Video abstract - “Carceral Space: Prisoners and Animals”

Today we’re pleased to present the latest video abstract from our November 2016 issue (Antipode volume 48, number 5–links below). In quite a hard-hitting presentation, Bucknell University Associate Provost Karen Morin introduces her brilliant research exploring resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies.

Her Antipode paper, “Carceral Space: Prisoners and Animals”, which is currently free to download, illustrates the close linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality and captivity by focusing on three types of sites and institutions: the prison execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse; sites of laboratory testing of pharmaceutical and other products on incarcerated humans and captive animals; and sites and institutions of exploited prisoner and animal labor.

Karen argues that the main themes that call for a “carceral comparison” among these sites include: the emotional and psychological strain and violence enacted on bodies that is interwoven into their day-to-day operations; their geographies (locations, design and layout) and carefully regulated movements within them; relationships between carcerality and “purpose breeding” that extends across both nonhuman and human populations; the ways in which “animalization” of incarcerated bodies works to create conditions for social death and killability; and the legal and political contexts that produce certain lives as disposable “bare lives”.

As we said, it’s a hard-hitting piece–you have been warned!