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Seeing like a Jail, 2: Corrections Consulting

Judah Schept

in Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion

Chapter 6 is devoted entirely to a close examination of the substantial history of national and state corrections consultants in the county, paying particular attention to the two consultants whose ... More

Chapter 6 is devoted entirely to a close examination of the substantial history of national and state corrections consultants in the county, paying particular attention to the two consultants whose work was instrumental in shaping the expansion projects that receive the most attention in the book. Both chapters 5 and 6 engage debates about exclusionary languages and practices of late modernity and map them onto ethnographic examples of policy discussions that abstracted human lives into penological concerns with management and control and that privileged experts at the expense of alternative-and very real-understandings of incarceration. In examining consultants’ official reports, practitioners’ testimonies, and editorials and news stories in the media, these chapters trace the epistemological processes by which local carceral politics came to embrace and resemble the carceral state, even as many people in the community claimed a certain degree of knowledge about mass incarceration that absolved them of any complicity in its local replication.Less

The Geographic Production of Knowledge

Jess Bier

in Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge

Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine provides an extended critique of the notion that technoscientific facts should function as impartial arbiters in international conflicts. Chapter 6, “The Geographic ... More

Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine provides an extended critique of the notion that technoscientific facts should function as impartial arbiters in international conflicts. Chapter 6, “The Geographic Production of Knowledge”, draws on this overarching motif to explore its significance for broader research on knowledge and expertise. In particular, it highlights the need for researchers to materially alter the process of research in order to enable more heterogeneous landscapes for knowledge production. Returning to the themes of internationalism, landscape, and symmetry from chapter 1, this chapter also critically draws on the work of iconic poets and social justice activists like Mahmoud Darwish, Audre Lorde, and Nawal El Saadawi. It explores the following questions: How can researchers reflexively reshape landscapes in order to allow for more socially just forms of knowledge? What are the challenges to solidarity and cooperation due to geographical imbalances of power? The resulting analysis returns to the overall notion of geographic production, while also indicating a further layer of reflexivity for critical theory: the practice of material reflexivity, or awareness of one’s own situated position in landscapes with respect to power asymmetries—asymmetries that include international and economic hierarchies within academia itself.Less

Governing through Expansion

Judah Schept

in Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion

Chapter 7 examines some of the governmental and nongovernmental bodies, processes, and relationships in the county to better understand the political contexts in which the production of carceral ... More

Chapter 7 examines some of the governmental and nongovernmental bodies, processes, and relationships in the county to better understand the political contexts in which the production of carceral knowledge and conversations about expansion occurred. The chapter also looks at some of the contradictions between rhetorical embraces of consensus and practices of exclusion. There was a fluidity of individuals between county and city government bodies, criminal justice institutions, civic leaders, and the nonprofit sector. Frequently, all of them worked together with the mission of making policy and practice more humane and efficient, yet their collaboration had the consequence, whether intended or not, of ensuring that their voices remained dominant in the meaning-making processes of county discourse and the decision-making processes of county politics. The chapter focuses on the structuring of political spaces and discourses so that narratives of expansion were reinforced and insulated while appearing to be open to contestation.Less

Introduction

Marianne Sommer

in History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules

The introduction situates the book in the historiography of science. It draws on current research in biography, the concept of centers of calculation, and asks what kind of work was needed to ... More

The introduction situates the book in the historiography of science. It draws on current research in biography, the concept of centers of calculation, and asks what kind of work was needed to translate ‘bones, organisms, and molecules’ into texts, images, or exhibits that may then circulate. It inquires after the role not only individual scientists, but institutional networks played in the process. It engages with the changes in scholarly understanding from ‘the popularization of science’ to ‘the circulation of knowledge’. It explains the concept of historical culture and asks after the role of the human origins sciences (‘history within’) in interaction with other kinds of histories (‘history without’) as a kind of public history effort. Particular attention is given to the media and genres of communication, the notions of heritage and memory that Osborn, Huxley, and Cavalli-Sforza developed, and their understandings of human biological kinship in terms of ‘race’, population, and trees or networks. Their projects were ultimately directed at a betterment of the human race and to varying degrees to the conservation and development of natural environments.Less

