Theorizing Carceral Desires, Imagining Non-Carceral Futures: Methodologies and Conceptual Frameworks

The proposed workshop will convene an international group of qualitative researchers whose scholarship examines –and aims to imagine solutions that move beyond –the use of the criminal justice system as a remedy for harm, injustice, and socio-economic deprivation. The workshop will build on our current programs of research to develop an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars committed to empirically grounded research and critical criminological frameworks. The workshop will advance socio-legal knowledge and develop new methodological practices in the socio-legal studies.

The first theme will focus on the methodological conundrums that researchers attentive to the harms of criminalization confront when their participants invoke the police and courts as not just their only solutions, but their ultimate saviours. This dilemma becomes a paradox when interviewees have their own troubled relationships with the criminal justice system or are themselves criminalized or incarcerated. The workshop will consider how to make sense of these perspectives and desires. We will specifically explore how to ethically represent and theorize narratives that do not align with the social justice objectives we ascribe to and the broader project to de-centre the criminal justice system. In addition, we will examine how researchers can draw on desires for punishment and social control to derive further insights into carceral logics and complicate existing theorizations of the carceral.

The second theme will focus on how researchers can mobilize these accounts to contribute to and develop different imaginaries, that is, to think beyond the bounds of carceral systems and practices. In so doing, the objective will be to destabilize established logics that couple ‘public safety’ with social control, detention, and punishment, and conceptualize new ways to cultivate security, safety, wellness, and social order. This endeavour will not only focus on moving away from traditional criminal justice institutions but will also address the permeation of criminal justice logics into other realms of social life. In focusing on the latter, we hope to include scholars from a variety of disciplines who research topics that include but are not limited to, social welfare systems, schools, borders, and immigration controls. The aim will be to reach beyond the contemporary moment to determine how we can orient participant narratives to generate new insights on social change, methods of redress, and non-carceral futures. The emphasis will be on developing empirically based, theoretical tools that contribute to the project of making abolitionist societies both thinkable and possible.