Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement

This Introduction to the special issue develops a theoretical argument around the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement by exploring the relationships between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and the like with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who are doing their utmost to cope or escape. We explore how life is lived in and across these sites of confinement by focusing on the tactics of everyday life and hope while being mindful of how ever-present forms of abjection, even death are constitutive elements of these sites. Stuckness, from this inter-disciplinary perspective, is not simply a function of the spatial form it takes. Crucially, the argument goes, we need to understand how temporality animates stuckness as an important dimension of confinement.