Geographies of Criminality
Using the methods of multimedia historical storytelling, this project examines how the production of geographic knowledge was entwined with the construction of criminality in the US-occupied Philippines, and how both became transfigured into practices of incarceration, criminal transportation, and forced labor. Drawing on archival materials from the Philippines and the U.S., it seeks to use the kinds of data collected about people who were convicted of crimes at the turn of the twentieth century to denaturalize the supposed self-evidence of truth claims that relied on “natural facts.” Even while the focus is on a particular case study, the aim is to ask broader questions about what it means to think the history of carceral forms within an imperial frame: how does changing the spatial parameters of criminal transportation and convict labor in American empire, for example, change the temporal ones? What can historical GIS and critical geography, or image-driven narration, help us to see about criminality and imperial governance that academic writing alone cannot?
