Seeing Punishment: Understanding Incarceration and Structural Violence Through Visual Data

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

This thematic session brings together an interdisciplinary group scholars that analyze the experience of incarceration and issues of structural violence through images, videos, and text. Four empirical papers will be presented during this session that all leverage methods of visual criminology. Paper 1 uses prison newspaper data to trace the rise and downfall of the prison labor movement. Paper 2 uses photographs-as-storytelling to unpack gender identity and incarceration. Paper 3 uses narrative storytelling to examine the framing of slavery in ghost tours. Paper 4 analyzes the advertisements that private telecom companies use to sell communication to the incarcerated and the correctional system.

Sub Unit

• Area X. Critical Criminology / 73. Narrative and Visual Criminologies

Individual Presentations

• Privileging the Penal Press: Inverting the Hierarchy of Credibility in Historical Prison Research - Michael Gibson-Light, University of Denver

• The aesthetic, the embodied, the intangible: possibilities and limits of visual carceral research - Lindsey Raisa Feldman, University of Memphis

• Relentless Spirits of the Crescent City: Exploring Dark Tourism through Ghost Criminology - Favian Martin, Arcadia University; Kevin Revier, SUNY Cortland

• The Illusion of Choice: The Visual Hand of the Market and Manufacturing Consent for the Privatized Prison Telecommunications Sector - Lydia Bundick, Sam Houston State University; Alexander Kinney, Sam Houston State University; Nathan Kruis, Penn State Altoona; Nicholas Rowland, Penn State Altoona

Chair

• Alexander Kinney, Sam Houston State University

Discussant

• Alexander Kinney, Sam Houston State University