Spaces of Unfreedom:
Carceral Immigration Enforcement in the US Pacific Northwest
This dissertation project explored different spatial dimensions of carceral immigration enforcement in the US Pacific Northwest, documenting: 1) how the spatial and temporal regulation of people within a detention center perversely implicates those who are detained in their own dehumanization and exclusion; 2) how the various circuits of profit-making in the detention economy entail multiple and contradictory logics of human (de)valuation; 3) how immigration policing destabilized a local race and labor regime, with implications for the fraught politics of migrant solidarity; and 4) how the political repression of migrant justice activists during the Trump era was contextualized by both the uneven geography of contemporary struggles over immigration enforcement and a longer history of political repression in the US.
Montange, Leah. (2023) “They will destroy themselves wanting purely American”: Labor and carceral immigration enforcement in the US Pacific Northwest.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 113(2): 409-424.
Montange, Leah. (2022). “Limits of solidarity: immigration enforcement, labour control and im/mobility in Washington State” Globalizations. 19(6): 955-970.
Montange, Leah. (2022). “Political Detentions, Political Deportations: Repressive Immigration Enforcement in Times of Trump.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 40(2): 332-350.
Montange, Leah. (2021). “The Spatio-Temporal Ordering of Migrant Detention: Exclusion, Hierarchy, and Human Disposal.” Population, Space, and Place. 27(5): e2478.
Political Subjectivity and Resistance in Detention
I have an interest in debates in Citizenship Studies on the political subjectivity in spaces of domination, such as migrant detention. In these spaces, people who are not ascribed the right to have rights make political claims and resist domination anyway. I am interested in the different forms that resistance, political subjectivity, and struggle take in these contexts.
Montange, Leah. (2023). “Around, despite, and without reference to domination: Crafting oppositional human geographies in migrant detention.” Ed. Sarah Hughes. Critical Geographies of Resistance. London: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Montange, Leah. (2017). “Hunger Strikes, Detainee Protest, and the Relationality of Political Subjectivization.” Citizenship Studies, 21(5), 509-526.
On Detention Landscapes:
A Countertopography of Abolition Struggles
This project pertains to a specific detention site, el Centro de Internamiento de Extranjeros – Aluche (CIE Aluche), in Madrid, Spain. CIE Aluche sits on a contentious property, the footprint of the Franco-era prison Carcel de Carabanchel that housed all of Spain’s political prisoners during the 38 years of Franco’s dictatorship. For the past 25 years, the site has been subject to contentious struggles over the meaning of the site’s past and what its future uses should be. This project traces the contour lines between CIE Aluche, the site’s previous and future uses, spaces of survival and resistance in downtown Madrid, and finally connects these with sites from my research in Washington State, US. My research has uncovered the shifting spatial, racial, and national imaginaries invoked in the land use struggle over the old Carabanchel property. Spanish partisan politics, global economic shifts, advocates for historical memory, architects, urban planners, Spain’s pro-democratic and feminist new left, immigrant rights activists, a new generation of anti-racist and decolonial activists, and the rebellions of those who are detained all come into play.
Manuscript in Progress
In-care-ceration: How prisons expand through ‘care’
In this project, I work with collaborator Meredith Ruff (attorney) and the collective No New Washington Prisons, which fights prison expansion in Washington State. This research explores the intersections of “care”, and particularly physical and behavioural health care, with efforts to manage (and expand) Washington State’s prison, jail, and forensic incarceration infrastructures. We are producing a 5-episode investigative podcast mini-series and accompanying journal article that develops three case studies of carceral expansion projects, uncovering how discourses of “improving care” and the material project of increasing beds overlap, making carceral systems more complex, and more legitimate in the face of progressive and abolitionist critiques. This project also addresses how exposures to premature death continue to characterize prisons and other forms of incarceration despite efforts to change, improve, and reconfigure care. It will also elucidate how people inside and outside carceral systems have challenged both the systemic neglect of health and wellbeing of incarcerated people and carceral expansion.
Podcast and manuscript in progress
GIS, Policing, Esri, and Us
I am working with Araby Smythe (York University) and Jane Henderson (Dartmouth College) on a project that considers the entanglement of geography education, GIS, and policing through a study of the geo-spatial analytics software company Esri, including its line of law enforcement products. We are collecting public record request responses and using these to map the connections between Esri, our universities, and policing. This project prompts academic geographers, planners, and GIS instructors to think through the political, ethical, and pedagogical implications of our discipline’s entanglement with the tech giant Esri, and Esri’s entanglement with urban police forces in North America.
This project is part of a larger body of work connected to the Making Abolition in Geography collective. It is supported with funding from Antipode Foundation and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto.
Henderson, Jane and Leah Montange. (2022). Beyond Esri: Moving Toward Abolition in Geography. In Special Forum: Making Abolition in Geography, Society and Space Magazine. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/beyond-esri-moving-toward-abolition-in-geography
We worked with graphic designer Mara Henderson to produce the Beyond Esri Resource Guide.