Matters of Violence: Police, Prisons, Ecology

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

Police, capital, and the carceral state each operate fundamentally on the registers of fear and violence. The papers in this session question the relationship(s) between capital, police, violence, cruelty, imprisonment, alienation, and ecology, offering critical analyses and radical critiques of the various ways in which police and the carceral state seek to produce order. In particular, the papers in this session consider the role of police technologies in the normal and everyday police project of violence, the connective tissue that binds together police and capital through the images of ecological horror, the ways in which the power of police and prisons function as a tool of accumulation necessary to the ongoing project of state-building, and the ways in which cruelty and performance underwrite and animate police and state violence. At their core, then, these are papers that interrogate the contemporary and historic problems of police, capital, state violence, and power.

Sub Unit

• Area X. Critical Criminology / 62. Cultural Criminology

Division of Special Interest

• Division Session of Interest / Division on Critical Criminology & Social Justice

Individual Presentations

• Robocop, or the Modern Prometheus: Monsters, Militarization and the boundaries of the post/human. - Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University

• “I'll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.”: Tentacular Eco-Horror, Police, and Capital - Bill McClanahan, Eastern Kentucky University

• Cages in the coalfields: Police power and prison building in Central Appalachia - Judah Schept, Eastern Kentucky University

• Cops, Cruelty, and Colonial Violence: The Obscene Pleasures of Police Prerogative - Tyler Wall, University of Tennessee, Knoxville