"A Prison within a Prison”?: Examining the enfolding spatialities of care and control in the Barlinnie Special Unit

This paper uses one of Scotland's most controversial experiments in penal reform – the Barlinnie Special Unit – to examine the enfolding nature of care and control in carceral space. Connecting with recent arguments relating to “caring architecture” and using the framework of historical carceral geographies, it showcases the spatial complexities of implementing caring practices alongside reforming tactics. Beginning with a discussion of the care and control nexus within institutional spaces and its historical legacy, it considers the use of small units within the Scottish Prison System. Using the Barlinnie Special Unit as a pivot, the paper opens up the complex spatial arrangements and spatial tactics of experimental prison reform. It first examines the spatial and architectural dimensions of the Special Unit. Second, the paper focuses on issues of routine and inhabitation and the emotional uncertainty this generated for prisoners. Overall, this paper seeks to argue the importance of examining experimental spatial practices in prison reform history to highlight the interwoven spatialities of care and control in every‐day institutional life

Advancing Human Displacement Modeling: A Case Study of the 2022 Summer Floods in Pakistan

The devastating 2022 summer flood in Pakistan displaced about 7 million people in the Sindh province alone. Up to one-third of the country's area, mostly the country's south, was flooded. Effective response to intensifying and compounding hazards requires a better understanding of these processes. We can gain insights if impact assessments include socio-economic components and uncertainties arising from the interactions between impacts. However, the quantitative evidence from impact assessments remains limited and fragmented, due to methodological challenges and data limitations. Using the open-source impact assessment platform CLIMADA, we study to what extent flood-related hazards can be used to quantify displacement outcomes in a data-limited region. Using flood depth, exposed population, and impact functions, we link flood vulnerability to displaced people. This allows us to estimate internal displacement resulting from the flood event, and to further assess how displacement varies across the region. We find that a flood depth threshold of 0.67 m, with a confidence interval (CI) from 0.35 to 1.10 m, provides a best fit to all data from Sindh province. We find a negative correlation between displacement and the degree of urbanization. By testing the performance of our model in explaining differing displacement estimates reported across Pakistan, we show the limitations of existing impact assessment frameworks. We emphasize the importance of estimating potential displacement alongside other impacts to better characterize, communicate, and ultimately mitigate the impacts of flooding hazards

Affect theory and the concept of atmosphere

The concept of atmosphere is a way of emplacing affect and affect theory. Work in contemporary social geography has done much to demonstrate how elemental forces become enveloped in atmospheres. However it tends to under-theorise the role of historically structured socio-cultural forces and the modes of engagement of persons with the atmospheric. In this paper we identify core themes in the literature – the inbetweeness of atmospheres, tuning space, the folding space-times and modes of engagement. We then develop these themes further through an encounter with work in anthropology, architecture and ecological psychology. Reflections on fieldwork in a medium-secure forensic psychiatric hospital are then used to illustrate the application of atmospheric thinking to a particular setting. We conclude with a call for a renewed ‘ontographic imagination’