Wanted (For Display), Dead or Alive: Interrogating the Ethics of Touring Prisons, Penal Museums and Captured Bodies

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

Comprised of authors from The Prison Tourism Handbook (2016), members of this panel will present their research on the Ethics of Carceral, Prison and Penal Voyeurism. The sites visited and assessed in these presentations include: prisons with people confined within them violently viewed by audiences in the name of educational tours; historic prisons now empty and preserved for viewing as museums in South Africa, the United States and Iraq; the original electric chair in Texas; a museum in Italy built by Criminology’s own Cesare Lombroso, home to his severed head on display in a jar alongside the bodies of the victims of his research; and Sara Baartman, a South African woman who in life was put on display in European street shows, circuses, zoos and in death dismembered and viscously displayed in Europe’s most prestigious museums.

Sub Unit

• Area III: Perspectives on Crime and Criminal Behavior / 2: Conflict, Oppression, Injustice, and Inequality

Individual Presentations

• Reversing Criminology’s White Gaze: as Lombroso’s Disembodied Head Peers through a Glass Jar in a Museum foreshadowed by Sara Baartman’s Ghost - Viviane Saleh-Hanna, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

• Touring Operational Carceral Facilities as a Pedagogical Tool: An Ethical Inquiry - Tammi Arford, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

• Developing Pedagogies of Human Rights and Social Justice in the Prison Museum - Viv Golding, University of Leicester

• Execution on Display: Visitor Reactions to Texas’ Electric Chair - Elizabeth Neucere, Texas Prison Museum