Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
RCC Thematic Group: Unmaking and Remaking “Nature”
This project looks into islands of incarceration. When it comes to islands—exceptionality is the rule. Each island is peculiar with its own environmental traits, communities, cultures and behaviours. In a perpetual dual state of isolation and interconnectedness, islands incorporate contradictions as well as dense entanglements of bodies, matter, narrative and meaning. Various scholars, from Darwin to postmodern nissologists, have called for an understanding of islands as laboratories of both environmental and societal processes. In this context, the project posits that islands of incarceration are indispensable for the study of environmental humanities—for they fuse together the notion of islands, as discrete corpuscles of environment; and the notion of carceral communities, as insular units of society.