Visualizing State Power

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

The papers on this panel all grapple with the capitalist state’s abilities to conceal, mystify, and disavow its own violence through redacted state documents, the black spaces of everyday and exceptional police violence, Confined Animal Feeding Operations that elude visibility and legal oversight, and rural carceral geographies where prisons holding removed surplus bodies sit removed from sight on removed mountains. These papers engage the everyday tensions of state power, visuality and the politics of looking back.

Sub Unit

• Area X. Perceptions and Responses to Crime and Justice / 52. Media and Social Construction of Crime

Individual Presentations

• The Art of Bureaucracy - Katherine Biber, University of Technology Sydney

• Redacted: On Prisons, Police, Black Sites and “Dark Sides” - Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University

• Darkness on the Edge of Town: Prisons, CAFOs, and Rural Landscapes of State Power - Bill McClanahan, University of Essex; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University

• The Prison in the Coalfields: Work, Waste, Surplus, and Order in Carceral Appalachia - Judah Schept, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond

Chair

• Judah Schept, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond