Category: Environment

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Environment police power prison probation research Research methods sensory Uncategorized

International Handbook of Sensory Criminology Series: 1

Introducing… Sensory Criminology: Expanding the Criminological Imagination

This short post marks the opening of a series dedicated to discussing each of the organising themes of the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology, in preparation for its launch. Each piece will leave comments open as an experiment in discussion. Please feel free to leave talking points or ask questions – we particularly welcome questions from students.

The book asks what the sensory can contribute to our understanding and pursuit of criminological inquiry? What might the value be, of attending to the sensory in social scientific and criminological investigation? What do we even mean by “the senses”? Conventionally thought of as being restricted to sight, sound, smell, touch, taste – and often laid out in that hierarchy – what happens if this is extended to include a broader range of perceptual stimuli? What happens to how we can utilise a sensory approach to criminology if we add clarity, distinguishing it from adjacent, but distinct, theoretical frameworks adopted by phenomenological and affective perspectives? How can we think about violence and its politics, how coloniality and imperialism frame our understandings of justice and punishment, narrative and the arts in the context of criminal justice – and its absence, Environmental harm and how criminal justice practices impose particular understandings of place, space, time and justice, and how the sensory can inform methodological approaches to the rapidly changing contours of criminology and society.

The handbook is dedicated to expanding these ideas and considering how developing a set of principles to guide our approach to sensory criminology works to allow for a deeper consideration of implications for decolonial thinking. This enhances capacity, we argue, for disrupting western empirical hierarchies and the social systems they both shore up and are reinforced by. The book aims to amplify voices and experiences from beyond the Global North and to expand the possibilities of our criminological imagination.

CONTENTS

Sensory Criminology: Expanding our Imagination   Kate Herrity, Kanupriya Sharma, Janani Umamaheswar, Jason Warr

Section 1: Sensory Politics of Violence

Sensing Violence: Traces, Echoes, and Afterlives Liam Gillespie, Kanupriya Sharma and Hannah Wilkinson

  1. Listening to Donald Trump’s Voice: ‘Fight like hell!’, the Capitol Hill Riots, and the Spectre of Teleprompter Trump Liam Gillespie             
  2. ‘SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH’: Sound, Silence and Gender-Based Violence Amanda Holt and Sian Lewis
  3. The Sound of Violence: Paramilitary experience in Ireland Colm Walsh
  4. War, Colonialism and the Senses: “You can’t unsee or unhear that shit” Hannah Wilkinson

Section 2: Coloniality, Imperialism, and the Senses    

Recognising Abhorrent Legacies: Lessons for Sensory Criminology Onwubiko Agozino, Rose Boswell, Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Sharon Gabie, Andrew Kettler, Macpherson Uchenna Nnam, Jessica Leigh Thornton, and Jason Warr

  1. Doing Justice Differently: A Pan-Africanist Perspective Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Abiodun Omotayo Oladejo, and Macpherson Uchenna Nnam                 
  2. “I’ll Make You Shit!”: Olfactory Othering and the Necropolitics of Colonial Prisons Andrew Kettler 
  3. The Sensory Aspects of Abhorrent Heritage in South Africa Rosabelle Boswell, Jessica Leigh Thornton,  Sharon Gabie , Zanele Hartmann,  and Ismail Lagardien
  4. Decolonizing Sensory Rhetorics and Activism in Africana Prison Memoirs Onwubiko Agozino

Section 3: Sensory, Narrative, and the Arts         

Reimagining Justice through Creative Encounters and Sensory Knowing Glenda Acito, Lucy Cathcart Frödén, Fangyi Li, Lorenzo Natali, Nabil Ouassini, Kanupriya Sharma, Ozlem Turhal, and Raghavi Viswanath   

  1. Black light. Drawing, Music and Theatre as Sensory Practices in the Encounter Between Inmates and University Students Lorenzo Natali , Glenda Acito, and Ozlem Turhal 
  2. Crackle and Flicker: Music and Multisensory Experiences in Prison Lucy Cathcart Frödén and Áine Mangaoang       
  3. Seeing Museums as Criminological Spaces: An Affective Tale of Two Museum Visits Raghavi Viswanath and Fangyi Li
  4. ‘Sensory Criminology, Islamic Auditory Traditions, and Rehabilitation Nabil Ouassini and Anwar Ouassini                          

Section 4: Sensing (In)Justice        

From the Courtroom to the Street: The Sensory Dimensions of Racialised (In)justice Barbara Becnel, Dale Spencer, and Jason Warr

  1. Conflicting Senses, Victims, and the Courtroom: the case of Cindy Gladue Marcus Sibley and Dale Spencer    
  2. The Sensory Effects of Racial Profiling in Berlin’s KBO’s.  Melody Howse                          
  3. Racialized Punishment and the Sensorial Symbolism of Death Row for America’s Black Gangster Class Barbara Becnel             

Section 5: Environmental Harm and the Senses            

“The Way the Soil Crumbled in Their Hands”: Sensing Environmental Harms Amy Gibbons, Ascensión García Ruiz, Janani Umamaheswar, and Aysegul Yildirim

  1. Seeing and Sensing Environmental Harm: The Death of the British Countryside Amy Gibbons                 
  2. The Sensory Ocean: Exploring Noise and Light Pollution as Blue Crime Ascension Garcia-Ruiz
  3. Sensitising Criminology to Experiences of Environmental Noise Aysegul Yildirim

Section 6: Space, Place, and the Sensory           

Vivid and Vibrant Criminological Landscapes: Sense and Space Kevin Barnes-Ceeney, Priti Mohandas, and Janani Umamaheswar

  1. Dispossessed Realities: Houselessness, and Spatial Violence Luisa T. Schneider
  2. Release from Prison Day Kevin Barnes-Ceeney and Victoria Espinoza                        
  3. “I can’t breathe” Housing, Masculinities and Violence in Cape Town, South Africa Priti Mohandas
  4. Scrutinising Social Control in the City through the Senses Anna Di Ronco and Nina Peršak      

Section 7: Time, Justice, and the Sensory

Beholding Justice and Punishment Sneha Bhambri, Eamonn Carrabine, Kate Herrity, Arta Jalili-Idrissi and Jason Warr

  1. Sitting, Seeing and Getting Lost: The Sensory Aesthetics of Latvia’s Women’s Prison Arta Jalili-Idris
  2. Time, Temporality, and Chronoception Jason Warr
  3. It’s a Circus: The Production of Domestic Violence Proceedings in Lower Courts of Mumbai, India Sneha Bhambri
  4. Beholding Justice: Images of Punishment in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Eamonn Carrabine

Section 8: Sensory Methods

“They Are Not Like You and I”: Sensory Methods  Briony Anderson, Kate Herrity, Sarah Kingston and Mark Wood

  1. Sense and Insensibility: How Technologies Invite and Invisibilise Harm Briony Anderson, Mark A Wood, Jackson Wood, Will Arpke-Wales, and Flynn Pervan             
  2. Audio Criminology: Broadening the Criminological Imagination Through the Use of Audio Methods Sarah Kingston
  3. ‘Still feels like jail’: Sensing Danger, Bleakness and Friendship in a State-Run Home For Boys Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, Aishwarya Chandran and Sanjukta Manna

This project began life as a conversation between Tom Sutton and I (Kate Herrity) at the 2022 BSC conference. Shortly after, Kanupriya Sharma, Janani Umamaheswar and Jason Warr joined. The four of us divided up the eight sections which organise the book. Each of the authors of the three or four chapters within them were invited to take part in a discussion with one another about their work. These discussions formed the basis for each introduction section of the book. Since these sections are an accessible way of introducing the contents of the book in a way which lends a substantial project a coherent narrative, they seem like a sensible focus for discussion.

As with all projects, people decline and others drop out, representation is partial, interests and approaches of the editors are reflected in those invited to participate… We discuss all this at greater length and depth in the introduction, along with our hopes for the future and the guiding ethos of the book. We hope to invite more people to the table and enrich a conversation we do not aim to be the last word in.

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Environment police sensory smell Uncategorized

The Pervasive and Unknown Effects of Sensory Experiences in Policing: An Autoethnographic Response

Marina Carbonell

From 2007 to 2018, I served as a police officer with a provincial police service in Canada.  Starting on patrol, I also worked in communications, criminal investigation division, and forensics, I gained experience providing front-line response in a wide variety of emergency contexts. Prior to becoming a police officer, I spent my youth playing sports, specifically hockey and rugby, which resulted over the years in numerous sports-related injuries, including having my nose broken three times.

Figure 1: Graduation Day, 2007

Unbeknownst to me, my broken nose led to a deviated septum – a condition where the middle portion of the nose was twisted, obstructing airflow and preventing proper drainage. I knew my breathing was laboured; a girl in my police recruit class commented on how loud my breathing was, and I couldn’t run with an ‘in through the nose, out through the mouth’ pattern.  Finally, in the Winter of 2017, I saw an ear-nose-and-throat (ENT) doctor. I learned that the obstruction in my nose had created growths within my sinus cavities called polyps.  My nose needed to be reconstructed, and the polyps had to be removed.  The surgery went well; however, I could not have anticipated the results.  On the outside, my nose looked the same. On the inside, however, I quickly realized how poor my sense of smell had been once it had been fully restored.

Working in Forensics is unlike any other job. Calls range from minor incidents involving photographs of property damage and forensics processing of stolen vehicles, to crime scene management and analysis of complicated homicide scenes.  In my province, there is no coroner; every death at home is attended by patrol and forensics to rule out foul play.

Figure 2: Caught by the media while photographing a scene, 2017

The first few weeks after the surgery were tricky.  As my nose was healing on the inside, it would occasionally bleed if I got up too fast or bent over.  Normally, this wouldn’t be cause for concern; however, working in forensics brought the potential of introducing contamination into a crime scene. The last thing anyone wants to do is affect the integrity of a scene or necessitate questions about why your DNA is everywhere! This is commonly discussed in forensics; German police discovered scene contamination introduced by a cotton swab factory worker in Austria after the worker’s DNA was located at multiple scenes (Himmelreich, 2009).

After my nose healed, I quickly became aware of my heightened sense of smell. Before this point, I genuinely thought some people just experienced crime scenes and death differently than others in terms of fortitude, determination or tenacity. To say I was shocked is an understatement. Walking into a heavy smoker’s home, standing next to people with strong odours (good and not so good), and even the smells of diverse cuisines were astonishing compared to the previous complete absence.  The difference was jarring; I could smell the iron in blood, and the chemicals I used for processing, where there had been nothing before. Autopsies were a completely different experience, as was the newfound sensory overload of crime scenes. I was astonished by the difference, finding a huge disparity in my personal perception of my work as a result of regaining my sense of smell. The increased ability to smell made it challenging to leave work behind; my hands continued to smell like nitrile gloves, my skin seemed to exude the cleaning chemicals I used before leaving work, and unfavourable experiences lingered in my hair and on my clothes with apathetic vestige, making it harder to wash off the day. Smell, as a sense, is important, but it can also have lasting effects on well-being. Examining smell, Hur and colleagues found a strong correlation between smell and depression, with the prevalence of depression in individuals reporting negative or challenging smell experiences at nearly 40% (Hur et al., 2018).  Taste and smell problems can be the result of trauma to the head (Schechter & Henkin, 1974). Sense of smell can be influenced by fractures to the face (Drareni et al., 2021) and may be altered by diet (Liu et al, 2020; Stevenson et al., 2020), and salt intake (Henkin, 2014). Vestibular sensory systems may be negatively affected by sleep disruptions, impacting vision and balance (Besnard et al., 2018). Thus, police may be further at risk of sensory changes compared to others, as the profession involves physical altercations, shift work disrupting sleep, and often poor eating habits. These findings are especially timely, given the reported impacts on olfactory experiences by people recovering from COVID-19 (Coelho, 2022).

