Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.This interdisciplinary collection examines the thriving world of arts and creativity within prisons and other sites of confinement, revealing the complex terrain of ‘carceral aesthetics’. Set within environments marked by repression, contributors reveal how artistic practices become vital strategies of coping, resistance and political expression, while also being entangled in institutional rehabilitation agendas. Bringing together global scholarship, artist experiences and practice-based insights, the book interrogates the motivations, tensions and histories that shape prisoner arts, highlighting their role as testimonies to the lived experience—and pains—of captivity. Together, the chapters offer a theoretical framework for understanding the promises and contradictions of carceral arts today.
Anastasia Chamberlen is Professor of Sociology and Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Captive Arts research project, University of Warwick.Ruth Bernatek is Research Fellow at the School of Law, University of Warwick and was previously Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Captive Arts project.
1. Introduction: Dialogues on Prison, the Arts and the Hope for Justice - Anastasia Chamberlen and Ruth BernatekPart I: Identity & The Creative Self2. In Conversation With Dalton Harrison (UK) - Ruth Bernatek, Anastasia Chamberlen and Dalton Harrison3. Nameless Not Shameless: International Visual Art Prison Collaborations and the Questions They Raise About Artist Anonymity - Faye Claridge4. Marks, Doodles, Care, and Agency: Fieldwork Fragments From an Emerging Study Into Self-Led Creativity and Wellbeing Inside Prison Cells - Andrea N. Hadley-Johnson5. Intersections on the Inside: Gender and Class in a Prison Art Studio in California, USA - Laura Pecenco6. Escaping the Frames: Aesthetic Practices in Search of Other Justices in Latin America - Cristiane Checchia and Mário René Rodríguez Torres7. Overcoming Dehumanization: Prison Arts and Future IDs As Rehumanization - Luis S. GarciaPart II: Representations & Methods8. In Conversation With Damien Linnane (Australia) - Ruth Bernatek, Anastasia Chamberlen and Damiaen Linnane9. A Prison, a Prisoner, and a Prison Guard: An Exploration of Carcerality in the Middle East and North African (MENA) Region - Susan Aboeid, Sumaya Tabbah and Supna10. Getting Out by Getting In: The Group as an Escape - Charlotte Weinberg11. Carceral Performance, Histories of Prison Arts, and Liberatory Memory Work in Rideout’s the Ballad of the Whistling Man - Sarah Bartley12. Definitive Practice: Promoting Infrastructures of Creative Rehabilitation in England - Sarah HartleyPart III: Work, Healing & Resistance13. In Conversation With Jess Collier (UK) - Anastasia Chamberlen and Jess Collier14. A Story of Creative Writing in Prisons: Working on Generative Justice - Ella Simpson15. Empowering Voices: Applied Puppetry as a Tool for Healing and Identity Mapping in Young Refugee Inmates in Greece - Magda Vitsou16. From ‘Crime Scene’ to ‘Music Scene’? Music Therapy in a Scandinavian Prison - Kjetil Hjørnevik17. Bodies, Resilience and Dance in French and Canadian Prisons - Sylvie Frigon and Claire Jenny18. Prison Writing and Critical Perspectives on Justice and Incarceration in Argentina - Juan Pablo Parchuc19. Epilogue: Who Am I Poem and Reflections from the Dispersed Collective
'This is a genuinely transdisciplinary collection that brings together a diversity of epistemological frameworks to discuss the relationship between imprisonment and creative expression.' Lucia Bracco Bruce, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru