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The Moon Spins the Dead Prison
Really proud to have edited this collection of essays with Thomas Abercromby and Rosie Roberts for the School of Abolition. The Moon Spins the Dead Prison brings together a collection of new essays that explore the meaning, practices, and politics of prison abolition from local, national and global positions and perspectives. The publication includes new […]
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The Town Marshal on BBC Radio4
My short story The Town Marshal was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as part of The Poet and the Echo: a short story series in which writers choose poems as inspiration for new stories. You can listen back to it HERE. The story was inspired by a poem from Edgar Lee Masters’s intoxicating Spoon River […]
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ISRF Fellowship 2021-2022: Prison Break
‘the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology.’ H.G Wells in Utopia as Method (2013) Ruth Levitas. ‘[A]ll [activist] organizing is science fiction. When we talk about a world without prisons; a world without police violence; a world where everyone has food, clothing, shelter, quality […]
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Erratics – commission for Hanne Lillee’s ‘Foreign Fauna’
Image credit: Hanne Lillee. Header image: Hanne Lillee (2019) Ovules I was delighted to contribute a piece of writing on pregnancy, food, decay and the Fortingall Yew, for Hanne Lillee’s beautiful new book Foreign Fauna. Hanne writes: “The photographs explore growth and propagation, as well as decomposition and rot, and the repetitive force that transforms […]
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Just Humans podcast – Translation
I was honoured to be the guest on episode 2 of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research’s new podcast Just Humans. We talked about my sociological research using fiction and poetry and Stir my new poetry pamphlet for the Distant Voices project. When we think about translation we usually think of translating from […]
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Becoming different together by Les Back — Streetsigns
Vox Liminis is a project in Glasgow that challenges criminal justice and fosters communities through song writing and music How do you imagine a new kind of life if you have served time in prison? How can music help people trying to walk that line out of prison to a free life? In this podcast we visit an extraordinary project called Vox Liminis based in the Gallowgate, in […] […]
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Stir, field works from the Distant Voices project
Stir (2020) is a collection of poems which were written while I was the research associate on the Distant Voices project (2017-2021).[1] I’m a visual sociologist (sociologist with an art practice as part of their approach) and these poems reflect on my experience of doing ethnographic research in carceral spaces, written from the perspective of an […]
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How to do things with songs
In this blogpost, I share a few insights from my analysis of the songs so far produced in song writing sessions as part of the Distant Voices project. I’ve been exploring how we can use these songs – which were largely written in collaboration with serving prisoners, as ways to explore the issue of ‘coming […]
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Castaway (podcast) for the Distant Voices project
In this PODCAST I interviewed S Code: the co-writer of the song Weather You about his favourite tracks in his music collection. The idea for this podcast came out of an earlier conversation with S Code about the restrictions put on the number of albums and DVDs you’re allowed in prison. With no ability to stream music […]
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Like Birds Flying Towards the Light (podcast) for the Distant Voices project
In this PODCAST the co-writers of ‘Pure and Right’: musicians Jenny Reeve and Jill O’Sullivan aka Bdy_Prts, and Mark Holloway (Acting) Head of Operations HMP Inverness share the ideas and experiences that shaped their song. The co-writers are currently living far apart in New York, Glasgow and Inverness, so the podcast was constructed out of […]
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Phil Crockett Thomas 