Souhami (2023) argues that police are affected by their sensory experiences, such as working in the dark, which influences how they work. I agree with Souhami that my perceptions in policing were altered in the dark, and I was aware of this influence. For my entire tenure as a police officer, I refused to watch horror movies for fear it would influence my ability to do my job – you can’t be afraid of fictitious movie characters when you’re running through the woods at night. Police work in an environment where perception is everything. The interpretation of threats helps us determine action, but our interpretation of the world around us is subjective. Fear is an adaptive mechanism intended to keep us safe (Gagnon et al., 2013); however, when afraid, we perceive situations as having more risk (Stefanucci & Proffitt, 2009). For police officers and other first responders, training emphasizes vigilance and safety. The work is stressful and is physically and mentally injurious (Pooley & Turns, 2021). The “anti-police rhetoric” is common (Pooley & Turns, 2021), with perceptions of vulnerability leading to increased hypervigilance as a means to maintain feelings of safety (Pooley & Turns, 2021). Hypervigilance can also be heightened as a symptom of posttraumatic stress, a further consequence of the work, with police experiencing higher rates of PTSD than the public (Carleton et al., 2018).

Souhami (2023) also describes police visual perceptions of their environment as imbued with feeling, calling for increased scholarship into sensile influences. In response, I would argue that there is significance beyond sight in our sensory experiences. It is not solely the vulnerability in the dark or our visual experiences that lead to a change in our perceptions, but the combination of our olfactory, vestibular, proprioceptor, auditory, tactile and oral sensations, known and unknown.

The dark itself is known; we are generally aware of our reduced perception and increased risk. The feeling of vulnerability tells us to pay attention, to be aware, to stay safe. I always preferred night shift, as a ‘night owl’ myself. Working at night felt less restricted with less traffic slowing down around me, fewer calls for service, and fewer car accidents to attend. In the summer months, the cool air was a reprieve from enduring body armour in the hot sun. Weekends were always busy, but weeknights sometimes permitted time to catch up on paperwork, actually eat a lunch on shift, and carried the hope of fewer files for follow during the following week.

Familiarity, however, makes a difference. During one call for service in my early patrol days, I responded to a domestic disturbance call in an area outside my regular district. It was dark, and I was in a part of town that I was unfamiliar with, dispatched there because the unit in the area was assigned to another matter on the busy summer Friday night. The newness of the area increased my attention and intensified my focus. The dark felt darker, and the air hinted at a crispness that should have been absent on a warm summer night. I remember the walk up the long driveway, the gravel crunching under my work boots, while I was trying to figure out which door I should knock at. Before I could knock at the door, a huge German Shepherd appeared on my flank out of nowhere, running forcefully at me, with explosive and thunderous barking. The dog ended up being friendly, but the fear induced by my lack of visual acuity, the sudden sound and intensity of the dog barking, and the abrupt disruption to my vestibular senses and proprioception system during the swift turn was disorienting in an unusual way. I was looking for risk as I was approaching the house, I felt aware, though that sense of awareness was spurious, and the subsequent shock was galvanizing.

The sensory input of the unknown is invisible and profound. We ignore our sense of smell until we have a head cold and lose taste. In policing, smell itself acts like a warning system; approaching a door, I would get a sense of what to expect.  During one call for service where a lady had passed away at home, the patrol officer tried to warn my colleague and I, both in forensics, about the scene inside. We immediately dismissed his comments, thinking patrol officers were always dramatic about death scenes. Entering the front door was like walking into a brick wall. The dozens of cats inside had saturated the air with heavy ammonia, and I felt like I could see the air waving, heavy with dolor. We knew we had to go upstairs, but each step was forced and burdensome like walking through water. The creak of each stair was deafening, the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh of our Tyvek protective suits redounding between our ears. The cats wanted attention, moving in and out between our legs, limiting the space on the cramped stairs. We got halfway up to the second floor when my colleague stopped solid. “We have to get out,” she said with veiled panic. I could feel the sweat coming down my forehead, and I could see it in her hair, too. I remember telling her that if we left, we would have to come back in, we were already halfway there. The following ten or fifteen seconds of eye contact between us felt like it lasted an hour. We would have to come back in.

Prior to surgery, I attributed my ability to withstand the challenges of policing to a personal aptitude or individual competency. Being able to experience the change in perception, while challenging, allowed me insight into how fundamental sensory experience is to functional ability, focus, capability, and coping. Schleiermacher, concerned with language, wrote, “every utterance corresponds to a sequence of thoughts of the utterer, and must therefore be able to be completely understood via the nature of the utterer, his mood, his aim” (Schleiermacher, 1998, p. 229). I would argue this conceptualization of language can be extended to our sensory experience; our perceptions are rooted in our context and standpoint in the moment and over time, which in turn, influences our experience and contextualizes our disposition and abilities. If, as voiced by Wittgenstein, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (1922, p.201), our ability to understand and explain our experiences is vital to processing and conceptual expansion, and potentially, could have long reaching impacts for mental health, job satisfaction, and wellness. For example, understanding sensory needs holistically could influence perceptions and our choices. Something as simple as chewing gum can reduce stress during stimulus experiences (Yu et al, 2013), decrease the levels of cortisol in saliva (Tahara et al, 2007), and increase perception of performance and wellbeing (Smith et al., 2012). Gum chewing may also improve memory (Hirano et al., 2008) and positively influence attention (Hirano et al., 2013). For police, the influences on the visual, olfactory, tactile, vestibular, proprioceptor, gustatory, and auditory systems are complex and variable, and knowingly and unknowingly affect vulnerability and perceptions due to the conditions and environment in which police work. I agree with Souhami, we should not be afraid of the dark. But we must consider how the combination of perception, vulnerability, and all sensory aspects influence us in immeasurable, substantial ways. We still have to do the job, knowing the dog may not be friendly next time, knowing we will have to come back in.

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Emotions Environment Gender nighttime sensory smell space Uncategorized

The Night-Self

Chloe Young

A sea of revellers, young people laughing and dancing in a club.

It all started with shimmering bodies, a sweaty room, and the strobe lights of my favourite club.

The glitter we had meticulously applied in my bedroom, just hours before, had sunk its way down the faces of my friends, the result of our bodies being pressed up against other sweaty strangers. Coming into the club from the street outside, you’d be hit with a nauseating wave of sweat, vodka, and a sickly warmth that’d cling to your hair. Disgusting. And yet… Magical. As I had looked around the room, I’d found myself wondering where else such unfamiliar bodies would collide and become one sweaty blur. Where else would I not only let a stranger’s sweat fall on me but choose to let it in the pursuit of joy, pleasure, and fun. What I didn’t know then, as my body thrashed around in time with the music, was that these questions would set in motion a PhD trying to understand the self we become in the night-time economy.

My passion for nightlife cannot be separated from a youth spent sneaking into pubs and clubs in my small town on the Welsh border. Armed with a fake ID and whatever alcohol I could steal from my mother’s cupboard, I knew even then that there was something unique about the world of nightlife. That it offered me something magical. Something new. Something different.

And, most fascinatingly of all, that I was different.

Even now, I can recall the smell of the first bar I snuck into. With just a whiff of the perfume that I used to wear at that age, something fruity and sweet with a twinge of burnt popcorn, I’m transported back to the sticky aftertaste of spilled booze and sugary beer. See, the club itself that had a certain smell built into its four walls… The synthetic scent of a low budget fog machine and its chemical haze reaching across the room, mingling with the aroma of too many spilled vodka cranberries. No matter how many times the floor must have been cleaned, the sour sugar had etched itself into the floorboards.

Then there were the human smells. Sharp floral undertones fighting against the unescapable stench of sweaty body odour. When you’d first walk in, the smell was a strong and almost unescapable stench. But, over time, the smell would encompass you until it was barely noticeable anymore. You’d become part of the messy throb of bodies until the question of whose sweat was whose was simply impossible to answer. The sweat would bead on brows, soak shirts, and blend into a mix you couldn’t distinguish yourself in. You could smell the heat radiating off our skin as the bodies packed in tighter, the music seemingly louder, and any traces of perfume long gone. Disgusting? Magical? Both.

See, I loved the “Night-Time Economy” (NTE) before I even knew what this term meant. While there is no standard definition for the NTE, this is a label given to a wide range of nightlife sites such as pubs, bars, clubs and their associated services. Despite all the label encompasses, the phrase has most often been used to refer to the economic activity of the night-time city. However, the NTE is so much more than an economy, and I ask whether something is missed when we attempt to bound and define the space through its commercial activity.

Instead, could the sensory elements of nightlife allow us to better understand the NTE and its happenings within? Would we better capture the NTE by understanding it as an affective atmosphere where normal daily life comes to be suspended for a moment of ‘in betweenness’ (Turner, 1967)? Thinking about the NTE in this way, beyond its bounded and regulated zones (Newton, 2015, Philpot et al, 2019) paves the way for an understanding of nightlife as a social arena both made up of and producing embodied experiences evoking shifts in behaviours, identities and relationships with risk. Is nightlife really just made up of disconnections and continuities with our daytime subjectivities?

Nightlife spaces are, to borrow Durkheim’s term, socially and sexually effervescent places. The environment, often loud and electric, offers ‘possibilities of pleasure, excess and gratification” (Measham, 2004, p343). And, most importantly, it primes bodies to behave in certain ways. But how?

This is where affectivity comes in.

Affectivity refers to the realm of the unconscious and of the passions, emotions, and moods that all play a role in shaping our world around us. Conceptualizations of affect allow us to go one step beyond what is merely felt and make sense of the unconscious realm. Vague, and yet often incredibly intense, affect is thus the sensation that a feeling then expresses (McCormack, 2008). McCormack offers us the perfect example of affectivity… we know how a room of dancing bodies feels before we could begin to put the sensation into words or assign it a feeling.

Affects can layer upon each other to create an atmosphere that, “like a haze” (Bohme, 1993) radiates from and through individuals. This haze is contagious and fills a space in a way that spreads and induces moods, relations, and behaviour that align with the atmosphere, rather than any personal morality. As such, the crowd can be brought closer together, both emotionally and in proximity, in the formation of an imagined community (Anderson, 1983). A community built upon the stickiness of sugary mixers and a sticky floor that won’t wash out of your shoes no matter how hard you try. But, also, the stickiness of an affective atmosphere that sticks to, and with, those within it.

‘Getting lost in the crowd’ is a phrase we’ve all heard before and feels apt here. Both for how individuals tune into the affective flows around them in the NTE, but also how a ‘day self’ can be lost in the NTE and replaced with our new ‘night-self’ with a new set of tolerances, desires, and ideas. See, nightlife venues can be vibrant, exciting, and electric – the perfect place to get “lost” in… and this isn’t something that just happens by accident. The deliberate usage of lighting, décor and music contribute to engineering an affective atmosphere (Tan, 2013), which in turn affects rhythmic relationships between bodies and their wider spacings (McCormack, 2008; Tan 2013).

These affective atmospheres don’t exist outside of the bodies experiencing them. Picture walking into an empty club. You’ve timed it wrong. Or maybe you’ve picked the right time but on the wrong night.  The music is still loud, the lights still flash… but it’s not the same. This space needs bodies within to ‘warm it up’ (Duff and Moore, 2015) and create the atmosphere that, ironically, those  very bodies are craving by going to a nightclub.

The way I write about, and photograph myself and my friends in the NTE, suggests it is a magical place of community, excitement, and affirmed identity. Which it can be… but isn’t always. It is no secret that the space is saturated with reports of violence, sexual assault and drug use. It’s then not surprising that the NTE is commonly thought about as a place of victimisation and violence.

There is no denying the dangers, darkness, and risk of the NTE, and any attempt to diminish this would be naïve but could also risk misunderstanding something incremental about nightlife…For, the pressing question is: why do we still go despite the potential risk and danger? Or…is this risk part of the attraction? Does it hold a seduction because we don’t always find this elsewhere? In suggesting risk becomes part of the allure of the NTE, is worth noting here that there is an important distinction to be made between feeling uncomfortable in a space and being unsafe (Nicholls, 2019).

For example, I’d feel extremely uncomfortable on a bungee jump at a great height- but would not actually unsafe (as long as I’m properly harnessed in that is!) So, despite the great waves of adrenaline pulsing through my body as I’d leap off the edge, I wouldn’t be in any danger. This distinction is important. Even the most reckless of adrenaline junkies who seek the thrill of “living on the edge” take actions to minimise the level of danger they put themselves in through a range of risk mitigation strategies. See… you can’t enjoy the thrill if the thrill kills you. Thus, when thinking about thrill seeking in the NTE, it is crucial that such behaviours involve the night-self losing control – in a controlled manner. Or, losing control but only temporarily (Briggs and Turner, 2011).

The controlled loss of control materialises across nightlife. This is not just in the risk-taking behaviours within, but in the way we let our bodies move, interact and leak. Outside of sports events, there are few places where a body may “leak” like they may in a nightclub, revelling in its sweaty form without becoming out of place. Bodies are typically expected to be bounded and any bodily materials that threaten this (tears, sweat, blood, urine) have come to transgress the edges of acceptability. While there is nothing inherently disgusting about these fluids, the sweaty, smelly, unbounded body has been cast as something inappropriate in our social spaces today.  But not necessarily for the night-self…

I always make sure to pack deodorant in my bag when going into the PhD office, scared to get caught out or be “smelly”. Yet, despite much more skin exposed and adrenaline induced sweat, I’d never bother to cram such a thing into my handbag when going clubbing. In the office, deliberate attempts are made to reduce the possibility for sweating through air-conditioning or architectural design (Waitt, 2014), but the NTE offers a unique thermodynamic environment and a very different set of norms about sweat itself. Pennay (2012) suggests that club spaces provide individuals with the chance to be grotesque and ‘occupy an uncivilized body for a night: to grin like a fool; to laugh too loud; to sweat it out on the dance floor; to flirt outrageously; talk well-meaning shite to strangers; feel sexual, carnal and exhilarated” (Jackson, 2004, p. 123 in Pennay, 2012). Crucially, this idea of “sweating it out” and being “sexual” challenges the conditions that people usually face in regulating their bodies to maintain a “professional” image. Perhaps then, people seek out the NTE not in spite of its so-called ‘grossness,’ but because of it; sweaty bodies in the NTE are liberated to leak, sweat, ooze, but most importantly, to interact with other bodies and their fluids outside of gendered bodily structures. So, reflecting on my opening story, maybe that is why I don’t mind other bodies sweating on me as I dance, hair stuck to my face, arms up, and glitter rolling down my cheeks.

Then the lights come on. The air feels heavier, and the smell of danger loiters in the corners of the club as bodies fight their way to pile out onto the street, each on a mission to get a taxi or find a chip shop still open. The music, replaced by a chorus of drunken shouts, rings in your ears as your sweaty clothes cling to you like a second skin you can’t shed.  The air outside is like a slap to the face as your body is hit with reality carrying on outside of your night. Someone’s laughing… Someone’s crying… Someone’s throwing up. Sweat begins to dry down your back as your skin still hums from the vibration of dancing bodies, the smell of quickly stagnating and stale clothes. The sound of bare feet slapping along the pavement rings out as shoes are kicked off for the walk home, wet hair dripping with a concoction of spilled drinks, tears, and sweat. The taste of makeup sliding off your faces, leaking its way down onto white tops that had been carefully chosen and spritzed with perfume just hours before. The leaky, messy, dripping body… Free. For tonight at least.

Nightlife offers us something truly unique, and the chance to be unique. The NTE is magical, scary, and extremely messy… but also special. Trying to understand the NTE through a bounded and overly sober approach would be to neglect what makes nightlife what it is and why it plays such a big role in sociality today. As continue to research the “Night-self” and its affective capacity, allure, subjectivity, tolerance, and vulnerability, I hope to make sense of the NTE in a way that speaks to a truth about the space that has been so often overlooked… That the night-time economy is so different to any other space precisely because we’re different within it.

References

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Bohme, G. (1993) ‘Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics’ Thesis Eleven 36: 113-126

Briggs, D., & Turner, T. (2011). Risk, transgression and substance use: An ethnography of young British tourists in Ibiza. Studies of Transition States and Societies, 3(2)

Duff, C., & Moore, D. (2015). Going out, getting about: atmospheres of mobility in Melbourne’s night-time economy. Social & Cultural Geography, 16(3), 299-314.

Jackson, P. (2004). Inside clubbing: Sensual experiments in the art of being human. Oxford: Berg

McCormack, D. P. (2008). Geographies for moving bodies: Thinking, dancing, spaces. Geography Compass, 2(6), 1822-1836.

Measham, F. (2004). Play space: Historical and socio-cultural reflections on drugs, licensed leisure locations, commercialisation and control. International journal of drug policy, 15(5-6), 337-345.

Newton, A. (2015). Crime and the NTE: multi-classification crime (MCC) hot spots in time and space. Crime Science, 4(1), 1-12.

Nicholls, E., & Nicholls, E. (2019). ‘People Don’t See You if You’re a Woman and You’re Not Really Dressed Up’: Visibility and Risk. Negotiating Femininities in the Neoliberal Night-Time Economy: Too Much of a Girl?, 207-252.

Pennay, A. (2012). Carnal pleasures and grotesque bodies: Regulating the body during a “big night out” of alcohol and party drug use. Contemporary Drug Problems, 39(3), 397-428.

Philpot, R., Liebst, L. S., Møller, K. K., Lindegaard, M. R., & Levine, M. (2019). Capturing violence in the night-time economy: A review of established and emerging methodologies. Aggression and violent behavior, 46, 56-65.

Tan, Q. H. (2013). Flirtatious geographies: Clubs as spaces for the performance of affective heterosexualities. Gender, Place & Culture, 20(6), 718-736.

Waitt, G. (2014). Bodies that sweat: the affective responses of young women in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Gender, Place & Culture, 21(6), 666-682.

Categories
Emotions Environment Pedagogy sensory Teaching Uncategorized Writing

Eating Lemons: Teaching the sensory

Jason Warr

“For the first time in my criminology degree I can actually see the theories and ideas in my own life, outside, in the street.” (Final Year Criminology student, module Feedback (shared with permission.)

Autumn Term. University of Nottingham. 2023. For the first time in the UK I taught a full elective module on Sensory Criminology. Aimed at final year Criminology, Sociology, and Liberal Arts students the idea was to introduce students to the complexities of revisiting the criminological canon through considering the varying ‘sensoria’ that shape our experiential reality and understanding of the world. The basic point being that we, as human beings, are sensory creatures, we smell, we touch, we hear, and we see. These elements of our experience fundamentally shape not just our realities but, necessarily, how we experience and understand issues of crime, victimisation, and criminal justice.

Designing the course was one thing, selling it to students (and other staff members) who had not encountered such ideas before was something quite different. How do you convince students that smell can play a profound role in the experience of victimhood and criminal investigation when they have never really considered the idea of smell in their own lives? What of chronoception and the passing of time in terms of routine activities or sound in relation to green criminology? With developing the module came an explicit awareness that I was going to have to ask students to think about their studies in significantly different ways, and to challenge their learning as they had never considered. I was worried that they would not come with me. I was worried that challenging their pre-existent/nascent ways of criminological and sociological thinking, and asking them to develop a new criminological imagination, was going to go properly Pete Tong.

I need not have worried.

In terms of selling the module it very rapidly became evident that students ‘got’ it. Prior to running the module, I was explaining the basic concepts to a group of students and explored the rather silly, esoteric, and narrative convention of the ‘smell of fear’. I posed the equally silly question, “Does fear have a smell?”. Given this is a common phrase it seemed a useful place to start. Most of the students mentioned ‘acridness’ bitterness’ or sharpness (terms often used to describe this sensory marker of emotion in literature), but one student, a young Black woman from East London, laughed and went “sure, the absence of cocoa butter!”. The other Black students laughed; they immediately got the joke (both about Black skin care and being Black in white spaces), others just looked baffled. However, what it made clear was that students, even those not necessarily engaged or interested in taking the module, could see the links between complex socio-political concepts and the material, corporeal world in which they existed. Simple.

Not so simple …

I designed the module to cover a wide range of quite complex topics, which brought together both classic and novel criminological literature and, to continue the piracy of criminology as a rendezvous subject, coupled it with both novel and challenging sensorial anthropological and sociological developments. At its core, the module focused on the sensory through three distinct issues: 1. The communicative functions and symbolic interactionism of sensory experience; 2. The sensory/emotion/context divide; and, 3. The practices of thick description. There were two assessment points. The first assessment asked students to explore a sensory experience descriptively and analytically. The idea being to explore the complexities of communicating the interiority of sensory experience through written text. The second assessment asked students to sensorially examine a specific ‘space’ of their choosing. The aim was to think through research methodologies, ethics, and forms of analysis that go beyond the subjectively perceptual. Both assessments were designed to allow students to be creative in writing and thinking. By the end of the module students would have an understanding of:

  • The history of sensory social science
  • The development of sensory criminology
  • Sensory criminology and the philosophy of the social sciences
  • Methods of sensory research
  • The ethics of sensory research
  • Differing sensory studies in penality and criminology
  • How sensory criminology can challenge traditional criminological theory
  • Sensory victimology

Perhaps the most interesting but complex element of teaching the module was to get students to think through both the distinctions between the Senses, the relationship between them (intersensoriality) – especially as this relates to interoceptive (internal body states) and exteroceptive (external stimuli) senses and the shared yet often subjectively interpreted experience of sensescapes. Think about hearing a police siren – the intepretation is both singular and communal. This is distinct from the emotions that the sensory can evince and how we often substitute emotive descriptors for sensory ones when talking about the experience of sensoria, and the relationship between these issues and the spatialised/relational contexts in which said senses and emotions are being evoked. This is a core element of sensory criminology – affect and the sensory are distinct and to collapse them into a singular framework is to miss the point (and an entire world of analysis). Yet this is common to written English. To make the point, in the first seminar, I invited students to eat a lemon at the same time (I made sure no one was allergic) and then to write a few sentences describing the experience … but they could not use the words ‘bitter’, ‘sharp’, or ‘sour’ (seriously, try this, it’s not easy). Once those word options were removed, most students fell back on the same emotional signifiers (highlighting the degree to which the experience was shared) to explain the experience yet acknowledged that this did not really capture the reality of the sensation experienced. That was the way in.

One of the core problems of developing a sensory criminology is that many scholars have just not got it. They have either attempted to reduce it to something it is explicitly not (affect studies or embodied phenomenology – these are distinct fields in and of themselves) or, by ignoring the symbolic and material communications inherent to sensory experience have dismissed it as descriptively superficial. It has been interesting to see scholars who pride themselves on being analytically open-minded fail to escape the buttressed borders of their entrenched epistemic and methodological schema. They have clutched these comfort blankets so firmly that they cannot stretch a criminological imagination rendered brittle by repeated, but narrowly focused, use. This was not true of the students on the module. It has been a pleasure to see them open mindedly grapple with, and question, the complexities of trying to disentangle and understand criminological sensoria. This was evident in getting the students to think through the Sensory > Emotion <> Context problem.

