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Emotions sensory space Uncategorized Writing

Printing errors? Reading as Sensory Engagement

Tea Fredriksson

As any bookworm could attest, reading is a sensory experience. For example, you have to choose what tea or coffee to brew before sitting down with a book—what flavours go well with this particular book? Of course, before even reaching that step, you’d have to choose a book at your favourite library or bookstore. Having to choose between different books actualizes a lot of things outside of how good the blurb on the back makes it sound. Judging a book by its cover is one part of this, but so is the feel of the paper, and the weight and size of the book (avid readers might be familiar with thoughts like “can I bring this on the train, or will it make my bag too heavy?”, “do I really need another copy of this title just because this one is prettier than the one I have at home?”, or, for the anxious reader, “is this title too embarrassing to read in public?”). Sensory experiences abound, and that’s before we’ve even opened the book.

Reading is both physical and imaginary. For one thing, reading always happens somewhere—and that somewhere can add to, or detract from, the enjoyment we get. In this somewhere, we touch the page, and we imagine the book’s contents. If I read a book at home, and someone else reads it while imprisoned, did we read the same story? Maybe. The story was the same, but the experience of reading of it was probably not.

Different genres, too, lead to different ways of engaging with reading them—we might annotate a book we read for class, scribbling in the margins. We might read a thriller quickly, our pulse quickened by an unsettling turn of events. We might take extraordinary care not to crease the pages, or we might dog-ear them with reckless abandon. We might have a favourite reading chair, or we might struggle to focus on our book while we read in public transit. For anyone who has ever read a book aloud to someone else (or had one read to them), reading can take on a whole other level of sensory experience. Do you use different voices? How do you decide, spur of the moment, how different characters sound? Do you feel self-conscious about it? How does your audience respond? Suddenly, reading is a shared sensory landscape rather than a private one.

Of course, many of the sensory experiences that go into reading have to do with things outside of the book. But far from all of them. Reading, in short, conjures up whatever it is that unfolds in the story in ways that engage our senses. Perhaps most importantly, the process of reading is sensory in and of itself—words on the page conjure images, smells, tastes, and all sorts of emotions. Books make us cry, they make us laugh, they let us escape our current timespace and enter into another, or they bore us half to death (looking at you, third-grade history textbooks). While the story is in the book whether you open it or not, it isn’t until you turn the pages in the act of reading it that this story starts to unfold. Time, for example, does not pass in the story until you make it pass by reading the words as they flow. Reading, then, depends on familiar typesetting, where one word follows another in an order that makes sense—an order that feels safe, even if the story itself is unsettling. This brings me to what is, perhaps, the main point I wish to explore here: how does text itself, rather than the story it conveys, become sensory?

When I wrote my book exploring prison autobiographies, I grappled with questions of dis-ease and dis-order, unsettling timespaces, and frightening encounters. The narrators and characters in these stories offered plenty of opportunities for me to experience an array of uncomfortable feelings. However, I couldn’t help but notice how text itself, as a medium, sometimes struggles to convey certain unsettling moods. Creating atmosphere within the story is one thing, letting readers engage with a sort of imaginary emotional landscape in relation to characters and places in the story. We might feel saddened or frightened, but from a sort of vicarious viewpoint rather than for ourselves. Could text, then, cut through this vicarious layer to unsettle the reader themselves? Can it show, as well as tell? While academic writing might be an odd place for it, I wanted to play around with writing in a way where the text mirrored its contents. For example, my study dealt with uncanny dis/appearances, so part of the text dis

appeared.

Another element of this had to do with uncanny repetitions, which made me repeat a sentence on déjà vu a few times in a row in order to get the point across. The typesetters removed this repetition, thinking it was oh so very lucky that they found this error before the book went to print. That was one of several little things that had to be explained before the book was done; they found ‘errors’ and I went “no, no—this is wrong on purpose” (which was an odd-feeling thing to claim as an academic). To add a final example, otherness was a key theme in the study. Since otherness has to do with being somehow different from the mainstream, I used a different font for these particular  others. A friend, flipping through the pages of the published study (in other words, way past the point where I could request changes to the typesetting), asked me, in a bit of a panic, if I had seen the printing errors. While this was not quite the kind of emotional response I had in mind, it did show some element of what I was hoping for: They had responded to the text, before even reading the writing. What I’m getting at, then, is that by leaning into the view of reading as a sensory experience, and by breaking the familiar ways text behaves on the page, we might underscore the points we’re trying to make—or at least offer the reader a surprising way of engaging with our texts. Granted, since my study had to do with horror, this was perhaps easier than when dealing with more pleasant sensations. Then again, since you’re reading this, I’m guessing that you, too, might be conducting research of your own that deals with the less pleasant aspects of social life. Consider this an encouragement, an invitation, or a dare if you like, to bend the format of academic text in ways that make creative use of the sensory engagements that readers will have with your work.

