[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: The Beautiful Prison, special issue

[Gonul Pultar]

From: Doran Larson <dlarson at hamilton.edu>



The Beautiful Prison

A proposed, special issue of /Law, Culture, and the Humanities/ titled
"The Beautiful Prison" invites scholars, theorists, literary artists,
and current and former inmates, to imagine the prison in a transformed
state. While the prison quarantines law-breakers, it is itself held
captive by the limits of our ability to imagine it as anything other
than a site of legal, political, and economic control, of race/class
war, and of the theatre of violence that signifies the presence of
law. "The Beautiful Prison" is premised upon the belief that, even
while bearing such weight, the prison will begin to change (or wither
away) only when we can change our /imagination/ of the prison. "The
Beautiful Prison" invites writers to trespass beyond the limits of
existing facts and cultural imagination, to open a space of dialogue
and speculation on the prison's transformation-abolition into a site
of social reconstruction.

Submitters should avoid rehearsing the facts and statistics
surrounding the prison as the unjust, violent, and destructive
institution that it is. "The Beautiful Prison" seeks writers able to
move outside of tried discourses.

A strike by individual imaginations against the history of sites of
institutionalized pain, "The Beautiful Prison" seeks to draw a new
horizon around the limited picture we hold today of collectively
sanctioned justice. The Beautiful Prison is not a prison at all, but
the prison's antidote in hope.

Empirical investigation, critical analysis, policy review, and
activism around existing prison issues and systems certainly continue
to be needed. "The Beautiful Prison," however, seeks to chart
directions for change by asking contributors to engage in flights of
imagination that cast an aura of light behind the prison as it exists,
thus implicating the existing prison's (obscene) silhouette without
engaging in policy debate.

Approaches might include but are not limited to:

*Ideal constructions or reconstructions;

*Utopias and Utopian outcomes;

*Fantastic social functions;

*Reuse of existing brick and steel facilities;

*The prison on/as a new horizon of justice;

*Transnational visions;

*The prison as process without location;

*The prison in community ( )habilitation

Please send a brief sketch or abstract (250-500 words) to
dlarson at hamilton.edu <mailto:dlarson at hamilton.edu> by August 15, 2010.
Contact Doran Larson, at the same address, for further information.