| Summary: | 'Scribing place' Is a qualitative study set In one prison for eighteen months, and one probation hostel for one month that responds to three core questions about how and where. why and with what effect male prisoners write, mark, scratch and texture carceral and semi-carceral space. This research was born from an Interest in prisoners' writings as activities that mediate the soda-cultural interrelationships and spaces of a prison community commonly considered illiterate. However. this Is not the kind of writing that passes exams or gets published as novels or short stories, but the tags, messages, notes, letters and body marks that characterise and mediate the 'of course' aspect of our social landscapes. These are the writings that are often ignored, or at least dismissed as sociocultural footnotes, rather than material for 'main text' interpretation. This work draws from ethnographic methodologies such as participant observation and conversations, while developing a more novel form of focussed workshop, in order to engage in an Intersubjectlve dialogue with prisoners. Having developed a geo-sociolinguistic framework this research explores prisoners' writings through posing and responding to questions about the relationship between writing/texts, people and space. The findings were that the prison Is subject to a series of textured transformations that create two forms of change• firstly, the transformation of unsafe carceral space Into various pockets of safe place, and secondly, numerous changes . some successful, other not - to a prisoner's sense of self. The hostel was found to be a deeply liminal, anti-place where. In order to secure release, prisoners struggled to comply with the demands of 'residency', in particular constant threshold crossing between the seml-carceral (hostel) and the freedom of the outside world.
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