Short Abstract

We invite contributions that explore the interaction of different logics and technologies of governance and control in carceral settings

Long Abstract

Over the last decades, a growing body of scholarship across disciplines has explored the emergence of new logics and technologies of governance and control over detained populations. Researchers have examined transformations in the governance of prisoners, immigration detainees, and related groups. More specifically, they have analysed the mechanisms of subjectivation and control that emerge through new risk technologies; the forms of accountability implied by dynamic security models; the informal practices that regulate the everyday order of prisons; and technologies of control extending beyond detention settings, such as so-called alternatives to incarceration. Many of these transformations rely on new technological devices (applications, electronic ankle bracelets, etc.) or socio-legal assemblages (NGOs and service providers) and are permeated by intersectional inequalities based on nationality, gender, race, and ethnicity.

In analyzing these technologies, scholars have identified paradoxical connections emerging from practices that combine humanitarianism and security, care and control, punishment and protection, often operating as a continuum that needs to be untangled.

However, much of this scholarship relies on conceptual frameworks developed in a limited set of Western contexts and often transferred elsewhere without sufficient critical engagement. Thus, frequently these analyses overlook the interactions of new technologies with the set of social, political, historical, and colonial conditions that have traditionally shaped each country’s punitive practices.

This panel seeks to bring together contributions that examine the specific assemblages of logics and technologies of governance and control operating in diverse carceral settings across the globe, and to discuss the tensions, ambiguities, and resistances that emerge from them.

Keywords: carcerality; prison; immigration detention; technologies of governance; punishment; protection.

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