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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

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Uncategorized

Sensing surveillance

Lizzie Hughes

Surveillance is most commonly conceived of as something electronic or machinic. Something that is primarily a ruling body or state’s power, but also increasingly a part of the everyday life we are accustomed to in the West: CCTV cameras, passports, and security, yes, now also credit cards, phones, social media, online shopping. The idea of surveillance creeping into everyday life is not new (Marx, 1988). In these everyday imaginings, “surveillance” signifies events happening all around us, somethingthat we step into, hold, tap, log onto; something done onto our bodies that we experience, might benefit or get pleasure from, that might trap us, help to kill us, or something that we resist.

It is a similar story in most academic literature: “surveillance” is defined as an act done by a state or powerful institution onto a subject and/or population involving machine technology (Monahan, 2006). It’s fair to say that surveillance studies is dominated by a desire to analyse and interrogate this rapid advent of new technologies that expand and proliferate surveillance systems both in-line with and away from state power (Finn, 2011: 415). Undoubtedly, examining technology-mediated surveillance is important. But this focus on new developments conceals how surveillance has long been a tool of colonial practices that continues to disproportionately impact the lifeworlds of colonised subjects, whilst sustaining the global violence of lingering empire (Browne, 2015; Ogasawara, 2019). Moreover, as Dubrofsky and Magnet (2015: 3) note in their influential text Feminist Surveillance Studies, focusing on machines distracts from the fact that in ‘its most basic structure, the act of surveillance has always existed in some form as the action of observing or the condition of being observed’. A particularly sensory – and human – observation.

The broader conception of surveillance as human has produced some fascinating explorations into visual surveillance. In Surveillance & Society’sspecial edition entitled ‘People Watching People’, Andrejevic (2004: 481) describes ‘lateral surveillance’: ‘not the top-down monitoring of employees by employers, citizens by the state, but rather the peer-to-peer surveillance of spouses, friends, and relatives’. In the same edition, Zurawski (2004: 499) examines the Northern Irish ‘“culture of watching”’ between people that is contextually specific to a landscape of conflict. Social media is, of course, a powerful tool of human visual surveillance par excellence, as humans connect, watch, and evaluate each other across the globe (Trottier, 2016). Steve Mann’s (2002) concept of “sousveillance” reveals a space within surveillance whereby humans can utilise their own personal technologies to look back at those in power, indicating possibilities of agency and resistance. Away from machines entirely, in Dark Matters Browne (2015) examines surveillance’s colonial roots and coins “dark sousveillance”: a human countermodel to oppressive surveillance that emerges from sites of oppressed Blackness, offering hope for other ways of being. Similarly, Finn (2011) examines how “staring” and “being stared at” does a racialised visual surveillance to assign “belonging” and “unbelonging” along gendered lines within social spaces.

Being watched, watching others, watching ourselves. Familiar enough ideas – but what about the rest of the senses?

Within criminology there have been stimulating explorations into the importance of taking into account the total sensory mode: seeing and hearing, smelling, touching, tasting. The emergent field of “sensory criminology” highlighted in this blog shows how interrogating the affective phenomenological experience of being human enlivens studies of deviance, otherness, and criminality. In my own PhD thesis, I argue that essential to understanding the topic of surveillance is an examination of the full range of the senses and their individual and combined roles in practices of surveillance. With this expansive, affective view of sensation-as-surveillance, I study how surveillance is done by humans in everyday spaces and in everyday ways: put simply, I seek to sense surveillance.

One such everyday space is the gender-segregated public bathroom, a site of contested identity that, more so than any other social place, sustains rules about gender in ‘a quite literal way … mark[ing] people out as “normal” or deviant, law-abiding or criminal, safe or threatening’ (Barcan, 2005: 10-11). To enter, we must agree to the vulnerability of mixing with strangers at the same as revealing and opening our bodies. The public bathroom is also a site of significant sensory intensity saturated with sensory information: labels and signs, flickering lights, warm seats and door handles, banging doors, running liquids, flatulence, the stench of shit, piss, and bleach, coughing, mechanised gusts of hot air, shuffling feet. This sensory and affective intensity makes it an ideal site from which to explore how humans undertake a sensory surveillance of themselves and others around them in everyday spaces. And, in particular, in a space that increasingly features in the UK as a central arena for hostile attacks on trans people’s bathroom access (Jones and Slater, 2020). In the absence of formal gatekeepers comparing identity documents to bodies, such as the type you would find at an airport, the public bathroom is a site of concentrated informal governance. Individuals are empowered to informally police the space themselves in the pursuit of “safety” and “privacy”, in turn upholding particularly binary ‘gender laws’ (Barcan, 2005: 10-11). This pursuit manifests, in part, as sensory engagements with a latticework of spatial and bodily clues and cues that are used to “tell” who “belongs” where.

