Imagining Spaces of Violence and Transgression in Vancouver and Northern Ireland

This chapter focuses specifically on the issue of space, place, violence and transgression drawing on case studies in Canada and Northern Ireland. ‘Imagining spaces of violence and transgression in Vancouver and Northern Ireland’ focuses first of all on the lives of indigenous women and sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). For 26 years, on 14 February, Valentine’s Day, women of the DTES have led a memorial march through the city, stopping at the places and spaces where women were murdered or went missing. The chapter draws on material from walking methods, participatory photographs and interviews with women who attended the march in 2016 to examine spaces of past, present and future in their lives. Continuing the theme of the construction and impact of space and borders explored in the previous chapter, this chapter also examines the history of the ‘peace walls’, ‘peace lines’ or ‘border lines’ in Belfast in the context of spaces of war, violence and conflict in Northern Ireland. Specifically,the ‘architecture of conflict’ is explored through criminological scholarship on the conflict in Northern Ireland. As with the Vancouver case study, arts-based walking methods are utilised that explore these border spaces through sensory, kinaesthetic, multi-modal research with citizens of Belfast.

Imagining Dystopian Futures in Young Adult Fiction

This chapter discusses how it is notable that ‘speculative fiction’ – fiction that creates alternative worlds – frequently addresses themes of deviance, transgression and ordering. It identifies themes of surveillance and spectacle; hyperreality and virtual reality; memory and the suppression of history; and hierarchy and difference in dystopian fiction aimed at young adults – The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008), The Maze Runner (Dashner, 2009), Divergent (Roth, 2011) and Red Rising (Brown, 2014). The chapter explores the role of this fiction in cultural imaginings of social control, repression and resistance, and argues for greater criminological attention to novels, including bestselling fiction.

Historical Spaces of Confinement 2: Magdalene Laundries

This chapter explores memories of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, which confined poor and ‘deviant’ young women. It draws on feminist history to explore the laundries as sites of gendered social control and analyses the reconstruction of these spaces in oral histories and the documentary Witness: Sex in a Cold Climate (Channel 4, 1998), and their portrayal in the films The Magdalene Sisters (Mullan, 2002) and Philomena (Frears, 2013). Concepts of memory, including forgetting and rediscovery – at individual, familial and national levels – are utilised.

Historical Spaces of Confinement 1: Homes for Indigenous Children in Australia

This chapter examines historical confinement via the example of homes for Indigenous children in Australia. Between 1910 and 1970 Indigenous children were removed from their families and placed in children’s homes in order to assimilate and ‘civilise’ them. Frequently, this removal was forcible. This chapter explores how these homes are remembered and imagined in oral history testimonies, as well as in the cultural representations, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), Doris Garimara Pilkington’s life narrative and its film adaptation, Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002).

Imaginative Criminologies of Space: the Spaces of Imaginative Criminology

This chapter outlines the book’s conceptualisation of imaginative criminology as encompassing attention to fictional and visual representations of crime and transgression, as well as gaining insights via creative, biographical, and ethnographic participatory methodologies. It defines and discusses ‘the imaginary’ and ‘transgression’ and highlights the particular focus on the spaces of transgression. The chapter discusses how space is understood and conceptualised in the book as relationally constructed and affectively significant, as well as an outcome of unequal relations of power.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter reflects on how the theoretical and methodological threads running through book tie together to develop an imaginative criminology of space. It build on the authors’ previous work towards a radical democratic imaginary and, drawing on Hudson (2006), incorporates a discussion of transformative justice. The conclusion argues that an imaginative approach is necessary in order to comprehend the complexity of issues of transgression and space, and to ensure the continued reinvigoration of criminology as a discipline.

Border Spaces and Places: the Age of the Camps

This chapter discusses arts-based research (filmic analysis and walking ethnographies) with asylum seekers and migrants waiting in border spaces, mostly in camps (in Greece, France, Jordan and Melilla) to move on with their journey. The construction of the camp as a site of containment, constraint and a border space and what this means in the lives of the people and families waiting, some for many years, is examined through narrative interviews, photographs and filmic work. The chapter examines the constitution of space through the relational, embodied and imagined experiences of migrants and the material and symbolic concept of the border and border spaces in their lives, journeys and sense of belonging.

Creative Writing and the Imagined Spaces of Imprisonment

This chapter discusses two creative writing projects with men in HM Prisons Lewes and Durham. It examines methodological issues associated with the relevance of space and setting to participatory arts (PA) research in prison, and the imaginative writing produced by participants. Memories, relationships, and the experience of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ were all significant features of prisoners’ writing. This writing is read not simply as ‘research data’ but also as creative and cultural expression. The Lewes project involved using texts from the Mass Observation Archive as inspiration for prisoners’ poetry. Themes of creative writing, history and criminal justice are taken up in relation to the Durham project in which creative writing groups ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ Durham prison wrote ghost stories based on the prison and the history of crime and punishment in the city. These are explored in this chapter, along with a crime walk that was developed as part of the project, which serves as an example of public criminology.