Spaces of observation and obscurity: cinematic prisons of light and dark

In The Eye of Power, Foucault delineated the key concerns surrounding hospital architecture in the latter half of the eighteenth century as being the ‘visibility of bodies, individuals and things'. As such, the ‘new form of hospital' that came to be developed ‘was at once the effect and support of a new type of gaze'. This was a gaze that was not simply concerned with ways of minimising overcrowding or cross-contamination. Rather, this was a surveillance intended to produce knowledge about the pathological bodies contained within the hospital walls. This would then allow for their appropriate classification. Foucault went on to describe how these principles came to be applied to the architecture of prisons. This was exemplified for him in the distinct shape of Bentham's panopticon. This circular design, which has subsequently become an often misused synonym for a contemporary culture of surveillance, was premised on a binary of the seen and the not-seen. An individual observer could stand at the central point of the circle and observe the cells (and their occupants) on the perimeter whilst themselves remaining unseen. The panopticon in its purest form was never constructed, yet it conveys the significance of the production of knowledge through observation that became central to institutional design at this time and modern thought more broadly. What is curious though is that whilst the aim of those late eighteenth century buildings was to produce wellventilated spaces suffused with light, this provoked an interest in its opposite. The gothic movement in literature that was developing in parallel conversely took a ‘fantasy world of stone walls, darkness, hideouts and dungeons…' as its landscape (Vidler, 1992: 162). Curiously, despite these modern developments in prison design, the façade took on these characteristics. The gothic imagination came to describe that unseen world that lay behind the outer wall. This is what Evans refers to as an architectural ‘hoax'. The façade was taken to represent the world within the prison walls and it was the façade that came to inform the popular imagination about what occurred behind it. The rational, modern principles ordering the prison became conflated with the meanings projected by and onto the façade. This confusion of meanings have then been repeated and reenforced in the subsequent representations of the prison. This is of paramount importance since it is the cinematic and televisual representation of the prison, as I argue here and elsewhere, that maintain this erroneous set of meanings, this ‘hoax'

Phonologically motivated orthographic variation in Modern Uyghur: the voicing of h

In this paper, I present data from three corpora of written Uyghur showing that the conventionally voiceless letter h, which occurs in words of Arab-Persian etymology, sometimes patterns as voiced in stem-final environments where it is a trigger for morphophonemic voicing assimilation in a following segment. Results indicate that when authors omit root-final h from the spelling, they tend to use voiced suffix-initial consonants, but when the h is written there is considerable variation both between and within authors and lexemes. No other phonological or functional factors were identified as being strong predictors of the variation. I interpret this as reflecting a probabilistic process of lenition or deletion of root-final /h/ in the adaptation of these loanwords that has diffused at different rates across the lexicon for different speakers

Cutting through the fourth wall: the violence of home invasion in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games

The home is central to the Western imaginary. It is of foundational importance to the shaping of identity. It is where we begin to construct the story of our selves and where we first learn to navigate space. Yet, it is also a site of shadows and fear, of hidden desires and ambivalence. Within the cinematic “home invasion” genre, this is heightened by the presence of an antagonistic Other. They render all categorically interstitial. As with the Lacanian notion of extimité, the invading Other confuses interior and exterior boundaries. In Michael Haneke’s (1997 original and 2007 remake) Funny Games this is further problematized by the lead antagonist’s “movement” between the diegetic world and that of the viewer. This article examines this “fourth wall” breaking and unpacks how the audience’s consumption of violent media is critiqued as the lines between the home of the film and that of the viewing audience become blurred

Prison Service Journal - Special edition focusing on 'The Arts in Prison'

Let us begin with a single image: Harou-Romain’s Plan for a penitentiary, 1840. If the reader is unfamiliar with the title, they may well know the image itself from the plate section of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. It depicts an imagined view from a cell within Bentham’s Panopticon. The inhabitant of the cell—seemingly unaware of our presence behind them—is kneeling. Theyface outwards, towards the central observation tower. There are several ways in which we can read this particular image. For example, is the figure kneeling in silent penitence or are they engaged in some form of labour? On first being introduced to a poorly reproduced version of this image in an undergraduate lecture some years ago, it struck one of the editors of this special edition as the embodiment of Bentham’s ‘mill to grind rogues honest’. It appeared as though the architecture of the building bore down upon the lone figure. It was the weight of both the physical and conceptual that had brought them to their knees. That editor has written elsewhere about the centrality of this image to their on-going research interests and projects, as well as using it in delivering their own undergraduate lectures. Hopefully the reader will forgive this initial burst of solipsism, but—simply put—you would not be reading this were it not for that image. Of course, it is a truism to say that art has the capacity to transform. We know this. We know that art can challenge and provoke. It can reveal the artist’s self to others, as well as illuminate aspects of the audience’s self to themselves. It allows us to express who we are and who we want to be. This then takes us to the theme of this particular special edition: the arts in prison

