15-16 September, 2026 -Universität Trier, Germany
Carceral Geography Working Group
Call for Papers
The 6th International Conference for Carceral Geography invites papers exploring carcerality, borders and mobility, themes that have long animated this interdisciplinary field, as well as theoretical work, including on carceral space, abolition, post- and decoloniality, queer and feminist theory, social reproduction, and political economy.
Spaces of incarceration and confinement seem to epitomise the spatialities of enclosure, discipline and spatial control but as carceral geographers have argued (Moran et al., 2012; Turner and Peters, 2018), mobility, immobility, porosity and relationality constitute carceral enclosure. Rhythms of everyday life in incarceration are punctuated by the control of space and time: eating, work schedules, time outside, and lockdowns, a condition made more acute during the COVID-19 pandemic (Schliehe et al., 2022). Criminal justice systems move people between pre-trial and post-conviction confinement, sometimes confining people far from families and support networks (Piacentini 2004; Esposito, de Lellis, De Cordova and Briozzo, 2025). A range of non-criminal asylums and encampments utilize similar spatial controls but through therapeutic and humanitarian frames, prompting scholars to critique the paternalism of a care/control continuum (Pallister-Wilkins, 2022). Indeed, recent research on immigration enforcement shows frequent transfers between distant detention centres, a practice long known to impact detainees’ legal proceedings (Hiemstra, 2019). Deportation requires a transportation infrastructure to forcibly remove people from a territory (Walters, 2018). In a range of ways, carceral institutions manage, rather than prohibit, mobility. Showing how sovereign, embodied and affective registers of power operate in relation to law—and its suspension—carceral geography has contributed to political, legal and social geographers’ theorisations of disciplinary, biopolitical and sovereign power.
The proliferation of new configurations of bordering, migration control and carcerality have driven recent research, taking theorisations of carceral power to a range of other sites. The first American immigration detention centre repurposed a hotel for the purpose, while the UK has recently relied on hotels for emergency asylum accommodation (Burridge, 2023). Scenes of leisure mobility converge with forced mobility in Greece, Malta and Italy, with islands coming to serve as spaces of confinement (Mainwaring and Stierl, 2025; Spathopoulou, 2023). States like the US, UK, EU member states and Australia attempt to deter future migration through spectacles of detention, family separation and deportation and mass advertising campaigns (Coddington and Williams, 2022). Meanwhile, some of these same states have outsourced detention and confinement to other states (Giannacopoulos and Loughnan, 2020; Morris, 2023) and the private sector (Darling, 2022; Yin, 2023) and externalised migration and border management to transit and developing states (Collins and Minca, 2024; Dastyari, Nethery and Hirsch, 2023; Missbach and Hoffstaedter, 2020). These border and mobility regimes multiply labour in important ways, as well, through the use of under-paid labour in detention (Conlon and Hiemstra, 2025), incentive payments in refugee camps (Brankamp, De Jong, Mackinder and Devenney ,2023), voluntary labour to earn status (Tazzioli, 2022), and austerity economies (Avgeri, 2024).
All of these actions draw and are grounded upon colonial and settler colonial practices and western imaginaries that facilitate imperial projects, occupation, dispossession, segregation and attempts to counter the anti-colonial refusals and resistance from Indigenous peoples and racialised populations on unceded lands (McQuire 2024, Watego, 2021; Tauri and Cuneen, 2017; Agozino 2018; Palombo, 2019). The 5th ICCG was held in Melbourne, Australia, and keynotes and papers centered Indigenous sovereignty and the ongoing refusal of the carceral violence of settler colonialism. This introduced the intersections of current anti-asylum policies with the settler colonial project (Grewcock, 2014; Giannacopoulos and Loughnan, 2020; McKinnon, 2020; Perera and Pugliese, 2021). Indeed, bordered mobilities have been a keyway for colonizers to manage and control populations including labour shortages and surplus (Banivanua Mar, 2007). Apartheid states routinely control movement through documentation, work permits, identify verification, checkpoints, arbitrary arrest, and policing to produce racially stratified space (Griffiths, 2025). As nationalist politics have turned against asylum-seekers, refugees and migrants in recent years, colonial carcerality continues to haunt contemporary politics in important ways (Aliverti, Carvalho, Chamberlen, and Sozzo, 2023; Mountz, 2020). Australia’s Pacific Solution pioneered the externalisation and outsourcing of detention (Dastyari, Nethery and Hirsch, 2022; Morris, 2023), a model that has inspired Italy’s recent agreement with Albania, the UK’s agreement with Rwanda (now ended) and the US’s export of detainees to Ecuador in 2025. Thus, carceral border policies are also mobile, moving and transforming in new contexts.
To draw together these diverse threads of research, we invite empirical, theoretical and methodological papers from researchers at all career stages. We are inviting abstracts for individual papers and proposals for organised themed sessions.
Due date for Abstracts: 27 March 2026
Session Formats: Sessions will last 90 minutes and include the following formats:
●Paper sessions of four 15 minute presentations and Q&A.
●Panel sessions exploring a theoretical intervention, debate, monograph, or recent events. Workshops featuring interactive activities (such as creative methods), non-traditional session formats, film screenings, etc.
●Exhibitions of visual and creative work displayed in common areas at the conference.
For Individual Papers: Submit your Abstract Here by Friday, 27 March, 2026
To propose a themed session or exhibition: Submit your Abstract Here by Friday, 27 March, 2026
Timeline: The Organising Committee will review proposals and inform submitters whether they have been accepted to the conference in early May 2026. We apologise in advance that we cannot accept all papers.
Registrations: Registrations for the Conference will open in May on this page.
Cost of attendance: Professor Jennifer Turner and the Universität Trier are generously supporting this conference, and the conference has no required registration fee. Attendees with conference funding are requested to pay a nominal registration fee to support this and future events.
How to Contact us: Email us at 2026ICCG@gmail.com
ICCG Organising committee:
Sarah Brooks-Wilson, University of Birmingham
Clare Heggie, University of New Brunswick
Caitlin MacKinlay, Durham University
Lauren Martin, Durham University
Lara Palombo, Macquarie University
Anna Schliehe, Universität Trier
Renzo Szkwarok, Newcastle University
Works Cited
Agozino, Biko. 2018. Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation. Routledge.
Aliverti, Ana J., Henrique Carvalho, Anastasia Chamberlen, and Máximo Sozzo. 2023. Decolonizing the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192899002.001.0001.
Avgeri, Danai. 2024. ‘Humanitarian Capitalism: The Labour Regime of Aid and the Surrogate Welfare State in Times of Global Displacement’. Political Geography 114 (October): 103167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103167.
Banivanua-Mar, Tracey. 2010. Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade. University of Hawaiʻi Press.
Brankamp, Hanno, Sara De Jong, Sophie Mackinder, and Kelly Devenney. 2023. ‘The Camp as Market Frontier: Refugees and the Spatial Imaginaries of Capitalist Prospecting in Kenya’. Geoforum 145: 103843. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103843.
Burridge, Andrew. 2023. ‘Towards a Hotel Geopolitics of Detention: Hidden Spaces and Landscapes of Carcerality’. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231157254a.
Coddington, Kate, and Jill M. Williams. 2022. ‘Relational Enforcement: The Family and the Expanding Scope of Border Enforcement’. Progress in Human Geography 46 (2): 590–604. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211044795.
Collins, Jessica, and Claudio Minca. 2024. ‘The Belgrade “Campscape”: Refugee Spatialities, Mobilities and Migration Corridor Geographies’. Geopolitics, January 3, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2279103.
Conlon, Dierdre, and Nancy Hiemstra. 2025. Immigration Detention, Inc. Polity Press.
Cunneen, Chris, and Juan Tauri. 2017. Indigenous Criminology / Chris Cunneen and Juan Tauri. Policy Press.