These clues and cues work simultaneously at the levels of architecture and the body, following deeply problematic binaries that make assumptions about bodily configuration. When we approach the public bathroom door – an architectural block cloaked as a common-sense object – and if we are able to enter, we undertake a series of complex, relational, and situational decisions that are part of our own self-regulation: What are we wearing? How are our bodies arranged? Do we match the space? What sensory signals are we giving off? Are we chatting in the ladies? Are we not-speaking in the men’s? Are we making sure to cover the sounds of piss, or openly farting? Are we in and out, or stuck in a queue complaining? All of this happens at a sensory level: we look at, we listen out for, we sniff, we touch. We feel our way in.

At the same time, we undertake a sensory assessment of those around us. For example, in my PhD I examine how assuming someone’s gender based on the length or their hair and their clothing style is visual surveillance; the assessment of someone’s vocal pitch as to whether they are a man or woman is aural; the smell of a place (so often used to describe the men’s) is olfactory. These sensory processes are not neutral: sensory attributes have long been assigned to some population groups in stereotypical and violent ways as part of the maintenance of homogenous power and normative borders. The ongoing patrolling of trans, queer, and non-normative bodies that in part occurs at the sensory level is connected to this history and demonstrates how the use of sensory evaluations is part of the ongoing construction of social power flows, as well as the surveillance and policing of gender. It is also leading to the increased verbal and physical harassment of different types of bodies in public bathrooms – because this assessment is not just about who “belongs” in what bathroom, but also about casting doubt onto some bodies who do not “seem right”, who are organised along a spectrum of “safe” to “dangerous” when being made “dangerous” can trigger a violent formal police response in worlds already hyperviolent for racialised queer and trans bodies.

In my thesis, I seek to explore the ways in which surveillance exists outside of and away from machines, and how it is so much more than watching others and being watched. Taking the public bathroom as an intense social site saturated with sensory surveillance I hope to add to, to complement, to provide another surveillant framework that attends to the complexity of human governance alive in everyday spaces. Sensing surveillance helps us to study the sensorium of everyday lifeworlds that construct and direct our experiences of ourselves and others, as well as account for the various sensory economies that are always at play, policing, informing, regulating. It helps us to see that surveillance does not just happen “over there” and is not something new – it is perpetual, endless.

References

Andrejevic M (2004) The work of watching one another: Lateral surveillance, risk, and governance. Surveillance & Society 2(4).

Barcan R (2005) Dirty spaces: Communication and contamination in men’s public toilets. Journal of International Women’s Studies 6(2): 7-23.

Browne S (2015) Dark matters. Duke University Press.

Dubrofsky RE and Magnet S (2015) Feminist surveillance studies. Duke University Press Durham, NC.

Finn RL (2011) Surveillant staring: Race and the everyday surveillance of South Asian women after 9/11. Surveillance & Society 8(4): 413-426.

Jones C and Slater J (2020) The toilet debate: Stalling trans possibilities and defending ‘women’s protected spaces’. The Sociological Review 68(4): 834-851.

Marx GT (1988) Undercover: police surveillance in America. Univ of California Press.

Monahan T (2006) Surveillance and security: Technological politics and power in everyday life. Taylor & Francis.

Ogasawara M (2019) Mainstreaming colonial experiences in surveillance studies. Surveillance & Society 17(5): 726-729.

Trottier D (2016) Social media as surveillance: Rethinking visibility in a converging world. Routledge.

Zurawski N (2004) ” I Know Where You Live!”–Aspects of Watching, Surveillance and Social Control in a Conflict Zone (Northern Ireland). Surveillance & Society 2(4).

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custody HumanRightsLaw Uncategorized

A human rights law perspective on sensory experience and dignity in detention

Elaine Webster and Natasa Mavronicola

Infliction of physical pain, non-consensual touch, slopping out, subjection to loud noise, social isolation – these are all experiences within penal settings of subjection to, or deprivation of, certain sensations, smells and sounds which are deeply relevant for understanding the nature of dignity violations. From our perspective as researchers analysing the interpretation of the right not to be subjected to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, in particular in European human rights law, we reflect on how a human rights lens has potential to illuminate why those involved in the governance and/or oversight of penal institutions should be concerned with the sensory. At the same time, we reflect on what those of us engaged in illuminating and concretising human rights can learn from bringing the sensory into focus; on how it can deepen our understanding of what is actually going on at the level of individual experience, and in turn shape our understanding of what falls within the purview of a legal norm such as the right not to be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The way that individuals experience dignity respect or disrespect is a core concern in the penal context. In human rights doctrine, dignity language is particularly prominent in relation to the experience of prisoners and other detainees, including in immigration detention. The Nelson Mandela Rules, dealing with the treatment of prisoners, state in the very first sentence of the very first rule that “all prisoners shall be treated with the respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings.”