Ghost criminology: an exploration of the discipline’s ‘spectral turn’ (69530)

The inequalities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial injustice brought to vivid focus by footage of lethal state violence and the fires that have scoured continents speak to traumas of the past and future being inflicted upon the living in the present. Drawing upon recent criminological scholarship examining spectrality, as well as Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, this paper sets out a framework to explore these harms. This new sub-discipline of ‘ghost criminology’ is a means to recognise the harms that have been inflicted in the past and trace the contours of their lingering presence. Given the discipline’s spectral turn, we can begin to capture those figures, groups and concepts that have been rendered invisible, as well as attend to harms that have persistent afterlives. In this, it is vital that we also attend to the discipline’s troubling and troubled past. Criminology continues to be haunted by its complicity in colonialist practice, scientific racism and eugenics. The present itself also demands radical praxis to ensure justice in the intersecting crises of racial injustice, structural imbalance and climate catastrophe. We conclude, then, by conjuring ghosts of the future. In attending to these, we must shape the ‘not yet’. We must imagine a state that does not see its most vulnerable members ‘let die’ through inaction or subject to the language and rituals of violence. A ‘ghost criminology’ provides a means of listening to the voices of the discipline’s dead, as well as the ghosts of its future

Phantom architecture: Jeremy Bentham’s haunted and haunting panopticon (ACS22)

This paper unpacks the notion of ‘phantom architecture’ in relation to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of hauntology, it examines the continued influence of a building that has never been constructed. Using visual analysis of the architectural drawings associated with the Panopticon, as well as a close textual analysis of Bentham’s letters, the paper sets out a framework for understanding the ‘haunted’ and ‘haunting’ nature of this ‘phantom’ building. Placing the Panopticon within the context of both the ecclesiastical and industrial architecture that Bentham’s brother was exposed to during his time Krichev in Belarus, we see the Panopticon as being inspirited by these influences. Further, we examine how the building itself was designed to house an imagined presence. Using Derrida’s notion of the ‘visor effect’, we find ourselves forced to replicate the asymmetry of vision between an imagined presence that observes and those that are being observed. Drawing these threads together, we see this paper informing the nascent field of ‘ghost criminology’. We conclude by framing the Panopticon as an extension of Zizek’s ‘architectural parallax’ in its entanglement across various temporalities

‘Forget about all your taboos’: transgressive memory and Nazisploitation

Emerging from the Women in Prison genre of exploitation cinema, Nazisploitation - and the specifically Italian sadiconazista filone - of the late 1960s and 1970s utilised the backdrop of the concentration camps to tell eroticised stories of genocidal violence. In transforming human suffering into voyeuristic spectacle, whilst making simultaneous claims to verisimilitude, these films problematised notions of representation and entertainment. In this paper, we will unpack how this confusion of Grand Guignol and grindhouse excess produces a transgressive memory. Their use of archival footage from the camps situates them as outliers in Holocaust representation. They open up the dichotomies of structural-functionalist and ideological-intentionalist frameworks of explanation for the Holocaust. As such, they serve as useful points of departure to consider the interplay between real and reel

Gendered viewing strategies: A critique of holocaust-related films that eroticize, monsterize and fetishize the female body

This piece unpacks how Holocaust-related films - ranging from Nazisploitation cinema (Love Camp 7, 1968, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, 1975) through to ‘art house’ (The Night Porter, 1974) and mainstream representations (Schindler’s List, 1994) - eroticize Nazi atrocities and violence against women. Following on from Caldwell’s analysis of gender “realness” we argue that there has been a tendency for such films to present masculinity as the dominant power-simulacra. Using Schweickart’s (1986) androcentric reading strategy and Mulvey’s (1992) scopophilic male gaze, we ask whether gender hierarchies and inequalities are reproduced in these cinematic representations

Laser Spectroscopy for Atmospheric and Environmental Sensing

Lasers and laser spectroscopic techniques have been extensively used in several applications since their advent, and the subject has been reviewed extensively in the last several decades. This review is focused on three areas of laser spectroscopic applications in atmospheric and environmental sensing; namely laser-induced fluorescence (LIF), cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS), and photoluminescence (PL) techniques used in the detection of solids, liquids, aerosols, trace gases, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs)