Entering the Maze: Space, time and exclusion in an abandoned Northern Ireland prison

Abstract

This article is an autoethnographic account of the authors' trespassing in the abandoned Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. For three decades before its closure in 2000, the Maze was the site of intense political struggle. The ruins of the Maze-a space once built to let no one out that now allows no one in-exist now in a state of limbo, between the conflicting narratives of the prison's troubled past, and an uncertain future. We present a brief historical account of the Maze, and explain our unconventional choice of 'research method', before introducing Foucault's notion of the heterotopia. We suggest that the Maze is an archetypally heterotopic space and our experience of exploring the prison can equally be described as such.

Excavating ghosts: Urban exploration as graffiti archaeology

“…As noted earlier, the graffiti 'ghosts' that constitute the focus of the present article were inadvertently encountered during the course of (auto)ethnographic research into another subcultural practice: recreational trespass, or 'urban exploration' (see . As with former exploratory incursions (see Kindynis and Garrett, 2015), the idea that my encounters with these residual traces might comprise 'data' for a criminological journal article was, to be frank, an afterthought. Furthermore, the extent to which my own recreational trespassing can be said to constitute (auto)ethnographic 'research' is itself something of an open question.…”

“…Indeed, if we conceive of 'urban exploration' more broadly as the 'adoption of the practices and discourse of exploration in the context of cities' (Castree et al, 2013: 540; see Pinder, 2005), we might position the approach taken here within a methodological lineage spanning the investigations of 19th century social reformers Henry Mayhew (1862) and William Booth (1890), the urban ethnographies of the Chicago School sociologists (Park et al, 1925) and the inner-city 'expeditions' of the radical geographer Bill Bunge (1977). 5,6 Moreover, and as I have suggested elsewhere, criminologists would do well to exploit the potential of urban wandering, exploration and infiltration -in their various forms -as immersive spatial research methods, capable of producing a Geertzian (1973) 'thick description' of place (Kindynis and Garrett, 2015). 7 In addition to deploying urban exploration as a research method, the approach taken here draws on two further sources of methodological inspiration: more-or-less formal archaeological analyses of graffiti; and ghost ethnography -an emergent methodological orientation that foregrounds an attentiveness to absence and the interpretation of material and atmospheric traces.…”

“…These histories and memories are multiple, often irreconcilable and contradictory: 'Ghosts are not coherent. They do not have one story to tell, or have one relationship to the living' (Pile, 2005: 162; see Kindynis and Garrett, 2015). 'The city is marked, then, by its multitude of ghosts; heterogeneous ghosts; a density of ghosts' (Pile, 2005: 162).…”

“…Graffiti, accordingly, does not lend itself to a singular, authoritative, historical interpretation. Rather, in undertaking 'unguided tours, without permission' or 'formal elucidation' (Payne, 2005: 73, 75), we encounter a multiplicity of 'embedded' -literally, inscribed -'narratives' (Armstrong, 2010: 245; see Kindynis and Garrett, 2015). Foreknowledge plucked from internet forums and blogposts; the stories of friends who have been there before; subcultural folklore, myths and rumours; and our own speculation and imagination 'all contribute to the types of spectralities we might encounter' therein (Garrett, 2016: 78).…”

“…Moreover, evoking these kinds of sites, notions of haunting might also contribute to a cultural victimology of place (see Walklate et al, 2011). Writing on so-called 'dark tourism' at sites of imprisonment, murder and genocide has already engaged with the spectral (Hughes, 2008;Wilbert and Hansen, 2009;Kindynis and Garrett, 2015). However, work from within victimology also stands to benefit from the conceptual metaphors -images to think with -offered by notions of haunting and the spectral.…”