This is a powerful, if uncertain, red line. A challenge for working with the dignity idea is that it doesn’t possess a neatly labelled, off-the-shelf meaning in human rights discourse (or any other discourse). International agreements and human rights treaties are not philosophical works; they only try to capture and convey a sense of shared, social values. To understand the substance of dignity from a human rights perspective then, we have to piece together fragments of these shared understandings with the texts, with the pronouncements of monitoring bodies about the circumstances before them, and with theoretical accounts of dignity’s meaning. When we do so, we see patterns and gain insight into connections between sensory experience and dignity, respect and disrespect, as we outline below.

While the idea of dignity may be associated with metaphysical properties, it is a multi-faceted notion and contemporary accounts embrace its richness. It is widely recognised that human dignity is bound up with embodiment, and that dignity violations are socially-embedded experiences. Besides the ways the sensory can play a key role in the distress and harm that certain circumstances can occasion, sensory experience can also form part of actual and symbolic communication of a person’s perceived exclusion from the human community. 

The sensory dimensions of physical torture in detention, perhaps the prototypical violation of human dignity, are well documented in testimony and scholarship. One example is Elaine Scarry’s landmark study in the 1980s, The Body in Pain, which connected the wrongness of torture, not only to physical sensation but also to loss of voice; a perverse substitution of ‘voice’ with ‘sound’ (chapter 1). Scarry explains how this perversion becomes a key dimension of the experience, devised to impact not only the person subjected to torture but also those subjected to hearing it.

Eventually the pain so deepens that the coherence of complaint is displaced by the sounds anterior to learned language. The tendency of pain not simply to resist expression but to destroy the capacity for speech is in torture renanacted in overt, exaggerated form. Even where torturers do not permanently eliminate the voice through mutilation or murder, they mime the work of pain by temporarily breaking off the voice, making it their own, making it speak their words, making it cry out when they want it to cry, be silent when they want it’s silence, turning it on and off, using its sound to abuse the one whose voice it is as well as other prisoners (p. 54).

As Oliver describes it in discussing Scarry’s account alongside survivor testimony, enforced “linguistic paralysis” becomes an act of exclusion (Oliver 2011, p. 92).

The connection between sensory experience and inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment is not as well documented. This is partly because these wrongs have been subject to less attention than the prototypical experience of torture; they are often seen as less ‘severe’ and thereby less concerning. These forms of treatment, however, should not be seen as being of lesser importance or impact on those who are subjected to them, and sensory experience can be integral to what makes treatment or punishment inhuman or degrading in character.

In the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) case law we find inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment often characterised by subjection to humiliation and/or suffering through manipulation of, or insensitivity towards, sensory experiences. We see this in noise subjection or sensory destabalisation through hooding as part of interrogation practices, such as the ‘five techniques’ of interrogation (hooding, noise subjection, stress positions, deprivation of sleep and deprivation of food and drink) that were the subject of a finding of inhuman and degrading treatment in Ireland v. United Kingdom (Ireland v. United Kingdom, 5310/71, 18 January 1978). Concretely, the continuous use of a dark hood as part of the “five techniques” served to cause not only substantial discomfort and disorientation, but also profound distress; Survivors of these ‘five techniques’, who are often referred to as the ‘Hooded Men’ have recounted having a a hood placed over their heads and being thrown off flying helicopters, not knowing that the helicopters were flying only a short distance from the ground. The debilitating implications of such ‘techniques’ have more recently been recognised in findings of torture in the context of CIA rendition and co-called ‘standard interrogation’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ practices (e.g. Al Nashiri v. Poland, 28761/11, 24 July 2014) and the enduring image of the Hooded Man in Abu Ghraib. We also see a recognition of the significance of sensory experience in the ECtHR’s attention to such things as the cumulative effects of airplane noise and constant loudspeaker announcements on a child in immigration detention (see A.B. and others v France, 11593/12, 12 July 2016), or carelessness regarding the impact of not being able to hear or to see as a result of impairment (Ābele v Latvia, 60429/12, 5 October 2017; Slyusarev v Russia, 60333/00, 20 April 2010). Moreover, non-consensual physical impingement on one’s body is a recurring concern in case-law, from a slap on the face (Bouyid v. Belgium, 233380/09, 28 September 2015) to the performance of full body searches (Valašinas v. Lithuania, 44558/98, 24 July 2001). Further, the ECtHR has repeatedly underlined, in the context of the imposition of segregation in penal settings, that “complete sensory isolation, coupled with total social isolation can destroy the personality and constitutes a form of inhuman treatment” (Onoufriou v. Cyprus, 24407/04 10 December 2009, para. 69). Sensory experience does not constitute the full picture of dignity violations, but it can be a key aspect of treatment that reflects or communicates dignity and disrespect.