Truth and the Experiential

Pablo F. Gómez

in Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

The chapter examines the fundamental transformations to ways of knowing the natural world effected by black ritual practitioners in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. During this pivotal period, ... More

The chapter examines the fundamental transformations to ways of knowing the natural world effected by black ritual practitioners in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. During this pivotal period, black Mohanes led an epistemological revolution in which the experiential replaced first principles as the basis for Caribbean ways of knowing truths about the natural world. Experientially based forms of producing and consuming medical knowledge proved essential to the creation of Atlantic nodes of knowledge production in spaces like Cartagena. Black Caribbean epistemological spaces in which the experiential overcame old dogma, even if experientially-based, were conspicuously located outside the boundaries that natural philosophers defined.In the early modern Caribbean a heterogeneous group of ritual practitioners of African descent arriving from Europe, Africa, and the New World experimented with new materials they found in the Americas and formulated material, conceptual, and social practices based on Caribbean experiential findings that they designed to interpret and establish authority over a natural world that encompassed the moral and the spiritual. As the chapter shows here, black ritual practitioners’ ways of knowing the natural world and bodies were intrinsically related to the development of novel Caribbean experientially based ways of articulating the nature of truth.Less

My Documents: Remembering the Memex

Daniel Punday

in Computing as Writing

The opening chapter takes Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” as a tutor text that helps us to understand the transformation of writing as it moves into the age of computing. Instead of ... More

The opening chapter takes Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” as a tutor text that helps us to understand the transformation of writing as it moves into the age of computing. Instead of celebrating Bush’s foresight, Punday treats this essay as providing a diagnosis of the difficulties that arise when we try to use writing as a model for knowledge production and dissemination in a digital age. Bush’s essay is profoundly ambivalent about the relationship between the consumption of prior knowledge through reading documents and the production of new knowledge. Bush clearly explains how we move through an archive of prior research by creating a “trail” that is uniquely our own, but he is not at all clear about how this trail produces new research. Chapter 1 reveals that writing means two different things both in Bush’s essay and in contemporary culture in general: it can mean work produced in a professional, academic, or corporate context that engages with shared resources, or it can mean an activity broadly literary in nature that allows an individual to produce a work creatively using accessible, mundane tools.Less

Introduction

Karina Biondi

John F. Collins (ed.)

in Sharing This Walk: An Ethnography of Prison Life in Brazil

In this introduction, the author presents the conditions of her fieldwork, conducted inside the prison where her husband was waiting for a judgment. She explores the gains and consequences of her ... More

In this introduction, the author presents the conditions of her fieldwork, conducted inside the prison where her husband was waiting for a judgment. She explores the gains and consequences of her insider-outsider status as a visitor and the way she transformed her involvement into a calibrated instrument of knowledge production. This chapter presents the ethnographical questions that became the central issues of the book, as well as the theoretical problems that carry. The central question is the presence of the First Command of Capital (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC) even where it is absent, or, in other words, even where it does not encounter any of its members. This matter is put in dialogue with some criticism concerning the concepts of society, culture, group and individual made by anthropology, philosophy, Melanesian and Amerindian studies, as well as the limits of this criticism.Less

Strangely Real: A Reassemblage From the Film Forgetting Vietnam

Trinh T. Minh-ha

in World Cinema and the Essay Film: Transnational Perspectives on a Global Practice

Photo-essay by Trinh T. Minh-ha. All stills are from her essay film Forgetting Vietnam.

Competing Narratives and Performancesin Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts

Ananda Breed and Astrid Jamar

in Rwanda Since 1994: Stories of Change

The aim of this chapter is to deconstruct how human rights reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch produce knowledge on the Rwandan gacaca courts as a failed (semi-) legal justice ... More

The aim of this chapter is to deconstruct how human rights reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch produce knowledge on the Rwandan gacaca courts as a failed (semi-) legal justice mechanism, and the implications therein. These reports play a fundamental role in our understanding of conflict, violence and accountability measures in the aftermath of atrocities. We use the analytical tools provided by French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's work on narrative and memory in order to understand how such knowledge is constructed and what is excluded in human rights reports. We argue that the human rights reports establish a fixed and static conception of gacaca. Crucially, we show that human rights reports remake history into a single imagery by eradicating context and subjectivity. What remains is a story of failure that leaves little room for different interpretations or meanings attached to gacaca.Less