Incarcerating

Imprisoning, detaining, containing, outsourcing, policing, privatising, surveilling, interning

Prisons, detention camps, labour camps, private police forces, technologies

Modernity produces the subject as a scientific, categorised, contained and regulated being through technologies
of surveillance. Incarcerating involves the scrutiny and punishment of bodies that are rendered as racial, ethnic or religious ‘other’. The typologies extend from detention, displacement and labour camps which utilise forms of walls, fences, checkpoints, security cameras, biometric profiling and data capture technologies, to the everyday routines of racialised stop and search on sidewalks. For Angela Davis, the incarcerating typology of the prison replaces the plantation as a site for the exploitation of labour, where racial violence and associated urbicide continue into the present. Yet incarcerating practices extend beyond the boundaries of the nation state and particular geographies. Processes of arrest, interrogation and prolonged detention through invisible extra-territorial and proxy detention sites point to a global landscape of incarceration extending from Australia’s “Blacksites” to the Middle East and North America with forms mass incarceration that are rendered banal. While incarcerating practices are marked by asymmetrical power relationships, these are countered by practices of gendered resistance and everyday spatial transgressions, suggestive of an alternative kind of political space in the making.

Film/ Fiction/ Visualisations

Chak, Tings. 2017. Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention [Graphic Novel]. Toronto: Ad Astra Comix. 

Kurgan, Laura. 2009. Spatial Information Design Lab: Justice Re-Investment New Orleans [Mappings/ Studio work]. New York: GSAPP Columbia. 

Okubo, Mine. 1946. Citizen 13660 [Graphic Novel]. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Tom Morgan and Darren Dharmadasa. 2016. Blacksites 


Core Texts

Alves, Jaime Amparo. 2013. “From Necropolis to Blackpool's: Necropolitical Governance and Black Spatial Praxis in Sao Paulo, Brazil” Antipode. 46:2, 323- 339.

Davis, Angela. 2003. “The Prison Industrial Complex”  Are Prisons Obsolete. NewYork: Seven Stories Press. 84 – 104.

Khalili, Laleh. 2012. Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Stanford University Press, 1 – 10.


Pieris, Anoma. 2016. “Changi: A Penal Genealogy across the Pacific War” Fabrications. 26:1, 50 – 71.

More Reading

Bormann, Karen. 1998 “The House Behind” in Pile, Steve., and Heidi Nast (eds.). Places Through the Body, London: Routledge. 165 - 180.

Giaccaria, Paolo, and Claudio Minca.2011. “Topographies/Topologies of the Camp: Auschwitz as a Spatial Threshold.” Political Geography, 30: 3–12.

Henni, Samia. 2017. Architecture of Counter Revolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria. Zurich: GTA Verlag.

Horiuchi, Lynne. 2008.“Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660 and her Trek Artwork.” In Robinson, Greg and  Creef, Elena. (eds.). Mine Okubo Following her Own Road. Washington: University of Washington Press, 111 – 130.


Katz, Irit., Martin, Diana., and Minca, Claudio (eds.). 2018. Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology. London: Rowman and Littlefield.


Konaté, Dior. 2012. “Penal Architecture: An Essay on Prison Designs in Colonial Senegal” in Demissie, Fassil. (ed.) Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Legacies. London: Ashgate.

Herschel, Andrew and Siddiqi, Anooradha. 2017. Spatial Violence. New York: Routledge.

Nolan, Ginger. 2018. “Quasi-Urban Citizenship: The Global Village as the Noms of the Modern” The Journal of Architecture. 23:3, 448 – 470.

Purbrick, Louise. 2011.“The Last Murals of Long Kesh: Fragments of Political Imprisonment at the Maze Prison, Northern Ireland.” In Myers Adrian and Moshenska, Gabriel (eds.). Archaeologist of Internment. New York: Springer, 263 – 284.

Samar Maqusi: ‘Space of Refuge’, Negotiating Space with Refugees Inside the Palestinian Camp.

Sanyal, Romola. 2014. “Urbanizing Refuge: Interrogating Spaces of Displacement. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 38:2, 558 - 72.

Sperry, Raphael. 2014. “Architecture, Activism and Abolition: From Prison Design Boycott to ADPSR’s Human Rights Campaign.” Himada, Nasrin and Lee, Chris (eds.) Incarceration: Scapegoat Journal. 7,

29– 37.

Yiftachel, Oren. 2009.“Critical Theory and ‘Gray Space’: Mobilisation of the Colonised.” City. 13:2 – 3, 246 – 263.

Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso.

Wilson Gilmore, Ruth. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalising California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wa Thiongo, Ngugi. 1982. Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary. London: Heinemann.