Recognising this is beneficial for furthering our understanding of dignity and its concretisation from within a human rights law perspective. In the context of human rights law – both legal instruments and case law – individual and communal experiences are filtered into the legal form, of proscriptive abstract statements and narratives retold for the purpose of judicial decision-making. As such, the totality of particular experiences is not – and cannot be – conveyed or appreciated in this forum. For this reason, we’ve found it interesting to reflect on how attention to sensory experience can help shape the delineation of dignity-respecting treatment beyond its partial rendering in legal texts, through a richer understanding of what is really going on at the level of an individual’s experiences of violations of the prohibition of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Notably, there is substantial scope within the ECtHR’s case law on inhuman and degrading treatment for the recognition of the way in which (cumulative) sensory experiences, or lack thereof, may communicate, often in diffuse fashion, distinct from the “fanfare” (Luban 2014, p. 129) of torture, a denial of equal humanity; and how they may serve, intentionally or not, to wear someone down, or even break their spirit. Often this recognition is present, but goes unspoken – the sensory dimensions of one’s subjection to profound powerlessness, severe distress, or loss of hope, are often to be found between the lines of the Court’s reasoning – for example, when the Court sets out an acceptable square metres per person to avoid overcrowding (e.g. Muršić v. Croatia, 7334/13, 20 October 2016), or when it deems detention conditions to be ‘insanitary’ (e.g. Kalashnikov v. Russia, 47095/99, 15 July 2002), or describes prolonged solitary confinement as “one of the most serious measures which can be imposed within a prison” (e.g. A.B. v. Russia, 1439/06, 14 October 2010), para. 104, 112).

In a sphere of judicial decision-making where empathy can play a significant role (Heri 2021, chapter 7), it is worth asking: what would be the impact if human rights doctrine were to accommodate a more immersive sensory experience of the places and circumstances faced by individuals? How might such an approach inform judicial responses to carceral settings in particular? The “vividness of imagined experiences” (Webster 2018, p. 71) within judicial reasoning might be enhanced by a greater appreciation of sensory dimensions. While there seems to be something particularly relevant from a dignity perspective about the social gaze, the way that individuals see themselves, and the presence of onlookers in judgments surrounding torture, inhuman and/or degrading treatment or punishment, the significance of seeing need not negate the significance of sensing more broadly. There is space for these broader perspectives to enrich context-sensitive assessments (see discussion in Mavronicola 2021, p. 93-105) of when particular experiences fall within the scope of the prohibition of torture, inhuman and/or degrading treatment or punishment.

Foregrounding the sensory within human rights law perspectives could constitute a valuable resource, just as connecting the sensory to the language of dignity within criminological perspectives could constitute a valuable resource. And it goes without saying that, in scrutinising the experience of persons in detention, there is a continued need to engage creatively with all the resources we have available.

Categories
Interviewing power research sensory Uncategorized Victimology

Sensing towards justice: The importance of attending to the sensory when interviewing victim-survivors

Beth

‘you were so afraid

of my voice

I decided to be

afraid of it too’

-rupi kaur, Milk and Honey

Recently, whilst designing a research project, I decided to look back on and examine my own experiences of participating in criminological research. I wanted to reflect on how we design and conduct research, bringing in knowledge of how it feels to be on the other side of the screen. I am a victim-survivor of abuse and have taken part in a small number of academic projects relating to this over the years. As I have only taken part in online interviews, and with an awareness many victim-survivors will experience the process differently to the way I do, I decided to investigate, and this is where I discovered a gaping hole in our conversations. There is plenty written about ‘ethical’ practice with victims of crime (Newman et al, 2006; Burgess-Proctor, 2014), how academics experience conducting their own research (Rice, 2009; Ross, 2017), and how methods may be experienced by participants (see Hlavka et al, 2007 and Campbell et al, 2009). But notably, almost all of this is written by and filtered through researchers, usually based on post-interview questions about the participant’s experience of the process. I question the effectiveness of this. How freely can those who have just sat in their vulnerability critique those imbued with more power? Participants do not have the same space to communicate for themselves about their experiences of taking part, and it seems that this has resulted in the loss of some of the nuance of emotions and sensations that taking part in research as a victim of crime can elicit.

Your research projects come into our lives suddenly and unexpectedly. Most often this is via a social media post, perhaps seen on a Saturday afternoon whilst I am sat with my family. There is a juxtaposition in this, the softness and warmth of my home against the harsh reminder of the world that exists outside of and prior to this new reality I have created. The pain which permanently exists under the surface is brought to the fore. But something about the research draws my interest and makes me stop, or go back to it. Curiosity perhaps. Most people don’t want to hear about my past, my existence is too uncomfortable for them to acknowledge and so they strip it from me on my behalf. We don’t have to talk about that. But I want to talk about it, and suddenly my head is bursting with things I didn’t know I wanted to say.

