Confinement: Spaces and practices of care and control – editorial introduction

Abstract

On 9 August 2019, a workshop convened at the University of Melbourne, Australia, brought together academics, practitioners and advocates to explore patterns of violence and neglect within and across a range of confined settings: youth and adult prisons, immigration detention, aged and disability care and residential ‘child protection’. Some of the participants in that workshop reflect here in eight pieces of writing that comprise this Special Themed Collection on ‘Confinement: The spaces and practice of care and control’. The contributions are anchored and connected by the parallels in how violence manifests within and across these diverse sites of confinement – corporeally and subtly, individually and collectively. Yet as we reflect, separately and together, the differentiation and demarcation of these sites and systems of confinement serves to maintain their material and symbolic separation, and to conceal their connecting threads and commonalities. In our Editorial Introduction, we draw out themes running through the contributions to illustrate how they connect and collide, and how they illuminate intersections, differences and (sometimes unexpected) resonances between spaces, practices, settings and experiences of confinement. We identify three themes running through the seven other pieces that comprise this collection: erasure, identity and voice. Against the backdrop of the global pandemic and its implications for how we think about and experience freedom, autonomy, isolation and connection, we consider these themes: how violence is hidden from view and erased from public and political memory; how identities are shaped and swallowed by institutional practices and patterns of dehumanisation, coercion and control; and how the voices of those with lived experience of confinement – both as ‘keepers’ and the confined – help deepen our understanding of the threads that connect and comprise the carceral webs in which we are all entangled.