The Sensory > Emotion <> Context problem, in many ways, sits at the heart of teaching (and understanding) Sensory Criminology. The problem itself is fairly easy to explain but demands a complex, multi-level, degree of analysis/explanation of any sensory event in order to capture it. So, what is the problem: it is that the sensations we experience communicate information that necessarily evokes emotional and cognitive responses, but both the communicated information and those subsequent emotional and cognitive responses are inherently contingent on context. The same sensation can therefore evoke varying responses dependent on differing settings. Take, for instance, hearing footsteps in the dark (a theme raised across all seminar groups by a wide number of female students) or seeing the blue lights of emergency vehicles. The emotional response to each of these can be utterly contextually contingent. If you are a young woman walking home alone from a club, the timbre of the sound of footsteps can utterly change the response (i.e. rushed heavy tread as opposed to the click clack of high heels), as can directionality (towards or away), or even proximity to a ‘safe’ space. To understand these experiences, at a minimum, we need to consider issues of time, space, geography, locale, gender, power, relations, company, rhythms, activity, sound localisation, temperature, lighting, history, weather, and much, much more. Without much prompting the students got it, and immediately understood how this related to other criminological issues they had been studying (from causal models of crime to victimology to green/environmental issues to state crimes), and what it meant for thinking through a seemingly simple issue. It also allowed them to think through criminological concepts as they related to their own lives and experiences.

It was this ability for students, regardless of lives lived, to ‘see’ the topicality beyond the materiality of the classroom and apply the ideas, which allowed them to grasp and utilise the concepts in quite complex ways in the assessments. As third year students you would expect this to be standard, but even at this level getting students to engage and have the confidence to apply new ideas can be difficult. We over-assess students (and children more broadly) in ways that is, pedagogically (and emotionally), detrimental. This requires a sector wide conversation – not that this will be possible whilst we have an educationally ignorant Government. Anyway, the first step in doing this was in seminars where I would repeatedly ask students to both think through how you communicate a subjective sensory experience and to then analyse it. This led us to Geertz’s ‘thick description’.  The purpose here was, in seminars and in preparation for the first assessment, to describe quite simple (non-criminological) sensory experience in as much, and as rich, detail as possible in order to communicate the sensation, and its context, in such a way as that someone not experiencing it, would be able to (to create a form of verstehen).

This was designed to do three things: first, allow students to develop their writing in creative ways (something the modern university actively and pedagogically discourages) and to explore the interiority of their experience; second, to consider their audience (beyond a marker) and what the communication of that interiority can involve for others; and, third, to begin to consider how the sensory and experience can be turned into data that can be analysed. This was the goal of the first assessment; to describe a sensory experience in five hundred words, and then analyse that piece of writing (1,000 words). Writing in terms of what is known about sensory studies and how that could be related to wider sociological/criminological issues. For instance, one student wrote about their morning coffee and the role of smell and taste in social routines; another spoke about perfume and scents and their link to familial relations and homemaking; others wrote on connections between the sensoria of clubs, the carnivalesque, and deviant leisure. The writing was rich, the detail profoundly communicative, and the skills on display impressive.

The first half of the module and assessment focused on the relationship between the subjective and the communal as it related to understanding and analysing the sensory. The latter half focused on the spatial and the criminological. This gave students the opportunity to apply skills developed in the first half of the module to the criminological analysis of space. I encouraged students to understand those Lefebvrean notions of space and place, and how the sensory may provide new ways to do this if applied to criminological issues or theory. For instance, could we explore sound, rhythmanalysis, and Routine Activity Theory? Does Guardianship (or its absence) have an audible quality? May the acoustic rhythm of a space play a part in the decision making of those who commit crimes in that space? What about Labelling Theory? Does scent and smell play a part in the way we marginalise and label others? If so, how, why, and what communication is being conferred that allows for this? Can this analysis be applied to Racist logics and policing? The possibilities and combinations of this were endless and gave students a way into a canon that had, until that point, seemed abstract.

The results in the final assessment were testament to the students grasp of rich, thick description, criminological theory, concepts of space/place, and application of a sensorial analysis. One student wrote, vividly, on how the sights, smells, sounds, and textures of Las Ramblas in Barcelona create a polyrhythmic environment that in and of itself creates criminal opportunities in ways not applicable to other urban spaces. Another wrote about the front door as a portal and the relationship between arrythmia and household routines as they may relate to crime. Others wrote about traversing the urban night-time economy and the way sounds, and their absence, can contribute to the gendered fear of crime. There was explorations of parks, lanes, alleyways, shops, pubs, kitchens, public toilets, and carparks. Topics of hate, VAWG, violence, theft, drug dealing/taking, policing, car crimes, and racism were covered. Criminological theory as disparate as Environmental Crime Prevention through to Drug Normalisation, and even Zemiology were considered, and unpacked. I know I am biased (and incredibly proud of my students – I told them this) but these were some of the richest and most critical student essays that I have ever marked (even if some did use Wilson and Kelling in rather odd, and unaware ways). The breadth of reading beyond the course material was impressive and extensive. I nearly got altitude sickness from some of the marks I gave (moderated and approved).

So, what did I learn form teaching Sensory Criminology for the first time? I had built quite a rapport with the students (I had 78) and asked them for quite brutal feedback … they took me at face value. Ouch. However, even in their critique it was evident that they had understood the pedagogy inherent to the module design and the aims of the module. They gave me useful advice on where the gaps in their knowledge and skills lay and how my assumptions about these issues had compounded their difficulties. In light of these comments, I will be adjusting some of my seminar tasks. However, beyond that, one of the things I learnt was that lecturer cynicism about students and their learning is really an ‘us’ problem, rather than a ‘them’ problem. It was clear from the start that students were both reading the set list ahead and backwards. They would raise concepts in discussions that we had yet to cover and were linking these to those covered earlier in the module. I have rarely seen that before. The students were taking ownership of their own subjective learning, despite the scaffolding of conceptual learning built into the module. I have not quite unpicked what it is about the teaching of the sensory that a) allowed for that; b) enabled them to interrogate and thus shape their own learning (oddly something similar to the disruption of ordering that is central to cognitive interviewing, a topic that we explored at various points of the module); and, c) to develop their reflexive learning, and pursue lines of interest through the module topics in ways that made sense to them (including the iterative process of revisiting texts when encountering new ones). If I can pin that down …

Categories
Environment food prison smell taste Uncategorized Women

The Aftertaste of Prison

Lucy Campbell

I was a chef for a while when I was younger, I started as a waitress and slowly made my way back into the kitchen, following my nose and my stomach.  I loved cheffing, it fired my enthusiasm, creativity and my appreciation of a chaotic environment. I thrived in the manic, heated frenzy of a working kitchen: the sticky heat, the rich smells of seafood and the warmth of a freshly baked pastry. Food is very important to me and always has been. I am a qualified ‘foodie’.

My time spent in prison then, for me was something of a sensory journey through the realm of taste. In 2004 my partner and I  were arrested for trafficking drugs across an international border and served four years in various Mexican prisons and three in the UK.  The food was worlds apart in each of them. In Mexico, they offered three meals a day served in carts parked at the entrance to each wing. It was essentially three meals of slop. Greasy, watery caldos and rice with beans. Always rice and beans and always with chilli. Chilli in everything! It was tough for a woman who had never eaten chilli before to be immersed in a culture that ate chilli with everything. It took some acclimatising and painful episodes while my body accommodated the new diet. The children had chilli-flavoured lollipops and sweets were chilli flavour. Everything edible had a chilli kick, it was almost a religious sacrament.  To deny the chilli was to deny the Mexican.

Prison life revolved around food, making food, buying food, waiting for food and getting food from family members. I measured the passing of time by the arrival of meals.  Not many women ate the prison food, they didn’t need to. Family is a strong vibe in Mexico and so visit days were busy and smelled delicious. Families brought bags and bags of food in Tupperware, enough to last days. Gorgeous food, real Mexican food. Carnitas, Mole, Sopa de Pollo, fresh tortillas. I didn’t get visitors so  I used to wait in my room and most days when the women came back from their families they would share plates of food with me. Mexicans are generous people, and they were delighted to share food with someone so (eventually) appreciative of their family’s cooking. It took me a while but I grew to love chillis, I grew to love the flavours of Mexico. Chillis, coriander, fresh, tangy salsas.   I wrote recipes of my favourite meals in my diaries and still cook these recipes for my own family today.

We cooked in our cells on small electric pans and the corridors always smelled incredible. It was like walking through a street market with the various aromas drifting out of each cell. This was fine until you were hungry, then the smells were pure torture. Everything was expensive in prison and nothing was free. Even drinking water had to be bought, it was a scrabble most days to survive and get by and it led to an environment where free trade and commerce were normal. Women improvised pop-up food shops which they ran from their cells. Street food done properly; sopes, tacos, carnitas. Flavours and textures that blew my mind, starved as it was for any kind of sensory input. I couldn’t often afford the food but it was a major treat when I could.  I remember walking past a wing where they had had a chilli disaster. The chillis must have been exceptionally strong and then caught in the pan. The whole wing was full of toxic smoke, women were running out with their eyes streaming and coughing. It was like the aftermath of a riot and someone had let off a gas grenade!

When I was finally repatriated to the UK after 4 years in Mexico, I came back pregnant and hungry, four years is a long time to live off other people’s generosity. My partner and I had weekly conjugal visits and birth control wasn’t a high priority in Mexico, it was expensive and difficult to get hold of. My repatriation had finally come through at just the right time, I had been worried about being pregnant in Mexico, and I came back when I was 12 weeks. Holloway Prison was the repatriation centre in England and so it was there I went. Straight from the airport to Holloway’s repatriation centre. I was so worried about Holloway, I had heard all the stories about it on the TV but it was amazing. On arrival, I was offered a meal and then another. It felt like a 4-star hotel after the sparse conditions in Mexico; with soft, fluffy duvets on proper beds, and well-cooked meals with dessert, I could even buy chocolate and snacks if I had the cash! It was sensory overload for the first few weeks with all the bright lights and regimented routine but the food made up for the culture shock. I relished the British classics: Lasagnas, Roast Dinners, and Beef Stews. Then there were the puddings, proper British puddings like treacle pudding and sticky toffee pudding. I ate everything, It was a banquet of food for a starving, pregnant woman and I took full advantage. Holloway was warm and comfortable and yet somehow, I missed Mexico. I used to joke that I had Stockholm syndrome, the condition where you miss your kidnappers or captors.

Can you live in a place and not become a part of it? I grew to love Mexico, I grew to love the food, and I grew to love the language and the people. When I eventually returned to the UK I was dreaming in Spanish and I found it hard to speak English all day long. It seemed so stilted, so lacking in feeling. I missed the open and generous natures of Mexican people, their warmth and their freedom of expression. This is a side of prison that we don’t often think about, happiness and joy in prison. It feels wrong to even write that line! Seven years though, is a long time, it would be impossible to be consistently sad or angry for the entire sentence.  I have some amazing memories of my life in prison in amongst the sadness and the trauma because life goes on in prison. Why wouldn’t it? People are very surprised when I relay stories of ‘fun’ that I had while incarcerated, like the sentence imposed must strip away any life as well as liberty.

Women are women wherever we go, we try to make our lives as close to ‘normal’ as possible. We try to cling to the normality of family and community and shared experiences.  I found that this was done through food, food is a universal connector, and it is hard to have a problem with someone after you have shared a meal with them. It brings people together and allows for a bonding that transcends language and culture. Food began conversations and friendships, it could lift the spirits.  I can cope with most things life throws at me on a full stomach.  I was at my saddest and most depressed when I was hungry.

