Roman Szorad: From Good Workers to Enemies of Nature? Foresters’ Revaluations of Work, State and Care in Slovakia
= Vienna Working Papers in Ethnography, no. 15.
This Working Paper examines negotiations of state forestry and its value in rural Slovakia. Focusing on how state-employed foresters perceive and navigate tensions with non-state environmental actors, it argues that by refashioning their work as care they reproduce the boundary of the state’s domain to exclude the non-state and state “outsiders”. Here, a critique of the state is interwoven with a hope for its alternative. To enact this state “otherwise”, the foresters build on newly established international partnerships, relations of care with humans and non-humans, and recollections of the socialist and imaginaries of the pre-socialist pasts. I conclude that the foresters have challenged their publicly devalued image by positioning themselves as “traditional” state actors, caring for nature, community and society in the region and beyond.
Marlene Persch: Moments of Sensing ‘Prison Climates’. Institutional Responses to Two Escapes from a Juvenile Correctional Facility in Ghana.
Journal of Extreme Anthropology 9 (2): 148-166.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in a correctional facility for male juveniles (aged 12 to 21) in Ghana, this article elaborates on institutional responses following two attempted escapes in 2018 and in 2021. The institutional responses I witnessed following these attempted escapes differed greatly: after the first, additional fencing was installed; after the second, the only response was to blame the officer in charge for ‘poor supervision.’ This offers insight into the institution’s character and how its staff created an acceptable narrative. Drawing on the concept of ‘prison climates’ (Martin et al. 2014) I suggest that escapes can be understood as moments in which prison climates become sensible. The paper is embedded in debates on escapes in correctional literature and prison ethnographies. In contrast to the usual focus on inmates’ experiences of incarceration or their agency I respond to and explore questions about how they produce the institution’s character by focusing on perspectives of prison staff.