Abstract
Advocating greater engagement between children’s and carceral geographies, this paper explores the spaces of parenting as they exist within a UK male prison, building upon criminological research on the effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ families and children. Focusing primarily on the visiting room, it extends discussion of the specificities of everyday material spaces and practices of parenting currently under scrutiny within children’s geographies and geographies of parenting, and brings these subdisciplines into dialogue with carceral geography. Concerned specifically with the intimate, embodied and sometimes banal practices of parenting in this constrained and highly surveilled context, it draws attention to previously overlooked spaces and identities of situated fathering.
Highlights
Until fairly recently, scholars of family interaction had seldom seriously considered the ways in which spaces and the social/symbolic processes associated with them matter (Marsiglio, Roy, and Fox 2005a)
Building on previous scholarship demonstrating the ways in which geographies of parenting are shaped by class and labour market position (e.g. Dyck 1990; Holloway 1998; McDowell et al 2005), they espoused a focus on parenting and policy to respond to a series of shifting dynamics reshaping expectations around the values and practices of parenting and the spaces in which it might happen; and a newly developed academic capacity to uncover the intersections of policy with the ‘intimate, embodied and banal practices of parenting across different contexts and landscapes’ (Jupp and Gallagher 2013, 155)
The visiting room as a space of situated fathering We identify a number of sub-themes that enable a more nuanced discussion of the visiting room as a space of situated fathering, and which allow us to reflect the views of both fathers who were visited by their children, and those who were not
Summary
Scholars of family interaction had seldom seriously considered the ways in which spaces and the social/symbolic processes associated with them matter (Marsiglio, Roy, and Fox 2005a). Very recently, Disney (2015) called for a more critical engagement with childhood spaces beyond the school, employing a Foucauldian approach to explore how orphanages can be conceptualised as carceral spaces of both care and control (see Disney 2016); and Schliehe (2014, 2015) drew together carceral and children’s geographies to examine the experiences of young women in secure settings in Scotland She noted that these ‘conceptual areas of humangeographical enquiry have important aspects to add to a qualitative and ethnographic study that focuses on the experiences of children and young people regarding their containment and separation from society’ (Schliehe 2015, 16).
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