Punishment, Citizenship and Identity: Reflections on Foreign National Prisoners
Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Monday, 24th March 2014
Convenors:
Ines Hasselberg, Sarah Turnbull and Mary Bosworth – Centre for Criminology, U. of Oxford
Statistical accounts tell us that a growing number of foreign national prisoners are incarcerated throughout the penal systems of Europe, North America and elsewhere. For the most part, however, scholars in prison studies have paid little attention to this population, or to the implications it has for our understanding of identity, penal power and legitimacy. In this seminar, we seek to address this gap in the literature when discussing the relevance of citizenship and migration for our understanding of imprisonment while noting the overlaps with long-standing matters of gender, ethnic and racial difference.
The incarceration of foreign national prisoners is of particular relevance in the context of national and regional security agendas in which foreigners have been increasingly conceptualised as a ‘risk,’ and national immigration policies have been tightened, making it harder to arrive legally and easier to remove unwanted non-citizens. These processes have implications for the nature of the prison population as well as for how imprisonment is experienced. Specifically, it suggests that incarceration can no longer be detached from the broader context of transnational mobility.
We call for contributions that seek to address these issues from a variety of starting points, including but not limited to: Why are foreign national prisoners so over-represented across a number of states? How do their experiences differ from native-born minority populations? How do various prison systems negotiate diversity, citizenship and cultural cohesion? What does the increasing number of foreign-nationals in prison tell us about the role of the prison in carving out national identity and aiding in regimes of border control? How do prisoners respond to these experiences? Are there differences in women’s and men’s experiences?
We welcome contributions approaching the issue from different geographical sites, angles and disciplinary fields.
Proposals should be sent by email to the convenors by Monday, 30thSeptember 2013 and consist of a title, abstract (250 words) and the name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s). Accepted authors are expected to submit their draft papers to the convenors by the 28th February 2014. The seminar will take place in Oxford (UK) on the 24th March 2014.
Please feel free to email Ines if you have any queries regarding the seminar and/or the call for papers.
