The Mango Tree: Exploring the Prison Space for Research

Abstract

Relationships are negotiated in and across space, whether it is within a court- room, a hospital, a public street, a home or the prison. ‘Space’ plays a crucial role in shaping the direction that research takes, but is often left out of discussions on the relationship between a researcher and research partici- pants in the field. Gupta and Ferguson (1997, 34–36) point out that in the social sciences ‘space itself becomes a kind of neutral grid on which cul- tural difference, historical memory, and societal organisation is inscribed’. Space does feature as a central organising principle in the social sciences, but at the same time it disappears from analytical purview. There are dis- cussions of techniques, representation and power relations in the context of ethnographic work (see Stanley and Wise 1983; Visweswaran 1996; Bosworth 1999; Bandyopadhyay 2010), but there is little dialogue about the role space plays in formulating these. Space is an active participant in the research process. This active participant becomes even more prominent when it is a closed institution, for example, a prison, a hospital, or a government-run shelter home. Mills (2003, 693) proposes to see space as a ‘set of super- imposed spatial frameworks, as many social spaces negotiated within one geographical place and time’. One needs to engage in a discussion of spa- tiality to determine which of the many spaces in the prison, a common site for criminological research, are less oppressive and how they facilitate an interaction between the researcher and the research participants. This dis- cussion needs to be situated in the context of the larger social frameworks that interact in the given prison space.