This dissertation project takes an interdisciplinary approach towards theorizing how we understand new modes of incarceration and confinement in the digital age. It makes key interventions in the fields of surveillance studies, carceral studies, critical data and technology studies, ethnic and racial studies. I argue that less conventional modes of incarceration and confinement, which are enabled through technologies, the Internet and processes of datafication, conceal the everyday carceral functions that target and exploit racialized people. Chapter 1 examines mobile carceral technologies that are part of Canada’s immigration and detention system. I investigate how notions of increased freedom that are associated with carceral technologies like electronic monitoring and voice reporting do not necessarily coincide with increased autonomy. In Chapter 2, I consider the relationship between mobile phone cameras and the rise of police body-worn cameras. More specifically, I examine how policing and surveillance technologies disproportionately take aim at Black people and communities, making the mere occupation of public and digital space extremely precarious. Lastly, in Chapter 3, I challenge the notion that biometric systems and technologies are race-neutral guarantors of identity, specifically within the polemical space of the modern airport. I argue that the airport’s security and surveillance infrastructure operates according to racialized knowledges, which unofficially validate the profiling of Muslim travelers by both human and non-human operators. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation encourages the reader to rethink notions of incarceration from both theoretical and practical perspectives; however, it is not a project about incarceration in the traditional sense. I argue that any notion of incarceration needs to be re-conceptualized in an age that is driven by big data and emergent technologies. While I draw on state and institutional forms of confinement in Canada, all of which have long and established histories of racism and oppression, I contend that notions of incarceration or confinement have bled into everyday life, particularly for racialized and marginalized people and communities. By surveying different surveillance technologies deployed across Canada’s immigration and detention system, the institution of policing and the biometric airport, I suggest that our understanding of the carceral has drastically changed. As issues of race, discrimination and oppression continue to underpin the structures of this newer carceral system and its modes of surveillance and confinement, it is a system that is less visible and physically confining but equally restrictive.

This dissertation explores the importance of colonial carcerality to International Relations and Canadian politics. I argue that within Canada, practices of imprisonment and the production of carceral space are a foundational method of settler colonial governance because of the ways they are utilized to reorganize and reconstitute the relationships between bodies and land through coercion, non-consensual inclusion and the use of force. In this project I examine the Treaties and early agreements between Indigenous and European nations, pre-Confederation law and policy, legislative and institutional arrangements and practices during early stages of state formation and capitalist expansion, and contemporary claims of “reconciliation,” alongside the ongoing resistance by Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. I argue that Canada employs carcerality as a strategy of assimilation, dispossession and genocide through practices of criminalization, punishment and containment of bodies and lands. Through this analysis I demonstrate the foundational role of carcerality to historical and contemporary expressions of Canadian governance within empire, by arguing land as indispensable to understanding the utility of imprisonment and carceral space to extending the settler colonial project. In particular, in this dissertation I focus on demonstrating the relationships between historical and contemporary logics, institutions, and everyday practices of imprisonment and carcerality, and the role they play in the reproduction and maintenance of settler colonial governance within the Canadian context. The central contribution I make in this project is the concept of ‘colonial carcerality,’ which I argue is a governance strategy that relies on inflicting ongoing harm to land, and to Indigenous, gender non-conforming and poor people of colour through criminalization. Drawing on the concept of colonial carcerality provides a framework to understand land as integral to the production of carceral space through the racialized, gendered, sexualized and classed hierarchies that make Canada possible as a settler state within empire. I show how that the criminalization of Indigenous persons through relationships to land occurs alongside the production of settler innocence, and that a carceral apparatus is produced through the preservation white heteropatriarchy alongside the subjugation of land. Drawing from the contributions of Indigenous resurgence and Indigenous feminist literature, this concept provides a theorization of carceral space beyond governance that highlights ongoing harm to land, waters and other living beings as a condition of possibility for carcerality within settler colonialism. It further draws from these insights to begin to imagine possibilities for restorative justice that value the life of all living beings as an entry point into understanding decolonial abolition within the settler colony. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Cette thèse de doctorat renouvelle les réflexions autour du « carcéral » afin de le repenser comme un instrument politique et social coercitif, qui saisit et emprisonne des sujets, des collectivités, des alternatives émancipatrices et des capacités imaginatives. S’appuyant sur des récits de femmes du « tiers monde » (We Lived to Tell : Azadeh Agah, Sousan Mehr, Shadi Parsi, 2007 ; Memoirs from the Women’s Prison : Nawal El Saadawi, 1984 ; Imaginary Maps : Mahasweta Devi, 1994 ; Zoo City : Lauren Beukes, 2010 ; Moxyland : Lauren Beukes, 2008), nous explorons de multiples tropes et sites d’emprisonnement, d’enfermement, de sujétion et d’immobilisation, qui renforcent les logiques carcérales et qui entravent l’agence collective. Nous présentons une critique genrée des mécanismes locaux et mondiaux, micropolitiques et macropolitiques de la violence contre les sujets captifs et les communautés précaires. Ce dispositif de déconstruction se base sur une analyse multidisciplinaire des arrangements carcéraux, qui incluent des institutions punitives, des États-nations hétéronormatifs, des discours patriarcaux, le trafic sexuel, la servitude pour dettes, le capitalisme, la surveillance numérique, la privation économique et la déshumanisation politique. Ce travail de recherche invite également à une relecture de récits carcéraux qui permettent la réinvention des vocabulaires, des pratiques et de l’éthique de résistance, ainsi que l’émergence de projets collectifs de libération qui transgressent les confins politiques, sociaux, discursifs et épistémologiques de l’agenda néolibéral. À travers ses différents cadres théoriques, notre lecture s’engage dans un dialogue critique entre les études littéraires, féministes, postcoloniales et matérialistes, afin d’élucider de nouvelles façons de penser la carcéralité, la liberté et la résistance. / This dissertation seeks to produce new understandings of the “carceral” as a mode of subject formation and social production that captures and contains subjects, collectivities, emancipatory alternatives, and imaginative capacities. Drawing on “Third-World” women’s narratives (We Lived to Tell : Azadeh Agah, Sousan Mehr, Shadi Parsi, 2007 ; Memoirs from the Women’s Prison : Nawal El Saadawi, 1984 ; Imaginary Maps : Mahasweta Devi, 1994 ; Zoo City : Lauren Beukes, 2010 ; Moxyland : Lauren Beukes, 2008), this dissertation investigates multiple tropes and sites of imprisonment, enclosure, subjection, and immobilization that reinforce carceral logics and impede collective agency. Through a multidisciplinary examination of carceral arrangements that include punitive institutions, heteronormative nation states, patriarchal discourses, sexual trafficking, debt bondage, global capital, political dehumanization, digital surveillance, and corporate violence, this dissertation offers a gendered critique of the local and global, micropolitical and macropolitical mechanisms of violence against captive subjects and precarious communities. The dissertation also invites a rereading of carceral narratives that enable the reinvention of vocabularies, ethics, and practices of resistance and the emergence of collective liberatory projects that transgress the political, social, discursive, and epistemological confines of the neoliberal agenda. Through its different theoretical frameworks, this dissertation engages in a critical dialogue between literary, feminist, postcolonial, and materialist studies in order to elucidate new ways of thinking about carcerality, freedom, and resistance.