No abstract

Despite the popular impression of prisons and other carceral spaces as disconnected from broader social systems, they are traversed by various circulations that reach within and beyond their boundaries. This paper opens a new analytical window onto this reality, developing the concept of D H teasing apart the emerging carceral landscape to provide a new critical epistemology for carceral geographies. In so doing, a meta-institutional agenda for critical carceral geography is derived, and possible ways to short-circuit carceral systems are revealed. KeywordsCarceral geography, circuit, circulation, counter-mapping, prison, institution. Nick Gill 1 , Deirdre Conlon, Dominique Moran and Andrew BurridgePlease note: the definitive version of this paper will appear in the journal Progress in Human Geography. This version is a pre-print, pre-proof version.1 Corresponding author, University of Exeter, UK. 2 Carceral Circuitry: Opening RemarksIn February 2016 the BBC (2016) reported the increasing use of drones to fly drugs, mobile phones and other contraband into British prisons. While no instances of smuggling by drones were detected in 2013, by 2015 33 instances had been recorded. The biggest find, in December 2015, featured a drone, drugs, a mobile phone, a phone charger and USB cards. Drone flights have reportedly become so common, especially during night hours, that prison staff find them unremarkable (The Guardian, 2016a). Dronedrops, alongside the stillincreasingly supplementing in-person smuggling such as during visits; with services on the outside.The rise of what the UK prison authorities call (The Guardian, 2016a) illustrates the unprecedented pressure that the prison boundary is under. The popular impression of prisons as impervious, closed-in on themselves and cut-off from the wider world is being challenged by rising prison populations and technological innovations that have precipitated all manner of mobilities and circulations both within prison walls and across them. Geographers have critically discussed G in order to call attention to this inter-connectedness of prisons and other carceral spaces (Moran, 2015;Fortes, 2015; although see Schliehe, forthcoming, for a recovery of Goff T intention has been to counter the imagination of a closed-off and sealed carceral institution, discussing instead the liminal spaces prisons (Moran, 2015: 90).These interventions beg the question of what an meta-institutional geography of the carceral would look like, meaning not simply a geography beyond them, combining supra-, sub-, inter-, intra-and extra-institutional imaginaries and perspectives. Carceral geography is in a strong positon to address such a question because, unlike prison studies, the subject of carcerality is not approached via an institutional lens at the level of the discipline itself. Rather, carceral geographers have already been at pains to emphasise the continuities that stretch across institutional boundaries (Allspach, 2010;Moran, 2015;Moran et al, 2014) providing an ideal foundation for ...

Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no-choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three-year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.

Cultural hybridity is a relatively neglected issue in globalization studies. The term refers to the production of novel cultural forms and practices through the merging of previously separate antecedents. Hybridization is different from integration, in which interdependencies develop while the antecedents remain unaltered. Recent evidence from the United States-Mexico borderlands reveals several forms of integration and hybridization, including large-scale population migration, economic integration, adjustments in law and politics, cultural mixing, and transformations in identity. Although trends toward cultural integration and hybridity are not always positive, such postborder tendencies are regarded as cause for optimism regarding the relations between Mexico and the United States.La question du métissage culturel est relativement négligée dans les études portant sur la mondialisation. Ce terme fait référence à la production de nouvelles formes et pratiques culturelles à travers le mélange d’antécédents séparés à l’origine. Le métissage diffère de l’intégration, au cours de laquelle des interdépendances se développent tandis que les antécédents restent intacts. Des données récentes recueillies dans les régions frontalières du Mexique et des États-Unis révèlent plusieurs formes d’intégration et de métissage, incluant les mouvements de population à grande échelle, l’intégration économique, les ajustements législatifs et politiques, le mélange culturel et les transformations identitaires. Bien que les courants menant à l’intégration et au métissage culturel ne soient pas toujours positifs, de telles tendances post-frontalières peuvent mener à des considérations optimistes en ce qui concerne les relations entre le Mexique et les États-Unis