Darling, Jonathan. 2022. Systems of Suffering: Governing Refugee Lives. Pluto Press.
Dastyari, Azadeh, Amy Nethery, and Asher Lazarus Hirsch, eds. 2023. Refugee Externalistation Policies: Responsibility, Legitimacy and Accountability. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003167273.
Esposito, Francesca, Federica De Lellis, Federica De Cordova, and Erica Briozzo. 2025. ‘“Who’s Breaking the Law … Not Us, Them!”: Inside Immigration Detention in Portugal’. American Journal of Community Psychology 75 (3–4): 371–85. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12784.
Giannacopoulos, Maria, and Claire Loughnan. 2020. ‘“Closure” at Manus Island and Carceral Expansion in the Open Air Prison’. Globalizations 17 (7): 1118–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2019.1679549.
Grewcock, Michael. 2014. ‘Australian Border Policing: Regional “Solutions” and Neocolonialism’. Race & Class 55 (3): 71–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396813509197.
Griffiths, Mark. 2025. Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine. University of Minnesota Press.
Hiemstra, Nancy. 2019. Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime. University of Georgia Press.
Mainwaring, Ċetta, and Maurice Stierl. 2025. ‘Islands of Solidarity? Migration and Activism in Malta’. Geopolitics DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2025.2511206 (June): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2025.2511206.
McKinnon, Crystal. 2020. ‘Enduring Indigeneity and Solidarity in Response to Australia’s Carceral Colonialism’. Biography 43 (4): 691–704. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27100081.
McQuire, Amy. 2024. Black Witness: The Power of Indigenous Media. University of Queensland Press.
Missbach, Antje, and Gerhard Hoffstaedter. 2020. ‘When Transit States Pursue Their Own Agenda’. Migration and Society 3 (1): 64–79. https://doi.org/10.3167/arms.2020.111405.
Moran, Dominique, L Piancentini, and Judith Pallot. 2012. ‘Disciplined Mobility and Carceral Geography: Prisoner Transport in Russia.’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (3): 446–60.
Morris, Julia C. 2023. Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru. Cornell University Press.
Mountz, Alison. 2020. The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago. University of Minnesota Press.
Pallister-Wilkins, Polly. 2022. Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives. Verso Books.
Palombo, Lara. 2019. ‘The Necessity of Decarceration’. Journal of Global Indigeneity 4 (1): https://www.jstor.org/stable/48717789. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48717789.
Perera, Suvendrini, and Joseph Pugliese. 2021. ‘Geographies of Violence: Island Prisons, Prison Islands, Black Sites’. From the European South 9: 85–97. https://www.fesjournal.eu/numeri/general-issue-3/anonymous-brown-bodies-the-productive-power-of-the-deadly-us-mexico-border/.
Piacentini, Laura. 2012. Surviving Russian Prisons. Taylor and Francis.
Schliehe, Anna, Chris Philo, Bethany Carlin, Caitlín Fallon, and Giovanni Penna. 2022. ‘Lockdown under Lockdown? Pandemic, the Carceral and COVID-19 in British Prisons’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47 (4): 880–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12557.
Spathopoulou, Aila. 2023. Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands. Palgrave Macmillan.
Tazzioli, Martina. 2022. ‘Extractive Humanitarianism: Participatory Confinement and Unpaid Labor in Refugees Governmentality’. Communication, Culture and Critique 15 (2): 176–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcac018.
Turner, Jennifer, and Kimberley Peters, eds. 2018. Carceral Mobilities: Interrogating Movement in Incarceration. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315645445.
Walters, William. 2018. ‘Aviation as Deportation Infrastructure: Airports, Planes, and Expulsion’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (16): 2796–817. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1401517.
Watego, Chelsea. 2021. Another Day in the Colony. Univ. of Queensland Press.
Yin, Mark. 2023. ‘Privatisation and Accountability in Australian Immigration Detention: A Case of State-Corporate Symbiosis’. Punishment & Society 25 (4): 1119–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221135175.