{"id":165,"date":"2014-09-17T07:55:36","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T07:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/?p=165"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:24:17","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:24:17","slug":"the-carceral-archipelago-panel-at-the-fourth-european-congress-on-world-and-global-history-4-7-september-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/2014\/09\/17\/the-carceral-archipelago-panel-at-the-fourth-european-congress-on-world-and-global-history-4-7-september-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"The Carceral Archipelago panel at the Fourth European Congress on World and Global History, 4-7 September, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The Carceral Archipelago panel in Paris<\/p><\/div>\n

During the first week of September, members of our European Research Council\u00a0funded project, Carceral Archipelago, attended the Fourth European Congress on World and Global History, held in Paris at the \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure.<\/p>\n

While at the Congress, a number of the project\u2019s researchers had the exhilarating opportunity of presenting\u00a0aspects of their research on a shared panel for the first time. Participants of the panel, which was\u00a0titled,\u00a0Carceral Archipelago: Space, circulation and penal confinement in global perspective, c. 1750-1939<\/em>, felt very fortunate to have as a discussant Russianist Dr. Alain Blum of the Centre d\u2019\u00c9tudes des Mondes Russe, Caucasien et Centre-Europ\u00e9en of des Hautes \u00c9tudes en Sciences Sociales.<\/p>\n

The project’s principal investigator,\u00a0Professor Clare Anderson, began the discussion with a presentation titled, A global history of penal transportation in the British Empire, c. 1750-1939.<\/em> Professor Anderson described the way in which the development of penal thought within various national and colonial contexts resulted from\u00a0global\u00a0circulations and flows of penal knowledge. She cited multiple\u00a0examples illustrative of the interconnectedness of various nations’\u00a0prison policies, the confluence of which influenced both\u00a0prisoner\u00a0transportation and confinement. For example, the “mark system” conceived of by British penologist Alexander Maconochie, \u00a0informed\u00a0the\u00a0use\u00a0of the\u00a0\u201ccoin system\u201d on the Andaman Islands. In a similar way, Russian legislators drew on the experiences of the French in French Guiana and the\u00a0British in\u00a0Australia as they struggled to reconceptualize\u00a0the tsarist penal system during the mid nineteenth century.\u00a0Dr. Anderson also suggested that the methods by which prisoners were documented and catalogued during the colonial era were underpinned by a sense of modernity, and can yet be seen within contemporary penal practices.<\/p>\n

The next panelist, Dr. Christian DeVito, addressed\u00a0the transportation of prisoners within the Spanish empire, with an emphasis on integrating land and sea routes, in The place of convicts in late colonial Spanish America, 1750-1830s<\/em>. Dr. DeVito\u00a0proposed that an\u00a0overemphasis on the metropole vs. penal flows\u00a0has obscured the importance of inter-regional flows of convict labour. He also foregrounded issues connected to the materiality of these transportation processes \u2013 from the ships used to convey prisoners to long land marches during which prisoners were marched, spectacle-like, through rural villages.<\/p>\n

Panelist Katy Roscoe, a PhD student at the University of Leicester, shifted the session\u2019s emphasis from the\u00a0spatial politics of trans-oceanic passage and long prisoner marches to the individual spatiality of four British penal islands located off the coast of Australia. In Islands of incarceration: institutional and geographical diversity on Australian convict islands<\/em>, Katy contrasted the varying spatial environments of Cockatoo\u00a0island, Rottnest island, Melville island, and St. Helena island, drawing attention to the intersection of function and environment on each. While the over-arching goal of confinement united these locations, each was also used to answer a separate, specific need. Cockatoo\u00a0island was designated as a place of secondary punishment and banishment; St. Helena island became a site for economic development. Prisoners with tickets of leave were given pistols (useful for fighting\u00a0off indigenous inhabitants) and were sent to Melville island, while Rottnest island was a carceral space for indigenous offenders.<\/p>\n

In Translation of of punishment: Integration of Japanese penal discursive sphere in the global penal information network<\/em>, panelist Takashi Miyamoto discussed\u00a0the circulation of\u00a0European penal ideas to\u00a0Japan during the late nineteenth century. Using illustrations from Bulletin de la Societe Penitentatire du Japon<\/em>, he drew attention to\u00a0the influence of French and British thought on Japanese legislative framers.\u00a0Takashi additionally noted that the Japanese were highly incentivized to translate and study the contributions made by European nations at prison congresses\u00a0throughout\u00a0the late nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

University of Leicester PhD researcher Carrie Crockett evaluated the spatiality of the\u00a0tsarist penal colony on Sakhalin island, (1868-1905). Just as Pinchgut could be seen from the Sydney coast, prisoners on Sakhalin could glimpse Lazarev across the Tatar Strait. The settlement\u2019s proximity to Siberia, which was\u00a0regarded\u00a0as a space ripe with\u00a0opportunities for economic and social mobility, as well as to Japan, Manchuria, and China, counterbalanced Sakhalin\u2019s reputation as a closed, brutal prison.\u00a0In We could see the mainland from our shore: the blurring of spatial boundaries on Sakhalin<\/em>, Carrie explored the ways in which the penal settlement\u2019s geographical position fostered a sense of\u00a0multi-national interconnectedness, the perception of which\u00a0rendered its boundaries\u00a0porous and negotiable.<\/p>\n

At the conclusion of the panel presentation, Dr. Alain Blum suggested that Carceral Archipelago\u00a0project researchers evaluate their papers\u2019 overlapping themes–the spatial politics of incarceration and the circulation of ideas–with an eye to\u00a0unifying them under a single context. He proposed that we consider in greater depth\u00a0the ways in which spatiality\u00a0might have been constructed as a result of carceral circulations. Questions from the audience also gave us\u00a0much to muse upon. Dr. Judith Pallot posed the provocative question, \u201cWhat makes transportation a distinctive experience?\u201d Other scholars offered their insights regarding the impact of administrative and legal jurisdictions on prisoners\u2019 experience of transportation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the first week of September, members of our European Research Council\u00a0funded project, Carceral Archipelago, attended the Fourth European Congress on World and Global History, held in Paris at the \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure. While at the Congress, a number of the project\u2019s researchers had the exhilarating opportunity of presenting\u00a0aspects of their research on a shared […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":159,"featured_media":177,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,10,25,9,5,4,50,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australia","category-carceral-archipelago","category-convict-labour","category-convicts","category-global-history","category-penal-colonies","category-russia","category-sakhalin-island"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/185"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}