn? We welcome papers that address contemporary practices or adopt a

longer historical perspective.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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