Place-bound prison stories: A criminological exploration of Nordic prison museums

This project explores how prison museums function as storytelling spaces.

International studies have shown how the conversion of decomissioned prisons into museums are part of a dark tourism, centred on fascination with death and suffering.

This project explores these ideas of dark tourism and the communicative (i.e. social, cultural, emotional, and political) functions of prison museums in a new, Nordic context.

As spaces open to the public, prison museums tell stories about penal history through both visual and written narratives, to locals and tourists alike.

As remodelled prisons, they tell stories of their own history through the use of objects, exhibitions, and the space itself. Moreover, they tell stories of imprisonment in a physical, interactive way.

By studying how these storytelling spaces make sense of and communicate past punishment to contemporary audiences from a criminological perspective, this project aims to analyse contemporary views of the past (e.g. past forms of or reasons for punishment) as a form of historical othering.

By studying this, the project unveils 1) how prison and punishment are (re)presented and how this mirrors shifting punitive attitudes across time as well as in relation to different crimes and punishable bodies, and 2) if and how the idea(l) of Nordic exceptionalism (i.e. exceptional leniency in terms of punishment) is present in these (re)presentations.