Prison spaces in Nigeria and Honduras : examining proximal and distant social relations
Whilst increasing emphasis has been put on interaction and intersubjectivity especially in the constructionist and poststructuralist inspired psychology of the 1990s and beyond, the INTER part of these dynamics has remained unexplicated.
Source: Prison service journal ; no. 187
The space of relating continues to be an empty, udefined one,
something merely in between. This is clearly an omission given that
as Rogers puts it 'the space in which dialogue unfolds is deeply
implicated in the relational involvements that take place'.
Prisons, as this issue of PSJ bears witness, scream about space,
punitive space, overcrowded space and so on. This latter category
is one of the most dominant in the discourse around the prisons of
the developing countries which I study. But filled up space is just
one - perhaps one of the most visible - aspects of the spatial
dynamics of prisons. This article concerns the sociality of space;
that is, the arrangements of space for social relations.
This is no new theme. Bentham's panopticon, as made famous by
Michel Foucault, is of course all about relations of space,
proximity/distance, surveillance, and the production of spaces and
subjectivities. But it is, I would contend, rather new to consider
these themes in the light of prisons in Nigeria and Honduras.