I suppose now my memories of Mexico are tempered by warm sunshine and hot tacos. Days where although I was at my lowest ebb, I sat in the blazing heat all day long. Tanning myself against the prison walls and looking across the barbed wire fence to watch the avocado trees swaying in the warm winds. Everything feels better with a full belly and with the sun on your face, even imprisonment.

Categories
custody Emotions Environment Neurodiversity probation Uncategorized

The Sensory Experience of Release: Reflections

Jennifer Stickney

Release is often full of hope, expectations of a better life and images of freedom that involve living life to the full[1]. The reality of release can be quite different. Being a prisoner involves significant loss: loss of freedom, loss of choice, loss of communication, loss of possessions, loss of relationships[2] and loss of normal every day sensory experiences that support people in interpreting and navigating the world around them.  It is therefore important that we understand the impact of this loss on the release experience. By doing this we are able to support people as they are released from prison to resettle into the community[3].

In Jays’ poem below he describes his realisation of the loss he has experienced through his offence and being in prison, and the impact this has had on his release.

Free to be Blind

Have you tried seeing the world through eyes that can only see the past?

Have you tried taking steps on the road I walk … consumed in darkness?

What’s freedom if it’s lived within a personal prison?

I’m only willing to accept your future if somehow I am invisible… if my voice made no sound, if my existence was just a memory that you don’t have.

Yes, I am free but don’t be blind to my pain!

I still live with my guilt backed inside my soul,

I can’t see what you see… I can’t see a person.

My reflection has no meaning.

My smile is just a mask.

My laughter only a sound you hear.

What’s freedom if a person isn’t truly free?

What’s a future if it includes me?

Jays’ poem depicts a sensorial numbness. His words suggest an inability to feels sensations, relying on others to use their senses to notice his voice, his smile, in essence notice him as he is unable to notice himself. When he is overwhelmed, Jay’s body is unable to recognise or interpret sensory information around him resulting in him feeling numb. To keep himself feeling safe from the unknown of release Jay has built a personal prison around himself, which limits the sensations he experiences and enables him to avoid the feelings of being overwhelmed and unable to cope. However, by doing this he struggles to see how he can feel free and move forward with his life in the community.

Tony compared his experience of release to one of coming out of segregation.

“I was in seg for 18 moths solid. On my own with no one else around.  When I came out of seg it was mad. Having people around, people talking everywhere. People everywhere.  It was mad.  I couldn’t understand what was going on.  When people spoke to me, they sounded like Pinky and Perky you know…, I couldn’t make sense of what they were saying.  I still don’t like being around lots of people, it makes …too many voices, too many people. When I first came out of jail I went to an AP[4]. I had the same experience as I did coming out of seg.  Everything was different, it looked different, felt different. When people spoke to me their voices all merged, like Pinky and Perky talking together – I couldn’t understand what they were saying or what I needed to do.”

Both James’ and Tony’s words highlight how sensory experiences can impact on emotional regulation. The stress of being released from custody exacerbates people’s arousal states and it is therefore unsurprising that this is a time when an individual needs tools and skills to help them manage unwanted and unhelpful feelings associated with sensory overload.

We know and can understand that people being released from prison following long custodial sentences are likely to need some support with the practical aspects of reintegrating back into society. However, in my experience little thought, or consideration is given to the impact of the sensory shock of release, and the immediate effect this can have on a person’s ability to manage the daily tasks required to navigate the community.

For some people I have worked with, release from custody can feel like an existential shock[5]: a sensory explosion. When their body is not able manage the sensory input it is experiencing, this can trigger the fight, flight or freeze response. The visual sensory experience of the world outside prison is tangible for even those of us who have spent just a few hours at a time visiting them: the space, colours, the shapes and how things move is so different from the generally grey, austere prison buildings. Sounds in the community can be enormously overwhelming, the unfamiliar sound of babies and children, emergency vehicle sirens, the cacophony of noise that is the norm in busy towns or on public transport.  The touch of a person brushing by in the street can be very triggering for someone who has not experienced touch for many years. The smells of petrol, sewers, smoke, flowers and fresh grass can be reminders of the past but unfamiliar in the present, and the pace of life, the speed with which vehicles move nowadays, the rush of people getting to appointments, are so different from the experience inside prison.

Considering our senses separately enables us to look at how they might be impacted by the experience of release:

In recent years there is an increased interest and a growing evidence base regarding the impact of sensory overload on a person’s ability to engage in everyday life and learn new skills. However little attention has been paid to how sensory overload can impact on a person’s experience of being released from prison. Consequently, little consideration has been given to the effect this can have on a person’s occupational performance in everyday tasks, and their feeling that they can cope with life after prison.

In 1969 Scott and Gendreau wrote that a person “cannot adjust to a sudden release into free society because his mental and emotional mechanisms are adjusted to the deprivation circumstances [of prison]. He cannot tolerate the myriad sensory input in normal environments with its pace, noise, confusion, and instant decision making. Anxiety, restlessness, sleeplessness, and irritability become so great in the released ex-inmate that he may seek means to return to prison with its retarded input and routine existence” (p.341).

Little has changed since 1969 regarding supporting people to prepare their sensory systems for release and enable them to manage this existential shock on the sensory system as they walk through the prison gates and start to navigate community living. However, with the growing interest in this area, and the evidence base that highlights the criticality of this support, we need to ensure that we act on this knowledge and evidence to better support people on their journey from prison out into the community.

In the chapter I co-wrote: “180 prisoners and the noise … it hits you, BANG!” Sensory systems, incarceration and resettlement[1] we identified some key strategies that can support people managing their emotions and behaviours particularly in preparation for release and as they transition from custody to the community. These include:

  • Understanding a person’s sensory preferences – it is helpful to know what sort of things calm and agitate a person prior to release to have some idea of how to support emotional regulation during times of high stress.
  • Developing a personalised place of safety – it is important to think about where a person is going to be released to and consider things that can be done to make it feel safe, such as where the bed is placed, the lighting of the room, the sounds they can hear and if they need ear plugs to support sleep etc.
  • Having meaningful structure and routine – this can feel containing and enable people to know what to expect and when, and plan how they can manage their time on release.  Having timetables that identify appointments and activities that will be taking place in the first few days and weeks post release is helpful.
  • Engaging in sensorimotor activities (activities that combine sensory experiences and physical movement e.g., yoga, gym-based activities, swimming and gardening) – can enable people to develop skills and engage in activities that support them to self-regulate when they are feeling overwhelmed.
  • Accessing sensory tool kits – these are personalised kits that are uniquely complied to support a person in managing their emotions and behaviours through sensory strategies and tools at times when they feel dysregulated. 

Getting release right is critical to supporting successful resettlement. Acknowledging the impact of sensory overload on a person’s ability to self-regulate in the first few days following release is essential.  Providing opportunities to enable people to manage their own risks and needs through better understanding of their sensory system can make life feel more tolerable in the first few days, and in the long term will assist people in their resettlement journey. Now is the time to use our knowledge and skills to start offering better support in this area at critical times in a person’s journey through custody and in their resettlement.

[1] Stickney, J., Budd, C. & Mark (2023). “180 prisoners and the noise… it hits you, BANG!”: Sensory systems, incarceration and resettlement. In Shingler, J. and Stickney, J. The Journey from Prison to Community (p. 85-102). Routledge.

[1] Shingler, J., & Stickney, J. (2023). “I can see freedom but I can’t have it”: Supporting people in the immediate aftermath of release. In The Journey from Prison to Community (p. 24-43). Routledge.

[2] Scott, G. D., & Gendreau, P. (1969). Psychiatric implications of sensory deprivation in a maximum security prison.

[3] Stickney, J., Hirons, A., & Jenner, H. (2023). “How could I know what to do?”: Supporting people in building practical skills for resettlement and reintegration. In The Journey from Prison to Community (p. 118-134). Routledge.

[4] AP – Approved Premise, multi-occupancy accommodation managed by the Probation Service.

[5] Canton, R. (2022). After-care, resettlement and social inclusion: The role of probation. Probation Journal, 69(3), 373-390.

Categories
Environment police power sensory space Uncategorized visual

Policing Dark Islands

Anna Souhami

One dark morning, I was standing on a hill in a howling gale in the Outer Hebrides, when I was surprised to see a police car in the distance. What did a police officer do in small, remote islands? What does policing look like when communities are small, scattered and separated by sea? Would police work be affected by the wind and rain that were then battering me? And why, after many years thinking about police work, didn’t I know?

This moment set in train an extended ethnography of policing in Shetland, the most peripheral archipelago in the UK. I wanted to explore how the historical preoccupation of criminology with the city had limited our imagination.  If our foundational research on policing had been conducted in remote islands rather than cities, what would we think was important in thinking about crime and its control? What would we notice that we currently do not see?

I soon discovered that one of the phenomena remote islands make inescapable is the dark: the visceral, overwhelming, sensory experience of immersion in darkness, and its effects on the exercise of state power.

Shetland is located over 200 miles north of the Scottish mainland in the centre of a ‘crossroads’ between Iceland, the Faroes, Scotland and Norway.   Its main connection with the UK mainland is by a 12 hour ferry from the Northeast of Scotland, though notoriously rough seas mean the journey can often take twice that. It can also be reached by propeller planes from Scottish airports, though the storms, 70mph winds and thick fog that batter the islands make this an unpredictable form of transport:  Flybe, the airline which served Shetland during my research, was known locally as ‘Fly Maybe’. 

So, in mid-December, armed with a suitcase full of seasickness tablets and some sturdy boots, I joined the young oil workers eating enormous plates of chips on the boat heading for Lerwick. Twelve hours later, I stepped out onto the deck in roaring winds, beside myself with excitement at my first glimpse of Shetland. 

I saw nothing.

Instead, I found myself enveloped in darkness, the quality of which I had never experienced before. It was impossible to tell where the land, sea and sky began or ended: the occasional tiny pinpricks of light which fleetingly appeared could have been from boats, houses or stars. This was my first experience of what islanders called ‘black dark’: an absence of light so profound that, as a police officer said, ‘you can’t let your dog off the lead as you’ll never find her again’.  Or as a former mainland officer put it, ‘you don’t know darkness until you’ve lived here. Here, there is nothing’. 

Yet while darkness may have been described in its absence – as ‘nothing’ – this was not how it was experienced. Instead, as I discovered, darkness is an acutely sensory experience. It is active, physical and alarming.

Light and darkness are central to the experience of life in remote Northern islands. Shetland experiences dramatic changes of light with continual light in midsummer (the Shetland phrase ‘simmer dim’ describes the brief dip in the light at the summer solstice) and in mid-winter, the time of my first arrival, only a few hours of watery grey daylight. Nights were not always dark: without clouds, auroras, stars and full moons lit up the sky making it possible to drive without headlights. The extraordinary experience of night illumination was so disorienting that one island police station had a list of full moon dates pinned to their front office to predict when people would ‘go crazy’.

However, more frequently, winter storms blacked out the moon and stars bringing immersion in darkness.  Staying in a little house at the end of a dark track next to a bay, I found myself overwhelmed by darkness. My fieldnotes describe tiredness, disorientation, and insomnia; feeling unable to leave my house, ‘hemmed in’ by a darkness that was ‘oppressive and total’.  To my astonishment, being submerged in darkness also brought with it a sense of creeping fear that was both existential and visceral. For the first time since a small child, I was afraid of the dark.

