Discussing Decolonisation and the Politics of Abolition: Online Panel Discussion

From racist policing and mass incarceration to increasingly militarised borders and surveillance systems, the logics of punishment, exclusion and control are fundamental to the reproduction of global racial capitalism amid today’s increasingly violent and authoritarian world-order. But what is the history of policing and bordering in relation to British Empire specifically, and to what extent does the imperial ‘boomerang effect’ explain racist state violence in Britain today? How should we understand the role of education in terms of the state’s ever-expanding carceral apparatus, and should calls to ‘decolonise’ education include demilitarisation and other, more radical forms of dissent? What intellectual and political tools do we need to analyse and resist contemporary structures of oppression, in order to imagine the world anew?

The penultimate event of YSJ’s 2024/25 Discussing Decolonisation series will bring together four scholar-activists for an online panel discussion on decolonisation and the politics of police, prison and border abolition. We will consider the intersections of anti-colonial, anti-racist and abolitionist praxis in the context of higher education (HE), exploring how abolitionist principles might bolster efforts to ‘decolonise’ pedagogy and practice, and what abolitionists can learn from anti-colonial struggles of the past and present day. Panellists and attendees will be invited to reflect on the entwined processes of marketisation and securitisation in UK HE, and to share thoughts on how we should respond to the ramping up of carceral practices across the sector – from campus-based policing and the criminalisation of dissent to the increasingly ‘hostile environment’ within UK universities.

The event will begin with around an hour of structured conversation with our panellists, after which we will open up the floor for audience Q&A and collective discussion.

Panellists:

Remi Joseph-Salisbury is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester, specializing in racisms and antiracisms, particularly in education and policing. His recent work addresses topics such as police in schools, campus securitisation, pandemic policing, police abolition, and racism in British education. Remi is a steering group member of the Northern Police Monitoring Project, and the No Police in Schools campaign. He is also a member of the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE).

Laura Loyola-Hernández is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Leeds, where she is the progamme lead for BA Geography and BA Geography with Transport Studies. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Sarah Radcliffe. In 2018, she was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to examine the role of emotions in non-traditional political acts for women to be elected in Indigenous communities in Mexico. In 2019, she was granted a British Academy Rising Star Award with the project #resisting: Exploring digital protest by marginalised groups. Her most recent work explores how different communities transform the meaning of politics in diverse settings such scholar activism’s impact in Higher Education, police use of biometric technology in the UK and community resistance through abolition practices, and use of social media by feminist collectives in Mexico.

Connor Woodman is a former Research Fellow at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, where he published the Spycops in Context papers. He has written on surveillance, abolition and policing for Verso, Novara Media, Pluto Press and the Jacobin, and has a book chapter in the 2021 edited collection Abolishing the Police.

Carys Coleman is a Teaching Fellow in Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton where she currently leads courses such as ‘Politics and Protest’ and ‘Contemporary Security Challenges’. Her research is primarily situated within Critical Global Politics and Critical Security Studies, with specific expertise in the social and political implications of the evolving technologies that govern the hostile environment, and policing. She completed her PhD at the University of Manchester, under the supervision of Dr Andreja Zevnik and Prof. Martin Coward on the harms created by the use of biometric technology in the policing and management of migration, which was nominated for British International Studies Association’s Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize 2023.

Bookings:

This event is taking place online via Microsoft Teams. Please book your place via Eventbrite by Tuesday 20th May in order to receive the Teams link in advance. 

If you would like to receive updates about forthcoming events in the series, along with recordings and materials from past events, please sign up to our Discussing Decolonisation mailing list.

If you have any questions or anything you’d like to discuss, please email series co-conveners Lucy Potter (l.potter@yorksj.ac.uk) and/or Dr Laura Key (l.key@yorksj.ac.uk).