The words are almost tumbling out as I type a controlled message offering my time. Tap, tap, tap. My finger hesitates over the little arrow before I hit send. An odd thing about participating in research as a victim of abuse is that alongside the desire to be heard, worry and shame creep in at this point. Worry because I now have all these things I want to say, and if they say no I will have nowhere to put them. I will be left scrabbling to contain them again. I know I will be disappointed because the child within who couldn’t speak now desperately wants to be heard. The shame sits in my having contacted this ever-so-important person at all. Abuse lies, tells you that you have nothing of value to offer. Shame is the feeling of taking up too much space, and of needing to squash yourself into the smallest possible version so as not to trouble anyone. I am probably wasting their time.

Something that often goes unconsidered when designing time or resource pressured research is how we will communicate with people if they do not fit our study, or if we have finished data collection. Sometimes these limits are framed as ensuring researchers are not ‘over collecting’ data so as not to upset people unnecessarily, which while intended to be ethical, is actually cruel in its denial. What may seem like an innocuous email to say no thank you, might be experienced as deeply painful to someone who has already given something of themselves. If it has to be, effectively communicating why the decision has been made alongside a sincere acknowledgement that you appreciate them taking the time to get in touch can make all the difference to someone who has been repeatedly told they are not enough.

But in this case they say yes, and the interview is arranged. The screen flicks on, and the things most immediately apparent to me are that I am not in control, and the attention is entirely on me. In a way which is hard to put my finger on this feels reminiscent of the crimes I experienced. The distance through the screen mimics the disconnect I once felt with the world around me. The invisible bubble. The Untouchable. Suddenly I am acutely aware of the chair digging into my back, of not knowing where to put my arms and legs. Everything feels wrong. I feel myself shift uncomfortably whilst I try to project the image that everything is okay. Smile. That’s what ‘in control’ looks like, right? Is it? I can’t quite remember. Adrenaline floods my body; I can hear my heartbeat and I can feel that I am shaking slightly. Thump-thump, thump-thump. I clench my muscles in an attempt to regain some control. All of my senses tunnel in on this interaction, and everything else around me almost ceases to exist. There is an eerie stillness in being hyperaware of your breathing, of the tenseness in your body, in perceiving the other person, offset by the relative silence around me as my brain mutes out background information. But I want to do this. I focus on the questions, and on saying what I want to convey. Time and space begin to contort as I narrate both in the then and the now.

I wonder what the researcher sees in this moment. I suspect not much. Many victim-survivors, especially adult survivors of childhood trauma, are experts at masking pain. We often hide our experiences for many years, learning as children to live in disguise. Online research makes it easier for me to mask my distress. I can position my screen so that all you see is my face. So that you don’t witness the shaking, the shifting, the fiddling with a piece of Blu Tack. Abuse taught me how to disassociate my mind from my body, and I subconsciously do that now. I have learnt to mute myself, to deny my own physicality. I have learnt to silence myself before I am silenced, as a form of control. To exist in a half form so that I might be palatable.

Researchers may develop a strategy for managing participants distress, but in order to implement this we need to have perceived it. This can be difficult if someone is not visibly upset. Using Fricker’s concept of ‘hermeneutical injustice’ (2007), it is hard for me to communicate my experiences in a way which others will understand without showing them the physical effect on me. Abuse is inherently sensory, I can explain it only in how it felt, in sounds, and smells. Without this framework it is hard for others to comprehend, but this level of detail can be hard for researchers to hear, and so many reject it. ‘I don’t want you to get upset, shall we stop’, centres the researcher and inadvertently communicates that this may be becoming too much for you. That you want to stop. For me, my becoming upset isn’t necessarily a negative thing. In fact this may be one of very few spaces I can express myself in an authentic way. ‘Remember that this is your space, we can do whatever you need ’ communicates that the participant is in control, and gives someone whose “no” has previously been ignored permission to advocate for themselves. To be present in their whole form. To exist.

Afterwards the adrenaline floods out of my body, like a tidal wave has crashed and dissipated, leaving me tired and drained. But this experience has also felt freeing; I have put down some of the heavy stones which I carry. Brené Brown once said that “shame thrives on secrecy, silence and judgement. Shame cannot survive being spoken” (2012). In the very act of speaking, in a scenario where I have the safety of remaining anonymous, some of the shame I feel has been drawn out and leached. I have released it, and it less so belongs to me. Each time I speak, my body feels a little lighter to inhabit. I feel proud, and the warm swell that starts in my chest grows and spreads down each arm and into my fingertips. I feel bigger somehow, like an unfurling, and it is one of those rare occasions where it feels good to take up space. To have grasped at power in the choice of speaking. Of, in some small way, helping those who will come after me. In this moment I feel strong, and defiant.

