CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Debolina Chatterjee Mapping Apocalyptic Visions in Carceral Spaces
Apocalypse, as a broadly shared language representing stories leading to the end of the worlds, serves as a prism to examine the various risks and vulnerabilities of those mired in carceral spaces. Prisons, as totalizing systems, signify the entrapment of marginal, disposable populations wherein the familiar coordinates of the social, cultural, economic, and moral organization disappear through radical dislocation and rupture and thus offer narrative resources to create and manage diverse anxieties of the ends. They also offer visions of exercising agency within the regimented landscape of penal spaces where the law is relentlessly apparent and somewhat emblazoned.
The project aims to underpin the existential predicaments associated with the apocalyptic anticipation of risk, danger, pain, and suffering in spaces in which the social order appears at its most fragile and uncertain edges. It seeks to unravel the moral and existential meanings of time as the expectation of a future radically discontinuous from the present, and to capture the apocalyptic scripts that underlie the processes of making and unmaking incarceration experiences. The study also places the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of apocalyptic imaginations to analyse how carceral spaces have been specifically constructed under biopolitical considerations during times of crisis. A dual methodology—of reviewing texts on apocalypse, law, and justice from across disciplines, as well as an interpretively oriented study of lived experiences of those inhabiting the carceral habitus to reveal ways in which the imprisonment situation feels recognizably apocalyptic—shall offer critical inquiry into the effects of biopower within carceral spaces.