Isolation : Places and Practices of Exclusion

This book examines the coercive and legally sanctioned strategies of exclusion and segregation undertaken over the last two centuries in a wide range of contexts. The political and cultural history of this period raises a number of questions about coercive exclusion. The essays in this collection examine why isolation has been such a persistent strategy in liberal and non-liberal nations, in colonial and post-colonial states and why practices of exclusion proliferated over the modern period, precisely when legal and political concepts of 'freedom' were invented. In addition to offering new perspectives on the continuum of medico-penal sites of isolation from the asylum to the penitentiary, Isolation looks at less well-known sites, from leper villages to refugee camps to Native reserves.

Carolyn Strange teaches at the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto. She has published on the history of criminal justice in Canada, the U.S. and Australia. She is the editor of Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment and Discretion (1996). She is the principal investigator on a collaborative project that studies prison history tourism at Alcatraz, Port Arthur and Robben Island.
Alison Bashford is senior lecturer in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney. She is author of Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine and Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. She is also co-editor with Claire Hooker of Contagion.