Something that has come to interest me is the question of whether there is a risk that participants may feel emotions ‘outside of normal experience’, and I wonder who’s experiences we are using to define ‘normal’? To those who have not experienced trauma, what I have described would seem to be ‘outside of normal experience’. But I exist within and navigate this space every day. When I watch a film or go online, I do so knowing that I could be confronted with abuse at any time. I go out in public knowing that men will sometimes stand a little too close behind me. I have learnt to navigate and manage these things because abuse is a life sentence. I will never cease to be a victim-survivor. There is an arrogance in the assumption that I do not live with my experiences outside of academia’s research interests.

My identity has been forcibly and irrevocably changed, but that does not mean that I will never be in a position to talk about my experiences. Yes, talking about it is painful, but the silencing hurts more. Returning to Fricker’s work (2007), there is violence in the testimonial injustice inflicted on those who have experienced abuse, in the academy’s refusal to accept our right to frame our own narrative and make our own decisions about our ability to participate safely. The chokehold of his hand and of his threats now manifests in the chokehold of others’ discomfort, and in my fear of being cast out. The body has an horrendous ability to remember and replicate the bodily sensations of being silenced. And so important things remain unspoken, and I remain unseen. Being told my truth cannot exist in the world because of someone else’s perception of what is an ‘acceptable’ level of emotion is akin to having my voice removed once more. It is the imposition of power, of being spoken for, in others attempts to manage ‘risk’.

As soon as I was made a victim of abuse my entire existence became defined by risk. My risk of poor mental health. Of relationship breakdowns. Of chronic illness. Nothing is ever defined in relation to my strength. My power. My capacity to create change. I am an adult with the rights to make my own decisions, and I can assure you that victim-survivors do not speak without careful consideration and assessment first. Finding the balance is tricky, but in our desire to protect our participants we must also take care not to stifle those who want to speak, because of our failure to confront our own discomfort and fear. If you are not prepared to hear then do not do research with victims of crime, or you will compound and become complicit in the violence of our forced dissonance from the self. 

Going back to rupi kaur’s poem, every day I become less afraid of my own voice. But in it’s assertions that it is acting in my best interests, I feel deeply the silencing and rejection from an academy which is afraid of hearing me.

Reference list

Brown, B. (2012) Listening to shame. [online video] Available from www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame/transcript?language=en

Burgess-Proctor, A. (2014) Methodological and ethical issues in feminist research with abused women: Reflections on participants’’ vulnerability and empowerment. Women’s Studies International Forum, 48.

Campbell, R., Adams, A., Wasco, S., Ahrens, C. and Sefl, T. (2009) Training Interviewers for Research on Sexual Violence: A Qualitative Study of Rape Survivors’ Recommendations for Interview Practice. Violence Against Women, 15(5).

Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Hlavka, H. Kruttschnitt, C. and Carbone-López, K. (2007) Revictimizing the victims? Interviewing women about interpersonal violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 22(7).

Kaur, R. (2015) Milk and Honey. Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing.

Newman, E., Risch, E. and Kassam-Adams, N. (2006) Ethical Issues in Trauma-Related Research: A Review. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 1(3).

Rice, C. (2009) Imagining the other? Ethical challenges of researching and writing women’s embodied lives. Feminism and psychology, 19(2).

Ross, L. (2017) An Account from the Inside: Examining the Emotional Impact of Qualitative Research Through the Lens of “Insider Research”. Qualitative Psychology, 4(3).

Categories
mobilities prison

Ghost in the sweatbox

Jason Warr

“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light”

Milton: Paradise Lost (lines: 432-433)

I once spoke to a member of the INLA who said that he had been tortured by the British military in the six Counties. He said the hoods, the sensory deprivation, the shouting, the beatings, the white noise were bad but the real pain, the blot out everything but the very fibres of your body pain, came from the stress positions. Being forced into cramped and crouched positions for extended periods of time so the pain built and built and became all consuming – even after being allowed to move. As I sat there in the cramped Perspex and metal box, knees painfully wedged against the ridged front, arse numb from the hardened seat, broiling in nought but my boxers as the mid-morning sun turned the, only moments before, icy box into an oven, fighting the staccato and nauseating swaying, the caustic smell of ancient vomit, sweat, plastic, and fear burning my nose and throat this is what I thought about. Torture.