I soon realised these experiences were shared by the police officers navigating dark islands. All officers talked about darkness. They described how it interfered with their work: feeling exhausted and disoriented, getting lost, and not knowing in which direction they were driving. One officer came back from an unsuccessful house inquiry explaining: ‘There are no streetlights. It’s pitch black. It’s the darkest place I’ve ever been. I couldn’t find the bastard house.’ 

Yet darkness also affected officers more profoundly. It shaped the way they perceived the islands, and how they felt and moved within them.  

In the light islands were playgrounds for exploration. The starkness of the Shetland landscape became exciting:  we drove to remote cliffs to spot seals, orcas and otters on clear days, or to see shooting stars, red moons and auroras on clear nights. Officers described the colours of the land and sea, the sunsets they had seen, the wildlife and boats that passed. 

In the dark, however, islands became places of vulnerability. Officers described them as empty, lonely, barren places: ‘bleak’, ‘desolate’, depressing’, ‘shit’, ‘grey’.  Yet darkness wasn’t simply experienced as absence – of light, colour or pleasure. Instead, it was active, oppressive and visceral. Dark islands were hostile places.  Just as I felt ‘hemmed in’ in my house, officers described being crushed or consumed by darkness. It was penetrating, ‘claustrophobic’, ‘oppressive’; they described ‘sinking’ into the landscape.

Phenomenological research helps illuminate why darkness seems to generate this bodily sense of vulnerability.  Shaw (2015, p586) argues that in light, vision holds objects at a distance, becoming a ‘protective field’ which delineates the self from the world. In darkness, the boundaries between the body and environment are eroded (also Edensor 2013, Merleau-Ponty 1962, Morris 2011). Bodies become porous, leaving us open and vulnerable to the world outside. Or, as one officer described it, in darkness ‘I felt I was being swallowed by the island’.

For island officers, immersion in darkness was profoundly unsettling. As a result, officers drove quickly through dark places or avoided them entirely. Instead they headed to the comfort of the police station, or circulated around populated places with the safety of illuminated light. As one officer put it, when cloud cover at night meant there was no light at all, ‘that’s when you return to the station’. Islands became mapped through the light and the dark, structuring where officers went and what they did.

Where the police go, where they focus their attention, directly affects the use of state power. Research in dark islands suggest that their sensory experience of the environment, and the darkness and light in which they are submerged, is crucial to how police officers think, feel and move through the areas they police, and consequently what they do and who they encounter. So why have these phenomena been overlooked in police scholarship? As I have argued elsewhere (Souhami 2023), the consistency of the urban context of police research seems to have led us to overlook the physical environment of police work altogether. Remote Northern islands reveal that there is more to criminology than our preoccupations suggest. We should not be afraid of the dark.

For more on this research, see:

Souhami, A (2023): “Weather, Light and Darkness in Remote Island Policing: Expanding the Horizons of the Criminological Imagination”. The British Journal of Criminology. 63 (3) pp 634–650, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azac052

You may also be interested in the ‘Just Humans’ podcast ‘Darkness: Dr Anna Souhami’ produced by the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research:  https://www.sccjr.ac.uk/podcast/darkness-dr-anna-souhami/

References:

Edensor, T (2013): ‘Reconnecting with Darkness: Gloomy landscapes, lightless places’. Social and cultural geography 14, 446-65

Merleau-Ponty (1962): Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Morris, NJ (2011): ‘Night walking: darkness and sensory perception in a night-time landscape installation’. Cultural Geographies 18 (3), 315-342

Shaw, R (2015): ‘Controlling darkness: self, dark and the domestic night’. Cultural Geographies 22 (4), 585-600

Categories
Environment Green Criminology

Commissions of Injustice in Rio de Janeiro: Indigenous preservation and resistance

Janine Ewen


“Everyone assumes that the favelas are all unliveable, but they are bound together by close community ties. [Favela residents] had no choice but to make life as liveable as possible since the State turned a blind eye… Some of these evictions are corrupt, [looking] to gain the best areas in Rio de Janeiro.” (James Freeman, Professor of the University of Concordia on the strategic mega-event thinning of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas)

In February 2014, I was carrying out fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro less than two months before the FIFA World Cup commenced. I had been invited to an International Mega Events and Cities Conference to join discussions on human rights, urbanisation, public policy, law, violence and security, accompanied by a tour of the primary site of discussion, the Maracanã Stadium, which was due to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. I still remember the words from the keynote speaker, Carlos Vainer, Professor at the Urban and Regional Planning and Research Institute at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IPPUR/UFR): “There are winners and there are losers in life; this is also in the same context as any soccer match. We are yet to determine who will win or lose between the government and the Brazilian people.”

The Brazilian government was involved in greed, corruption and, as you might expect, a lack of consideration for the people of Rio through rapid urban transformations (which the image below vividly depicts). From exploring Rio, I could feel the intensity of the mega-event developments from the explosion of street protests, FIFA-themed resistant art and the noise resulting from helicopters hovering over Rio’s favelas and the stadium construction. The increased occupancy of the UPP stations (“Unidades de Policia Pacificadora”) maximised and militarised security by restoring state control in the favelas and integrating the favelas to address urban violence and disarm drug traffickers. In other words, the government wanted to set the stage for a global audience: a problem-free and glamorous Rio de Janeiro, but with a high price to pay for those not invited to the match.


One of many street visuals that popped up across Rio de Janeiro during the World Cup 2014 developments, representing overbearing greed, corruption and a gold stadium in darkness.

Manguinhos, a favela In Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone.

The Aldeia Maracanã is a sacred, multi-ethnic village and resistance space in Rio de Janeiro that sits next to the Maracanã Stadium. The area has been occupied by indigenous urban people since 2006 and is the site of Brazil’s first indigenous museum, a building abandoned since the 1970s. Between 2006 and 2013, the Maracanã village bloomed into a community that became home to over thirty indigenous people from 17 different ethnic backgrounds. The indigenous people now had a vibrant space for rituals, fairs, cultural classes and bioconstruction to disseminate ancestral knowledge and demystify prejudices that indigenous people “do not belong” in the city. There have been numerous eviction attempts, with many of the community living in constant – and ongoing – threat of violent removals. The village faced brutality in the preparations for the World Cup and Olympics. In 2013, a military operation stormed the indigenous village using tear gas, pepper spray, stun grenades and physical violence. Brazil’s colonial past has created a socio-political disintegrated landscape in which both race and ethnicity remain problematic. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution, and the ILO Convention 169, ratified by the government in 2002, offers protection to indigenous and quilombola groups. However, the reality suggests otherwise. An example of this is the non-existent land rights and a lack of building ownership for the indigenous Indians in Rio de Janeiro. The defence of tribal land rights are under enormous pressure from the current right-wing President Jair Bolsonara as Indigenous leaders have been fighting against Bolsonara’s man-led genocidal policies of environmental destruction of rainforests, including the Amazon.

https://www.youtube.com/v/H1mHrXZQs2s?app=desktop


An exhibition of violence at the Aldeia Maracanã in 2013

The building stands vacant in the aftermath of the Aldeia Maracanã

Participants in the International Mega Events and Cities Conference, including myself, visited the Maracanã site with a local guide who lived close to the stadium. We were also taken to the Aldeia Maracanã.

The above picture shows the front of the indigenous home. On approaching the sacred building, I was met with an eerie sense permeating the space, and of what had been left of the Aldeia Maracanã from state-sanctioned violence, even though this visit occurred a year after the attack. The eeriness increased as I stood in the largely empty space in the aftermath of the tragedy. I began to picture a lively image and spirit of the indigenous community nurturing a home and school of sanctuary; creating art through painting, music and laughter. I also saw a garden in bloom with colourful vegetables and fruit, having the power of spoken words to educate the people of Rio on their traditions, and perhaps, creating common ground in a shared world where violations of residents’ rights led to thousands of Rio’s poorest being evicted for the games.

This was a life lived on guard against the threat of outsider raids – the violence nearing, not waiting or knocking, but forcing through their home. The air was stale and silent, despite being beside the stadium construction, and the windows represented dark, empty eyes on the inside, as if presenting a witness to the disappearance of indigenous life. Once we drew closer to the building, the display of the murals covering the Aldeia created a sense that theindigenous movement would return and that we are to view the murals as a visual message of presence, pain and resistance – “Commissions of Injustice”.


The local guide explained that the police were suspicious of visitors around the Aldeia Maracanã

The building, standing like a skeleton, provides the framework for an indigenous man’s head; a gaunt portrait of what has been left in the ruins. The man’s eyes hold no fear as he looks directly at the viewers, who have no choice but to stare back into the windows of a now shattered shell. The portrait, painted on a crumbling plaster façade, is like a Giotto fresco. The image was not, however, paid for by a rich family like the Medicis. Instead, it came at a higher price, the cost of displaced indigenous families. Ruby war paint, a red cross in battle, covers the indigenous man’s nose, mouth and forehead like markings of blood and violence enveloping his sense of smell, vision and future insight. The arch of his eyebrows and nose opens into wings like the tail of a bird. Unlike a dove of peace, it leads to a pathway cut out by the disfigurement of his ebony raven locks—a shaved centre parting carved across his skull with a phoenix descending into a yellow flame.

On the corner of the Aldeia, the face of an indigenous child is crying heavy tears of blood as if they will drown in them, creating a pool of redness around the edge of the chin that does not leave the child’s face. The red eyes represent what the child may be seeing and experiencing; the battle against their family and community members, suffering, perhaps anger, but most certainly danger, as shown by their small mouth gaping in horror at the display of violence. The child’s hair is missing from the middle, deep enough to have been pulled out by the roots. With more harm inflicted from the missing part of their head, they will not forget this, even if it represents the onset of becoming invisible after the battle. The vulnerability remains beside the boarded fence which prevents the viewer from seeing beneath; a stick of sorts is either diagonally going into the child or being held up in defence. It is difficult to look away from the indigenous child’s trauma.

The perimeter of the Aldeia has the appearance of a prison with high steel fencing, wire and the reflection of the security camera indicating state control and monitoring of the sacred building. The chain padlock on the fencing adds another element to the atmospheric mix of distrust and control. The government is determined to prevent indigenous freedom and does so by keeping away and shutting out culture, diversity and Mother Earth. This is a village and university in survival mode floundering in a sea of tension due to war and encroachment on sacred space by the government. Indigenous people are not “urban rubbish” that can be discarded, and they are not losers in the games played by FIFA. A reinstatement of ancestral territory ownership will be reborn. The collective fight will return.

Alongside studying criminology and finishing my copy of Sensory Penalties, I have attempted to breathe life into my field notes that sat untouched in a drawer; scribbles on how I felt, what I saw and what I imagined by sharing the whole experience when I visited the Aldeia Maracanã. I believe I received a learning gift from indigenous communities in standing up to and epitomising injustice as fully as possible. I have opened the sensory aspects to a space and building where indigenous life had forcefully disappeared – and I was moved by the absence of the community and the after-effects of the military police ‘storm’ tactics of grenade bangs, weapon whacks and shots of pepper spray that left stale air and stone-cold silence. The initial unease of ghostly eeriness on approaching and standing in front of the Aldeia Maracanã acted as a trace to the brutality of 2013 and the outside remains, the murals, allowed me to resist a simplistic interpretation of the Aldeia as a vacant ‘haunted like’ building, but one in which Indigenous preservation and resistance are still present.

Comissões de Injustiça no Rio de Janeiro: indígena preservação e da resistência

Janine Ewen

“Todos assumem que as favelas são todas inviáveis, mas estão unidas por laços estreitos com a comunidade. [Moradores de favelas] não tiveram outra escolha a não ser tornar a vida o mais viável possível, já que o Estado faz vista grossa… Alguns desses despejos são corruptos, [procurando] ganhar as melhores áreas do Rio de Janeiro.” (James Freeman, professor da Universidade de Concórdia no mega evento estratégico das favelas do Rio de Janeiro.

