The orphanage as an institution of coercive mobility

Abstract

Citation: Disney, Tom (2017) The orphanage as an institution of coercive mobility. Environment and Planning A, 49 (8). pp. 1905-1921 Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University's research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html This document may differ from the final, published version of the research and has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version of the research, please visit the publisher's website (a subscription may be required.) ArticleThe orphanage as an institution of coercive mobility Tom Disney University of Nottingham, UK AbstractThis article reconsiders children's mobilities through the relationship between care and control in the context of Russia's disability orphanages. Drawing upon the lens of carceral mobilities, the article challenges the dominant conceptualisations of children's mobilities as 'independent' or necessarily intertwined with notions of 'wellbeing'. Instead this piece draws upon ethnographic research into the Russian disability orphanage system to present three typologies of multi-scalar carceral mobilities which children experience in this context; firstly as a form of spatial segregation and containment, secondly as a form of punishment and finally enforced stillness and restraint as a form of care. In doing so it provides new insights into the nature of the everyday for children in restricted institutional environments, largely absent from the wider geographical literature. Through the lens of carceral mobility this article provides a more nuanced geographical reading of the orphanage beyond an environment variously understood to harm or problematically to provide shelter, but as an institution enmeshed in biopolitical processes of power and control.

Spatial control and care in Finnish nursing homes

“…Even though the purpose of nursing homes differs somewhat from the purposes of other institutions, the spatial practices inherent in them have many similarities with other such environments, such that nursing homes can be seen as quasi‐carceral spaces. Hence, this study contributes to the existing literature within carceral geographies and drives forward a conceptualisation of the carceral, addressing the call from other researchers to expand institutions under consideration (Disney, 2017b; Moran et al., ). The apparent lack of a penal element suggests that a nursing home can, at most, be called a quasi‐carceral setting.…”

“…The significant relationship between space and care has long been recognised (see Brown et al., ; Conradson, ; Disney, , 2017a, 2017b; England, ; Milligan, , ; Milligan & Wiles, ; Parr et al, ). Milligan and Wiles () highlight the fact that care relationships are dependent on the space where they are implemented.…”

“…Gill, ). Although restricting movement and monitoring might not be disadvantageous and could be conceptualised as a form of care (Disney, 2017b), they also engender a loss of freedom. Such practices reveal the complex continuum of care and control that institutionalised elderly patients experience.…”

“…The field of carceral geography has typically concentrated on spaces that detain and lock up “problematic populations of one kind or another” (Philo, , p. 4), which can include nursing homes. As Milligan (, p. 21) notes, “[i]nstitutional care has been seen to represent a spatial solution to particular ‘problems’ usually arising as a consequence of frailty and age.” Recently, there have been calls to extend the concept of the “carceral” beyond “traditional” environments, such as prisons (Moran, ), to institutions such as schools (Gallagher, ), orphanages (Disney, , 2017a, 2017b), social housing estates (Villanueva, ) and even communities (Rannila & Repo, ).…”

Troubling institutions

“…The populations that are targeted by an institutional dynamic of care and control are not only increasing but are evolving and developing themselves, marked by an increasingly punitive turn in welfare (Wacquant, ). A notable development of geographers’ engagement with institutions has been the diversity of scholarship; there has been a sustained interest in material built environments of institutions such as the asylum (Philo, ), prisons (Moran, ), secure care units (Schliehe, ), orphanages (Disney, ) and schools (Gallagher, ). Defining the carceral and tracing its micro‐ and macro‐scale experiential components has recently preoccupied geographers (Moran et al., ), with some pursuing an activist approach seeking to dismantle these punitive institutional networks of control (Hamlin & Speer, ).…”