Dr Emma Russell - La Trobe University, Australia

Since 1990, ten new prisons have been built in Victoria, Australia. In that time, the state’s prison population has increased by more than 250%. In this seminar, I discuss my current research into this phenomenon, conceptualised as an abolition geography of prison expansion in Australia. This project draws on political ecology, urban planning, and science and technology studies to investigate the historical processes and contemporary technologies that materialise and sustain prisons in our midst. While processes of colonial dispossession, environmental degradation and economic restructuring set the stage for vigorous carceral development, there are additional forms of labour and technology involved in producing prisons that require closer examination. This seminar interrogates one of them: the community advisory group (CAG).

I use Victoria’s newest prison, ‘Western Plains’, as a case study. This 1248-bed maximum-security mega-prison is sited on Wadawurrung country, in the small township of Lara. Since its completion at the end of 2022, the prison has attracted significant criticism for sitting ‘idle’, as it has yet to receive its first prisoners. This raises the question: how did a $1.1billion mega-prison, unnecessary on its own terms, come to be built? To explore this question, I examine the meeting minutes of the prison’s CAG and develop an analysis of the state’s strategies for normalising the prospect of new carceral infrastructure. As an unemotional, bureaucratic record of a controlled social arrangement, CAG meeting minutes reflect how state-corporate actors use a range of discursive, environmental and visual techniques to pacify localised dissent, enlist the community in the tenuous project of carceral expansion, and materialise new human cages in the landscape.

Dr Emma Russell is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow (2024-2026) based in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing (Routledge, 2020) and co-author of Resisting Carceral Violence (with Bree Carlton, Palgrave, 2018). Emma has co-produced radio series on historic prison abolition campaigns and regularly partners with community-based organisations in research and advocacy against mass criminalisation and incarceration.

This seminar will be held ‘in-person’.