[ecrea] cfp: Carceral Cultures

Call for Papers—First Call

Canadian Association of Cultural Studies Conference

Carceral Cultures
March 1-4, 2018
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Conference Keywords: Carceral logistics; detention; dispossession; 
enclosure; border security; forced migration; freedom

Confirmed keynote speakers: Joy James (Williams College); Dian Million 
(University of Seattle); and Kim Pate (Senate of Canada)

Confirmed plenary speakers: Tracy Bear (University of Alberta); Sahar 
Francis (Addameer); Catherine Kellogg (University of Alberta); Mary-Jo 
Nadeau (University of Toronto); Dorit Naaman (Queen’s); Silky Shah 
(Detention Watch); Brett Story (Ryerson); Sunera Thobani (University of 
British Columbia); Rafeef Ziadah (University College London); Jasmin 
Zine (Wilfrid Laurier)

Even though prisons have been central to modernity, we live in a time of 
enormous carceral expansion. The West Bank and Gaza have been described 
as the world’s largest open-air prison, where carceral logistics 
permeate all forms of life on a daily basis. Across the globe, refugee 
camps, immigrant detention centres, and mass incarceration projects have 
targeted racialised and marginalized communities. While in many cases 
actual prisons and architectures of detention are hidden from view and 
remain inaccessible to the public at large, the impact of 
incarceration—its breadth and extension—is rendered as a set of 
logistics that work their way through material and affective economies.

We invite participation in the CACS meeting for 2018 on the theme of 
carceral cultures in order to examine the myriad ways in which the 
carceral has come to shape the economies, ecologies, aesthetics, and 
social and political experiences of contemporary culture. Carceral 
logistics are structuring our society in unprecedented ways, leading to 
fundamental challenges to the meaning, expression and experience of 
freedom. While the historical route of carceral logistics can be found 
through the Black Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, they are 
also present in white settler nation states through land dispossession, 
enclosures, and the reformation of property law. Carceral logistics have 
informed the contemporary era of border technologies, data aggregation, 
and surveillance. They are found in the ubiquitous technologies of the 
state to organize and govern populations, to establish forms of 
segregation and partition.

Productive forms of resistance and challenges to carceral logistics are 
varied and strong, from the BDS campaign to solidarity movements between 
#blacklivesmatter and Palestine. The formation of prison solidarity in 
places such as Cairo, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo, are stories that 
underscore how freedom can be struggled for even at the heart of the 
carceral state. Indigenous movements and migrant justice networks have 
continuously struggled to capture and redefine freedoms that can exist 
outside of this logistical matrix.

The conference is hosted at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver Campus 
on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the 
xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and 
Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Papers, panels and workshops are 
invited on (but not restricted to) the following topics:

➢ Representational strategies concerning incarceration and freedom
➢ Data, surveillance, sousveillance
➢ Abolition movements
➢ Carceral intimacies
➢ Capital and labour in the carceral state
➢ Enclosure, segregation, apartheid, partition
➢ Prison literacies
➢ Military occupation
➢ Carceral mobilities
➢ Legacies of internment
➢ Cultural memories of incarceration
➢ Embodied in/carcerations
➢ Carceral feminism and its alternatives
➢ Poetics of resistance
➢ Freedom from Ferguson to Palestine
➢ Black Lives Matter
➢ Politics of containment and resistance
➢ From slavery to incarceration
➢ Indigenous dispossession and incarceration
➢ Carceral logistics at the level of domesticity and social reproduction
➢ Red zones and other carceral geographies
➢ Community responses to urban policing and punishment
➢ Pedagogy and the carceral, eg Teaching Inside/Out

We strongly encourage pre-constituted panels/workshops and alternative 
approaches to academic presentation styles. Proposals for 
presentations/papers, panels, roundtables and workshops will be due 
October 15, 2017. More details about submission and registration will be 
forthcoming. For more information please contact: (cacs /at/ sfu.ca)

Conference Chair, Davina Bhandar
CACS On-site Committee Chair, Zoë Druick

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