This special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, entitled ‘Confinement Beyond Site: Connecting Urban and Prison Ethnographies’, is guest edited by Julienne Weegels, Andrew M. Jefferson and Tomas Max Martin.
The volume tackles germane (and presumably perennial) questions surrounding the nature of control and freedom, and speaks to long-standing debates about the social life of institutions. In doing so, the volume builds a useful bridge between the disciplinary traditions of anthropology, sociology and criminology. However, the core of the project remains ethnographic, in the best sense that the term implies. The authors in this volume offer analyses of human experiences that are situated within their broader social contexts, and which tackle basic conceptions about what anthropologists mean when they use terms such as ‘fieldsite’.
By interrogating the porous boundaries between prisons and streets, this volume advances our understanding of what type of phenomenon incarceration is. In doing so, the work might teach a much wider audience of social anthropologists how to better think about the nature of liberty, constraint and sociality itself.
The special issue is made up of an introduction by the Guest Editors, and articles by Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, Hollis Moore, Julienne Weegels, Carolina Boe, Luisa Schneider, Andrew Jefferson and Tomas Max Martin, Manuela Cunha, and an afterword by Steffen Jensen. The issue ends with Joseph Bristley's review of Bernstein's The Future of Immortality, and Elizabeth Turk's review of Matza's Shock Therapy.
I hope that you find the issue interesting.