Em Fevereiro de 2014, eu estava realizando trabalhos de campo no Rio de Janeiro a dois meses antes do início da Copa do Mundo da FIFA, onde fui convidada a participar em uma Conferência Internacional de Mega Eventos e Cidades sobre os direitos humanos, urbanização, políticas públicas, direitos, violência e segurança. Esta Conferência Internacional seria por sua vez, acompanhada de um passeio pelo local principal de discussão, o Estádio do Maracanã, que viria a sediar a Copa do Mundo em 2014 e as Olimpíadas em 2016. Ainda me lembro das palavras do palestrante Carlos Vainer, professor do Instituto de Planejamento e Pesquisa Urbana e Regional da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (IPPUR/UFR): “Na vida existe vencedores e  perdedores ; este contexto também existe em qualquer partida de futebol. Ainda estamos para determinar quem vai ganhar ou perder na partida entre o governo e o povo brasileiro”. 

O Governo Brasileiro estava envolvido na ganância, corrupção e, como era de se esperar, existe uma falta de consideração para o povo do Rio através de expontâneas transformações urbanas (que a imagem abaixo retrata vividamente). Ao explorar o Rio de Janeiro, eu pude sentir a intensidade dos desenvolvimentos de protestos de rua, da arte resistente à temática da FIFA e do barulho resultante dos helicópteros sobrevoando a construção do Estádio e as favelas do Rio. O aumento da ocupação de esquadras polícias pela UPP (Unidades de Policia Pacificadora) maximizou e militarizou a segurança, o que possibilitou o restauro do controlo estatal nas favelas, ajudando a  integrar as favelas no combate há violência urbana e a desarmar os traficantes de drogas. Em outras palavras, o Governo queria preparar o palco para uma audiência global: um Rio de Janeiro sem problemas e glamouroso, mas com um preço alto a pagar para quem não fosse convidado para a partida.

esenvolvimentos da Copa do Mundo de 2014, representa a ganância arrogante, a corrupção e um estádio de feito de ouro na escuridão.
Manguinhos, uma favela na Zona Norte do Rio de Janeiro

A Vila Maracanã é uma vila sagrada, multiétnica e centro da resistência no Rio de Janeiro situada ao lado do Estádio do Maracanã. A área é ocupada por povos indígenas desde 2006, e é o local do primeiro museu indígena do Brasil, um prédio que ficou ao abandono desde a década de 1970. Entre 2006 e 2013, a aldeia do Maracanã floresceu em uma comunidade que se tornou o lar de mais de trinta indígenas de 17 diferentes origens étnicas. Os indígenas agora tinham um espaço vibrante para os seus rituais, feiras, aulas culturais e bioconstrução como meio de disseminar o conhecimento ancestral e desmistificar preconceitos que os indígenas “não pertencem” na cidade. A vila enfrentou a brutalidade nos preparativos para a Copa do Mundo e Olimpíadas. Houve inúmeras tentativas de despejo violentas, o que causou uma vida de constante – e contínua ameaça aos moradores da comunidade. Em 2013, uma operação militar invadiu a aldeia indígena usando gás lacrimogêneo, spray pimenta, granadas de choque e violência física. O passado colonial brasileiro criou uma paisagem sociopolítica desintegrada na qual os factores raciais e étnicos permanecem controversos. Em 2002, o Governo Brasileiro retificou a Constituição Brasileira de 1988 e a Convenção 169 da OIT, onde ofereceu proteção a grupos indígenas e quilombolas. No entanto, a realidade sugere o contrário. Um dos exemplos disso são os direitos de terra inexistentes e a falta de propriedades dos índios indígenas no Rio de Janeiro. A defesa dos direitos das terras tribais está sob enorme pressão do atual presidente de direita Jair Bolsonaro, já que líderes indígenas têm vindo a lutar contra as políticas genocidas lideradas pelo homem de Bolsonaro na destruição ambiental das florestas tropicais, tais como a Amazônia. 

https://www.youtube.com/v/H1mHrXZQs2s?app=desktop

Uma exibição de violência na Vila Maracanã em 2013 

O prédio permanece abandonado no rescaldo da Vila Maracanã. 

No decorrer da Conferência Internacional de Mega Eventos e Cidades, fomos convidados a visitar o Estádio e a Vila Maracanã, na companhia de um guia local e residente da mesma. 

A foto acima mostra a frente de uma casa indígena um ano após o ataque. Ao me aproximar do prédio sagrado,  contemplei o espaço, e reflecti sobre o que havia sido deixado para atrás, um sentimento de violência sancionada pelo Estado.

Este sentimento de estranheza aumentou enquanto eu contemplava este espaço praticamente vazio repleto de tragédia. Esta estranheza me levou a imaginar de como seria o espírito da comunidade indígena, alimentando uma casa, o ensino dos seus costumes sagrados; na criação de arte através da pintura, música e riso. Também imaginei um jardim em flor com vegetais coloridos e frutas, tendo o poder da voz para educar o povo do Rio sobre as suas tradições, e talvez, criando um terreno e mundo compartilhado, onde as violações dos direitos dos moradores seriam respeitados. Direitos, esses, que foram ignorados, levando ao despejo de milhares de moradores mais podres. 

Esta era uma vida vivida de protestos contra a ameaça de ataques de forasteiros – a violência se aproximando, não esperando ou batendo, mas forçando através de sua própria casa. O ar estava obsoleto e silencioso, apesar de estar ao lado da construção do estádio.  As janelas no interior representavam os olhos escuros e vazios como se fosse uma das testemunhas do desaparecimento da vida indígena. 

Uma vez que nos aproximamos do prédio, a exposição dos murais que cobrem a Aldeia criou uma sensação de que o movimento indígena retornaria, e que, deveriamos ver os murais como uma mensagem visual de presença, dor e resistência – “Comissões de Injustiça”. 

O guia local explicou que a polícia suspeitava de visitantes no em redor da Aldeia Maracanã 

O edifício, acima representa um esqueleto, com a estrutura facial de um homem indígena; um retrato magro do que foi deixado nas ruínas. O olhar do homem não demonstra medo, enquanto ele que olha diretamente para os espectadores, que não têm outra escolha a não ser olhar de volta para as janelas de uma concha agora quebrada. O retrato, pintado em uma fachada de gesso em ruínas, como se fosse uma pintura renascentista de Giotto. No realidade, a imagem não foi paga por uma família rica, como os Medicis. Em vez disso, veio oriundo do custo das famílias indígenas relocalizadas. A pintura da guerra do rubi, uma cruz vermelha em batalha, cobre o nariz, a boca e a testa do homem indígena como marcas de sangue e violência envolvendo seu olfato, visão e visão futura. O arco de suas sobrancelhas e nariz se abre como forma de asas e a cauda de pássaro. Ao contrário de uma pomba de paz, esta imagem leva a um caminho cortado pela desfiguração do seu corvo ébano; esculpida no seu crânio acompanhado com uma fênix descendo em uma chama amarela. 

Na esquina da Aldeia se encontra uma pintura, representando um rosto de uma criança indígena chorando lágrimas de sangue, como se ela se afogasse nelas, criando uma poça de vermelhidão ao redor da borda do queixo da criança. Os olhos vermelhos representam o que a criança pode estar vendo e experienciando; a batalha contra a sua família e membros da comunidade, o sofrimento, perigos e sentimentos de raiva, o que é demostrado pela pequena boca, surpresa pelo horror e violência. A falta de cabelo no meio da cabeça da criança é profundo o suficiente, como se tivesse sido puxado pelas raízes. A vulnerabilidade permanece ao lado da cerca. Cerca esta que impede o espectador de olhar para baixo; uma imagem de um tipo de varas que estão entrelaçadas ao redor da criança, talvez como meio de defesa, sendo difícil desviar o olhar da criança indígena. 

O perímetro da Aldeia é parecido com o de uma prisão, cercas de aço alto, arame e câmeras de segurança indicando o controle estatal e o monitoramento do edifício sagrado. O cadeado de corrente adiciona outro elemento à mistura atmosférica de desconfiança e controle. O governo está determinado a impedir a liberdade indígena e o faz mantendo-se afastado na exclusão da cultura, diversidade e da Terra Mãe. 

Esta é uma aldeia vive em um modo de sobrevivência, pois existe um constante mar de tensão devido à guerra e à invasão do governo na profanação do espaço sagrado. Os indígenas não são o nosso “lixo urbano”, nem os perdedores dos jogos disputados pela FIFA, onde podem ser descartados em qualquer oportunidade. Uma reintegração da propriedade do território ancestral renascerá, e a luta coletiva voltará. 

Além de estudar criminologia e terminar a minha cópia de Penalidades Sensoriais, tentei dar vida às minhas notas de campo que estavam intocadas em uma gaveta; rabiscos sobre como me senti, o que vi e o que imaginei compartilhando toda a minha experiência quando visitei a Vila Maracanã. Acredito que fui presenteada de uma forma única e preciosa, ao aprender os factos vivenciados pelas comunidades indígenas, no confronto e no sistema simbólico da injustiça.

Esta experiência me fez compreender que o tudo aquilo que havia permanecido da comunidade indígena teria sido forçado a desaparecer. Acabando por ficar comovida pela ausência da comunidade e pelos efeitos posteriores das táticas de “tempestade” da polícia militar, sendo estes, golpes de granada, golpes de armas e tiros de spray de pimenta que deixaram no ar um sentimento envelhecido e silêncioso. O mal-estar inicial da estranheza fantasmagórica ao nos aproximar da Aldeia Maracanã nos serviu como um conta histórias , onde era visível o teor de brutalidade em 2013 e os restos externos, através dos murais, onde havia a representação simplista da Aldeia seria como um prédio vazio”assombrado pelo passado” e um espírito presente da preservação e da resistência indígena. 

Categories
Emotions Environment Green Criminology research sound space

Deep-Sea-Soul-Sensing : deindustrialisation and the energy transition environment – Aberdeen City

Janine Ewen

Acknowledgements

 I would like to start this blog by acknowledging the people in Aberdeen who are responsible for our street art and the visuals featured within this piece. These people have made it possible for me to start expanding my criminological and sociological imagination thanks to their creativity in our home; I hope that paying closer attention to “unlikely places” will mean that those unknowns will feel acknowledged and less alienated. I would also like to say thanks to Dr Colin Atkinson and Dr Erin Sanders-McDonagh – two academics (and friends) who have been generously supportive of me in recent years, and who have inspired me to explore the power of visual and sensory methods in research. Many thanks also to Dr Kate Herrity for giving me the platform to write and discuss partial findings and interpretations of my fieldwork, and for having thoughtful conversations with me on sensory criminology.

Deep-Sea-Soul-Sensing

My first sensory experience of the sea comes from my childhood living in Larne, a seaport and industrial market town on the east coast of County Antrim, Northern Ireland. As a child, I loved to run over the grassy hill at the back of my house and listen to the boats’ horns, watching them glide in and out: I wanted to know what it would feel like to be on one. Little did I know that, one day these moments of curiosity would become a reality, and vital for my family’s safety. When I was eight-years old, I was on one of those boats, escaping, with my mother and brother, from my father’s domestic abuse. We travelled to Stranraer, a town in South West Scotland, and then caught the train up to Aberdeen, where a social worker was waiting to drive us to a women’s refuge in Aberdeenshire.

