Knowing and not-knowing: I-poems and dialogue as a decarceral feminist methodology

Here we explore positionality and ethics in prison research, reflecting on our work on the closure of Holloway Prison, a women’s prison in North London, UK. We consider what it means to enter the prison archive, held at Islington Museum, London, and engage with prison artefacts, as women who have not ourselves experienced imprisonment. Through poetry and autoethnographic conversations, we trace our emotional and affective responses to the archive, asking what these reveal about our relationship to the prison. In particular, we want to hold on to knowing and not-knowing as an ethical position, to acknowledge our distance from the experience of imprisonment, and to interrogate moments that feel familiar to us. In using a range of creative research and dissemination methods, we hope to not only explore and interrogate our own relationship to the prison, but to also invite others to look differently and generate ‘abolitionist affect’ when engaging with narratives and artefacts of imprisonment. We aim to contribute to the abolitionist project by analysing the prison through emotional and affective responses that have potential to unsettle its naturalisation.