The concept of a carceral archipelago was first used by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 publication, Surveiller et Punir, to describe the modern penal system of the 1970s, embodied by the well-known penal institution at Mettray in France. The phrase combines the adjective "carceral", which means that which is related to jail or prison, with archipelago—a group of islands. Foucault referred to the "island" units of the "archipelago" as a metaphor for the mechanisms, technologies, knowledge systems and networks related to a carceral continuum. The 1973 English publication of the book by Solzhenitsyn called The Gulag Archipelago referred to the forced labor camps and prisons that composed the sprawling carceral network of the Soviet Gulag.
Michael J. Watts is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 2016. He is a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left.
The American Association of Geographers (AAG) is a non-profit scientific and educational society aimed at advancing the understanding, study, and importance of geography and related fields. Its headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. The organization was founded on December 29, 1904, in Philadelphia, as the Association of American Geographers, with the American Society of Professional Geographers later amalgamating into it in December 1948 in Madison, Wisconsin. As of 2020, the association has more than 10,000 members, from nearly 100 countries. AAG members are geographers and related professionals who work in the public, private, and academic sectors.
Neil Robert Smith was a Scottish geographer and Marxist academic. He was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and winner of numerous awards, including the Globe Book Award of the Association of American Geographers.
Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published five times per year by Wiley-Blackwell and produced by The Antipode Foundation. Its coverage centers on critical human geography and it seeks to encourage radical spatial theorizations based on Marxist, socialist, anarchist, anti-racist, anticolonial, feminist, queer, trans*, green, and postcolonial thought. Originally inspired by the social justice movements of the 1960s, the journal supports progressive causes through the work of the Antipode Foundation, a UK registered charity. Antipode is also known for its online "Interventions", its book series, and its diverse workshops and lectures. The chief co-editors are Sharad Chari, Tariq Jazeel, Katherine McKittrick, Jenny Pickerill and Nik Theodore.
Cindi Katz, a geographer, is a Professor in Environmental Psychology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life; the privatization of the public environment, the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination, and the intertwined spatialities of homeland and home-based security. She is known for her work on social reproduction and everyday life, research on children's geographies, her intervention on "minor theory", and the notion of counter-topography, which is a means of recognizing the historical and geographical specificities of particular places while inferring their analytic connections to specific material social practices.
James Morris Blaut was an American professor of anthropology and geography at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His studies focused on agricultural microgeography, cultural ecology, theory of nationalism, philosophy of science, historiography and the relations between the First and the Third World. He was a critic of Eurocentrism. Blaut was one of the most widely read authors in the field of geography.
J. Richard Peet is a retired professor of human geography at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester MA, USA. Peet received a BSc (Economics) from the London School of Economics, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia, and moved to the USA in the mid-1960s to complete a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. He began teaching at Clark University shortly after completing his PhD from Berkeley, remained there for over 50 years, with secondments in Australia, Sweden and New Zealand. He was 'forced' into retirement in 2019, when 79 years old.
Anne Buttimer was an Irish geographer. She was emeritus professor of geography at University College, Dublin.
Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly the intersection of race, justice, and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022).
Katharyne Mitchell is an American geographer who is currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the Dean of the Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Audrey Lynn Kobayashi is a Canadian professor and author, specializing in geography, geopolitics, and racial and gender studies. She was the vice-president of the Canadian Association of Geographers from 1999 to 2000, and the president from 2000 to 2002. Kobayashi was also the vice-president of the American Association of Geographers in 2010, and president in 2011.
Brittany Michelle Friedman is an American sociologist and author. Her research spans the sociology of law, sociology of race, political sociology, economic sociology, and criminal justice. Friedman is most known for her research on social control and cover-ups, the Black Guerilla Family and black power movement behind bars, and the financialization of the criminal legal system as seen with pay to stay. She is a frequent commentator on public media outlets on topics related to institutional misconduct, cover-ups, prison reform, and racism. She is the author of the forthcoming book titled Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
Stefano Bloch is an American author and professor of cultural geography and critical criminology at the University of Arizona who focuses on graffiti, prisons, the policing of public space, and gang activity.
Dominique Moran is a British academic geographer. She is a professor in carceral geography at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham.
Mei-Po Kwan is a geographer known for her research contributions in Geographic Information Science, and human geography, particularly as they apply to time geography and human mobility. She is the Choh-Ming Li Professor of Geography and Resource Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Director of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science (ISEIS) of CUHK, Director of the Institute of Future Cities of CUHK, and Head of Chung Chi College of CUHK.
Sallie A. Marston is an American social geographer and Regents Professor in the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment located in Tucson, Arizona.
Jackie Wang is an American professor, author, and poet. She is best known for her books Carceral Capitalism, which critiques the relationship between the debt economy and racialized mass incarceration, and The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void, for which she was a National Book Award finalist in poetry in 2021. Her scholarship centers on the intersections of racism, liberal capitalism, surveillance technologies, and the political economy of prisons.
Rebecca Lave is a geographer, professor of geography at Indiana University Bloomington (IU), and the current president of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Her research focuses on critical geography, as it applies to physical geography, as part of the emerging field of critical physical geography. She has focused on bridging the gap between physical and human geography in her research, as a department chair at IU, and as the president of the AAG.
