undoingtime
Conflicts & Negotiations Project
2020-21 MA Cohort
Prisons — as well as the actors and bodies which make up the carceral system — allocate, redistribute, divide up, split, modify, share out, and seize time for particular groups of people. Within prisons, there are often allocated times for recreation, for meals, for unwaged labor, for communication with loved ones and people 'outside' of the prison. In taking away time from individuals as part of their 'punishment', the state and carceral systems seek to make something like an irreversible change to the trajectory of individuals and communities. But this is not the whole picture — incarcerated people often experience many forms of carceral time, often alongside experiences of non-carceral time.
HMP Holloway (the women's prison which was closed in 2015 in North London) is the starting site for this project. In thinking about Holloway Prison as a site that structures and allocates time — not just in the past, but also in the present and future — the project aims to unravel the different temporalities that are woven into the carceral experience, in order to provide diagnostic and interventionist tools and to generate a counter tempo.
How can we tap into or help to generate collective rhythms that oppose these state imposed temporalities?
HMP Holloway (the women's prison which was closed in 2015 in North London) is the starting site for this project. In thinking about Holloway Prison as a site that structures and allocates time — not just in the past, but also in the present and future — the project aims to unravel the different temporalities that are woven into the carceral experience, in order to provide diagnostic and interventionist tools and to generate a counter tempo.
How can we tap into or help to generate collective rhythms that oppose these state imposed temporalities?