As I sit here in my academic office the echoes of that confined sensorium experienced 20+ years ago revisit me. I shiver. I don’t often reflect upon the embodied experiences of my decade plus incarceration, preferring rather to rationalise, examine, evaluate. I did then, and still do impose a distance between myself and my memories. I utilise them to inform research questions and interpretations of the contemporary prison. They are a filter. However, if we wish to explore the true nature of prison, punishment, and processes of social control (that is after all what my job as a prison’s researcher is) it behoves me to find the honesty in my own experiences. To no longer deny my embodied captivity but to explore it in all its sensorial glory. That it is what I have done in our book and what I do here. For the prison is an embodied experience, not just one of mind. The prison doesn’t just impose itself upon the ghost but the machine as well. The ‘penal’ is sensorially encoded into every constraint and restraint that you as a prisoner are subjected to. Bars, bells, bolts, bangs, and boxes – all are experienced through the senses; all communicate a symbolic message – thou art prisoner!

I don’t know whether the INLA man told me the truth about him being one of the ‘Hooded Men’. It mattered not. As I sat there it was that particular story that my discomforted mind dragged forth. Of course, I am not saying my experience was similar to the horrors of ‘enhanced, 5-point, interrogation’ but it was, nevertheless, what my mind conjured as the pain in my knees grew, my back began to cramp, and every thought narrowed to the nagging senses of my twisted and uncomforted body. I had never been inside one of these contraptions before. In the preceding years, though experiencing multiple moves and journeys doubled cuffed and squished between the sweating and nervous bodies of officers, I had been moved in singular roomy vans or cars. Yet here I was, for the first time, going fuck knows where, in a sweatbox.

An apt name. A box of sweat.

Long is the way and hard …

That morning I had been rudely forced from sleep as 4 officers had burst into my cell. Panic. Fear. I had jumped out of bed, sleep blinded, clad in just my boxer shorts, and had swung at the unknown, amorphous, and blurry bodies in front of me. Thems the rules in prison. The hard lessons you learn in Young Offender Institutions – people burst in on you, you fight. There is no choice but to fight. Connection. Crunching impact as fist impacts with something. “Ooogh”. Hands reach, bodies swarm, lights flash, shadows dance, uniforms glimpsed, grips take hold. Pain. Sharp and intense. Arms going one way, head another, kick in the nuts. The swing may have been a bad idea! “What the fuck Guv? What’s going on?” Grips loosen. I’m told to calm the fuck down and comply. I do. I’m told that I’m being moved. I cry that I have a visit that day. I complain. Grips retighten, twisting. Pain. I’m told that my mum will be notified when the wing officers come on in the morning. I struggle but it’s no good. I’m being ghosted.

Ghosting … old prison slang for being forcibly and unexpectedly moved from hosting prison to somewhere else in the estate. A laydown or permanent move. You know not. I did not know why I was being ghosted. I was told that it was for security reasons. I didn’t know where I was being sent. Security reasons. Laughingly they told me I was heading up North. What the fuck?? Ghosting is one of the more pernicious aspects of being in prison. The discombobulation. The anxiety. The stress. The not knowing. The deprivation of certitude. It ruptures what ontological security you may feebly cling to. You do not warrant security; you gave that up when you came to prison.  It creates a schism between you and the spaces you inhabit. Nothing is solid. Nothing permanent. No place is yours. Transportation has a long history in carceral practices. The process itself is designed to both physically and symbolically cast you as an outsider, no longer a member of this society, you belong outside, over there, away from us. Any sense of belonging, of community, is to be denied to you, your civic status revoked. That loss is encoded into the very embodied experience of transportation. Of course, in my ghosting, I am not saying that I am some Jim Jones being sent o’er seas to Botany Bay[1] nor a Sarah Collins heading for Van Dieman’s shore[2]. However, the forced movement, and the status and powerlessness it reinforces, are microscopic instances of the same power being imposed for the same reasons.

So, there I sat, in my boxers, sweating, in pain, rocking and banging about as the vehicle ran roughshod over pothole and bump. Heading to where I knew not in the barren North. Cramped, nauseous, muffled, a world of green blurring by, no comforting concrete to be seen. Wilderness. The interminable minutes stretched into hours. The heat and funk rose as the plastic of the booth, the miniature cell, closed in and compressed the air around me. The stench of me combining with that older undertone of vomit and detergent and heat to make my own self a source of disgust. The roar of the tyres and the diesel engine, pitched to the point of visceral white noise, intruded into my mind; occasionally blocking out the pain emanating from my lower limbs and back. My thoughts, when they came, were bloody and black. I raged. I wanted to hurt anyone associated with that experience. With every passing, torturous mile I became more feral. With every passing mile I shrank, I became less. To survive I needed that journey to end. Even if all that lay at the end was another cell and countless years.

Long is the way …

[1] MacColl, E and Lloyd, A L (1957) ‘Jim Jones at Botany Bay’, Convicts and Currency Lads, Australia: Wattle Records.

[2] See old English Ballad Female Transportation: https://digital.nls.uk/english-ballads/archive/74892349?mode=transcription