RT Article
T1 Ghosts of the Gulag: Negotiating Spectres of the Penal Past in Northern Russia
JF The British journal of criminology
VO 64
IS 1
SP 17
OP 33
A1 Slade, Gavin 1980-
A2 Piacentini, Laura
A2 Kravtsova, Alena
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1882174828
AB The paper develops the concept of penal spectrality—a sense of the presence of those who endured past penal suffering within environments and among objects related to the practice of punishment. The residents of Ukhta, a Gulag town in Northern Russia, engage uncomfortably with penal spectrality and employ two forms of distancing—pragmatic and cultural—to deal with its melancholic affects. Pragmatically, residents repurpose and reincorporate the things of the penal past into the social order, finding a use-value in them for the present day. Culturally, residents engage in the museumification and commodification of Gulag things. The paper advances two directions for research in ghost criminology. First, we show how uneasy spectral feelings are not passively observed but actively negotiated. Second, in this interaction, we show the immediacy of engaged practical interaction with material objects that points to modes of encountering and misrecognizing penal suffering beyond cultural commodification and penal spectatorship.
NO Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 31-33
K1 penal spectrality
K1 Gulag
K1 Museum
K1 Punishment
K1 Russia
DO 10.1093/bjc/azad013