I will never forget the journey, leaving to start a new life in Scotland, with a mixture of feelings of overwhelming fear, excitement and sea sickness. Whenever my mother and I have reflected on the journey, she apologises that I became unwell. It acts as a trigger stemming from the guilt she still holds for staying with my father as long as she did, trying to change his abusive behaviour. Some mild nausea did not phase me, even as a child. I was on one of the boats I had watched with joy. But most of all, I felt a great sense that we were going to be safer. It is for this reason that I have a comforting, yet reflective, relationship with the sea; watching and listening to the movement of the waves is the ocean’s way of confirming to me that we got away.

When I meet people who are from Northern Ireland and they ask me where I am from, their facial expressions and body language give a lot away. This is not to convey any great love of Larne: “Christ almighty, you’re not really from that rough shithole, are you?” I shrug it off, as it is not as if I personally hold many treasured memories from my birth home, although our next door neighbour was a friend to my mother and a lifeline to us when my father was especially violent and we needed to get out of our house. However, it is the same stigmatised reaction that I get when I tell people I mainly grew up in the North East of Scotland, in Aberdeenshire and in Aberdeen City. That chilly, wet, mean, rich, oil-dominant place that is far away from everywhere else – ‘the Granite City’, as it is commonly known, because of the presiding urban city-scape of locally quarried grey granite.

Admittedly, I have had my own depressing thoughts of Aberdeen. This is not because I believe we live constantly under a hovering ‘Aber-doom’ cloud of grey in the complete absence of bright spells, but because it creates my own frustrations, witnessing and experiencing the impact that the oil and gas sectors’ volatile nature of production and price can have on people’s livelihoods and declining living environments. It denotes the historic discrimination and ongoing survival of working-class fishing communities and our stark social divisions, inequalities and crime. It cuts deeply amongst people living here that we endure great vulnerability as Europe’s oil capital. No area in Scotland is immune to poverty from a decade of UK Government austerity measures, but Aberdonians do ask the question, “Where has all the oil money gone?”

An Illuminating and important spotlight on Aberdeen’s poverty was televised last year, on ‘Darren McGarvey’s Scotland series. It was a relief for locals to witness, on screen that our social challenges were being given national attention, rather than them being drowned in a sea of oil and material wealth. My only criticism is that people living in the North-East barely have a voice to talk for themselves about these challenges at a national level in Scotland. This must now change as we go forward, experiencing another identity as an energy transition environment.

A new appetite for multi-sensory exploration

In thinking about the potential for criminology/sociology research in the North-East, back in July, I attended an arts-based socially-distanced ‘sensory sea-sound walk’ to explore the acoustic environment (facilitated by researcher Maja Zećo and supported by the ‘Look Again Aberdeen’ organisation). The walk started off at the South Bank of the River Dee, going past Torry and in and around part of Aberdeen harbour

To give a brief context, Torry, which sits opposite the harbour and within Aberdeen city, is an area and community historically based around fishing and boat building, although over the years it has become more of a hub for the oil and gas giants. For better or for worse, Torry is always firmly on the table for discussion due to the area’s deprivation and social stigma that live beside the undeniably diverse and rich community spirit. The industrialised harbour site, once host to the largest fish market in Europe, is acknowledged by some as an urban gift, due to its inner city presence and accessibility, including a claim to fame in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest existing business in the UK. However, the harbour site can be viewed with more nuanced local realities; for example, it is an industrial space where onlookers can watch boats pass by against the backdrop of towering oil tanks whilst eating a bag of chips. However, be sure to prepare for battle with the criminally-aggressive and renowned oversized Aberdeen seagulls about to flock around you.

The focus of the walk was to savour the aesthetic pleasures of listening by examining sounds which we do not normally pay attention to, as well as different volumes and textures, and the relationship between quiet, industrial, and residential zones. Although genuinely curious and keen to participate in the walk, carrying my notebook, pen, fully-charged phone and wearing my face mask, I didn’t expect to experience as many visual, sensory and therapeutic stimuli as I did. This forced me to confront my own problematic relationship with the physical environment, which has led to a level of disengagement. In other words, it became apparent to me that I had neglected to fully register what was so close and right in front of me. The walk gave me a bitter sweet taste; on the one hand, I became revitalised after setting aside my inner frustrations of structural struggle and oppression, but equally I felt guilty because I thought I was making a considerable effort to ensure I was witnessing and acknowledging it – it being the good, the bad and the damn right beautiful and ugly. It is true that the usual urban and industrial suspects were out in force that day: the gulls shrieking alongside the stretch of constant traffic through the city centre, as if they were in competition with one another to make the most noise. Also present were the inescapable odours of fish and other pollutant pongs as a reminder of the atmospheric harm and dominance that comes with the territory of living in such an industrial environment. The group came together at the end to discuss how our personal identities contribute to our experience of listening to places, including the need for multisensory engagement, incorporating histories and memories situated in place.

What was an hour and half’s worth of walking evolved into several weeks of my own independent fieldwork, revisiting the area, looking at the visuals on the streets and abandoned buildings with an appetite to feel, see and listen more. I was also able to visualise the expansion of the urban trail through Torry, with the end point being the site for the new £350 million Aberdeen South expansion project, which will accommodate larger vessels being used in a range of industries, including cruises, as part of addressing the downturn of the oil. Directly opposite the area will also lie a soon-to-be-constructed new multi-million-pound clean energy park (Energy Transition Zone). A campaign group is now in battle with the oil elites to prevent them from taking away the last green space in Torry – St Fittick’s Park. Is history repeating itself again? In an opinion piece I wrote for a national newspaper, entitled ‘Brexit, coronavirus, oil, and the struggles of Scotland’s North-East’, I urged that any current and future developments to address deindustrialisation and economic renewal in the form of a speedier transition from oil and gas to a sustainable renewable energy future could only be deemed ‘just’ if they were driven by a humane agenda. Indeed, we must reflect and learn from our past mistakes, which are rooted in greed and sit beside unforgiveable misfortune, otherwise we have missed the point entirely. There should be no fast flowing free pass to claim success and the future title of “Energy Capital of Europe”. Any risk of harm caused by the unjust exercising of elite power in the pursuit of creating an “energy pot of gold” which exacerbates or causes the persistence of social inequality and environmental harm must be monitored and scrutinised, but also documented. It is for this reason that expanding the criminological and sociological lens in the North-East (green criminology for environmental concern and crime, as one example) would be timely, as it would restore the critical eye in the hope that people’s voices will be strengthened and human lived experiences will become conceptualised over the transition. Such an expansion would also fill a major geographical gap in Scotland in a region which is part of the global phenomenon of deindustrialisation politics – that, for me, is the transition gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s time to swap the ‘shithole’ insults for sensory ethnographic methods to inspire inclusive, therapeutic and collaborative conversations for researching home, belonging and atmosphere

Fieldwork Findings and Interpretations

‘Stuck’: Humorous stickers but hazardous industries

Situated directly opposite the harbour, the imposing cartoon smiley sticker is funny, playful, but it also feels sinister. The smile of the emoji, popular for evoking positivity of the human experience, is trying its best not to be distracted by the toxic eye, representing the hazardous nuclear waste dripping down—but how long?  Do we need to keep just smiling despite the harm?

Close to harbour boats and in the midst of intense noise construction (hammering and drills), this pirate skull sticker armed with crossed swords, gave me an immediate sharp focus for thinking about the dangers associated with our major industries of fishing and oil in the North East, the more unfortunate realities for people working on the sea—rough working conditions and risks to health and life. The sticker gave me a clear message of deadly troubled waters

Separate but linked: ‘Go Fuck yourself; it’s Scotland’s oil!’—the politics of Scottish independence

There is a strong sense of political support depicted through a large number of ‘YES’ for independence stickers on the streets all around Torry and the harbour, next to the North Sea oil. This provided me with moments of reflection, some of which evoked worries, doubts and insecurities about our future, our homes, how we feel living here and our contribution to the debate on Scottish independence. Aberdonians feel tension on this subject, particularly in relation to their industries, economic policies and Brexit. Although one sticker exhibits a fresh and bold-looking sense of freedom, the profanity sticker below, even though distinct, provides a connection and an example of local discussion on the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and the UK government, for instance, the issue related to where the oil money is being distributed. The sticker suggests uprising, frustration and a possible message ‘It’s Scotland’s oil’, which was a political slogan used by the SNP in the ‘70s to build its economic case for an independent Scotland. Both stickers inspire an honest change.

Sweet smell of surprise: a rebellious weed!

This weed took my sense of smell to another direction while I was walking down Sinclair Road. Through the harsh stench of fish and industrial smoke, at either side of me, it offered me a powerful sweet fragrance as if it was trying to be noticed and offering a few moments of relief from the background of strong competing smells. The weed is high enough to cover the background of tall tanks, so I could catch a glimpse of the natural world tangling through hard and tough industrial fencing. It is a rebellious weed that is making a bold statement by climbing high. Because it really wants to be seen, it provides me an inner comfort as well as a feeling of confirmation that exploring the area was an important and necessary experience—we should always have a closer look at the most unlikely places and look out for nature —for inspiration.

Words of accuracy: tanks labelled ‘slops’

When I saw the word ‘slops’ on these tanks, it felt accurate as it depicted my own images of liquid: overflowing, spillage and other industrial harms, including the harm from oil. In my research, I had found that ‘slop oil’ needs careful management since it contains water, oil and a mixture of waste products. Slop oil can cause dangerous environmental hazards and costly storage problems. It is a serious burden not only for oil companies and governments but also for communities. Moreover, it is a reminder of the burden Torry has been ‘gifted’ by the oil industry. Yet, the liquid is stored in front of the community waiting to be dealt with.

The sun still shines on fishes: community strength in Torry

Although Torry has largely been cleared to make way for the oil boom, there are still some small fishing businesses left. Although most of the fishing sector now operates from Fraserburgh and Peterhead. This mural on a fish factory that sits directly across the River Dee gave me the perception of the community—keeping oneself above the dark shadows. The sun still shines on fishes, giving them a needed spotlight. Although vulnerability has made deep inroads, some strength has still survived, preventing from falling into dark shadows beneath and pushing to move on.  It depicts a sense of closeness, resilience and hope. Torry has a long-standing social stigma attached to its deprivation, poverty and crime, particularly drug-related crime. It shows why dark spots of Torry’s history should not be swept aside, along with its social challenges.

Abandoned, but with character intact: double-handed peace amid neglect

When walking back from the new harbour expansion site to the centre of Torry, I walked past this abandoned warehouse which bore several graffiti writings. What brought an instant smile on my face was a double peace sign and cheeky hat on the corner wall of this unoccupied building. To me, the double hand gesture symbolising peace is not there to represent victory but a higher form of resistance against being abandoned, sitting on a skateboard representing activity and movement. The top hat symbolises an upstanding presence. So, perhaps the place is empty but not completely abandoned.

Crashing waves of construction: the comforting sea but the unknown future

This picture represents the first visit to the new Aberdeen Harbour Expansion site. The sea has always been of comfort to me in several ways—particularly for the fact that it has helped to bring me and my family to safety. I will always want to be as close as I can to the sea in the future. However, the experience of watching the developments at the new Harbour Expansion site is disturbing. It is miserable to listen to the crashing sound of the waves in a bleak background and the noises of the machine bringing along the worries of the unknown. The known is what will be physically present here from the expansion, but the unknown is how this will impact people and their living environments—who will benefit? My own experience of moving to the North-East is interconnected with my concern for people and the environment in the North-East. Although it is more fearful and strongly reflective experience to confront the construction atmosphere, it needs to be faced. We cannot allow the decisions about our future and industrial decline to be made by a small number of wealthy men at the top. The time is now to take ownership.