Spaces and Traces of Containment: Architectures of Extractivism

This workshop seeks to trace the deep histories and afterlives (or longue durée) of spaces of containment, from sites of coerced or forced labor to asylum seeker reception centers, detention facilities, and deportation infrastructures. It aims to critically examine the multiple repurposings of these sites, which are historically and currently marked by coercion, discipline, violence, and racial hierarchies. We are particularly interested in interrogating how these regimes intersect with various forms of extractivism and the experiences of displaced people, including acts of contestation.

By exploring the historically produced infrastructures, logistical systems, and their changing assemblages of actors that give these spaces their “afterlives,” the workshop seeks to bring together empirical research on the scalar configurations of (im)mobility governance at the intersections of state, capital, and labor. Some of the questions we seek to explore include:

• How the built environment, architecture, and spatial arrangements shape the experiences of displaced people;
• The ways these spaces enable discipline, control, surveillance, and the reinforcement of racial hierarchies;
• How such sites are connected to changing forms of extractivism within the shifting dynamics of capitalism; and
• How the spatial organizations of these sites interact with broader regimes of confinement, labor exploitation, and the invisibilization of violence.