Prison Architectures and Disciplinary Space

It is assumed that prisons are a necessary part of contemporary civil society as an essential means of controlling violence and vice. However, the mass incarceration of debtors in England in the nineteenth century and of Black Americans now in the United States, like the death camps for Jews and Communists in Nazi Germany or forced labor camps for Uyghurs in China all suggest that penal institutions are intended to control the economically and politically troubling Others of their societies. The seminar investigates the evolution of spaces of incarceration and assesses how prison architectures collude in the elimination of unwanted parts of the social body.