I'm just going to sit on this so you can hear me. Okay, welcome everyone to the Spaniard leg of our conference journey. Do you want to speak into it? Yeah, okay. You're good? Oh wait, wait one second. It's just telling us to stop. Okay. All good. Ready? Okay, welcome everyone to this last session of our conference. I hope everyone has been enjoying the conference and has gained a lot from this experience. I want to introduce you to an organization called Clean Break. There's a presentation that will be played shortly for you. This organization has deeply impacted me and I am just so grateful that they're here today to share more about what they do. My mind are just like eyes to light from darkness. I sit and contemplate a river of pollution and good flows through in amongst the weeds and the waste runs a myriad thoughts, feelings and motions but no escape. I deal with this babbling brook as it overflows to eventually burst its banks ever becoming the waterfall, strong, immense, loud. Tis me. Tis me veins like rivers running through the countryside. The dam, my heart, my strength, my will. Tis me. Tis me. To overtalk your inner voice takes a strong voice indeed. Leading your river to floor restful and your undertow become, my dear. Covid restrictions are hard for everyone out there but lockdown in prison is a real nightmare. 23 hours a day locked up in yourself, the prison regime is now a living hell. There's no education and jobs a few. Sat in your pad with nothing to do. It's purple visits now to see your loved ones. Lack of physical contact, breaking down bonds. Keeping in contact with letters and by phone anything just not to feel so alone. I know prison ain't meant to be fun. Half an hour or so outside just to see the sun. There's only so much reading and colouring you can do watching TV or having a brew. Prisoner's mental wealth is getting worse, waiting weeks just to see a doctor or a nurse. Constant jangling of the keys is getting too much to bear. Feeling so down and bored I could pull out my ear. I hate feeling so down wearing that constant frown. Counting down the days till I am free and I can finally get back to normal and feel more like me. Take her down. Cuffs are on. Walk of shame. Until they're gone. The bare cell walls. The wooden bench. Bitterful looks. The sterile stench. They call this the sweatbox. Confined in here I know why. I sought my way to prison. No chance to say goodbye. I'm in the system now and I have a number. Scared and can't afford to slumber. I'm recovering. I'm finding my strengths. I have new skills. I will live through my stretch. Never again will I be naive. No man abused my trust. Getting new perspective. Live for me. Not love. All lost. Complications of a nation. The story of a foreign national through the system. Mediation. It didn't work so retaliation. She went berserk. In mitigation. It was said that litigation filled her with dread. So to prison for rehabilitation. She is sent. Done down with medication. And made better by education. She learns about repatriation. What no one explained was the utter devastation. Brought about by deportation. From an abusive relationship. She is stuck in a country. She knows none of the ways or the language. She is isolated. Punished. The system did not catch her. There was no help for her.  She is flown back to a country. She no longer knows. Isolated. Once again. Once upon a time there was a little girl. She could have had anything. Any diamond or pearl. Instead she chose a big white rock. Not knowing she'd be standing in a dock. She would do anything for the pipe. Her innocence was taken when it was perfectly right. Not knowing what she was getting into. There's nothing this girl wouldn't do. Who would have thought she'd end up this way? Chasing the buzz every single day. Crying herself to sleep at night. Looking in the mirror getting a fright. Hating herself for the things that she would do. Crying telling the rock that they are through. It took prison to learn her lesson. Prison's not a curse. It's her blessing. Without it she would be dead. She couldn't escape from her head. She's took the plunge and is finally free. Once upon a time that little girl was me. A story of life as a prisoner in lockdown. I am nothing but a shadow. I am a shadow in the darkness of winter. I am a shadow in the darkness of summer. I'm a shadow in the darkness of my mind. I'm a shadow at my parents' table. I'm a shadow at the bar at my local. I'm a shadow at my desk in the office. I'm a shadow online on social media. Am I real? Am I really living this life? Am I real to my family and friends so far away? Where did I lose myself? When did my hope, faith and courage leave me? How do I find myself in the darkness of my life? I am a human but not a being. I'm a dark shape, stumbling and just a shadow of my former self. Someone's banging on their door. Someone's ringing the bell. Do me a favour. Open the door and take them to the bin. It's the thing I miss most, you see? Peace. I tried being awake at night, early hours when the noise may cease. There's no escape from the chaos these walls hold. There's no escape from hearing others' dramas unfold. Assistance required, code red, code blue. Staff putting out fires, literally and metaphorically too. Please grant me some peace. A quiet space to think my faults. To let me heal. To let me mend. To consider my future in a world less fraught. It is I. Do you see me? It is I. Do you hear me? It is I. Do you feel me? It is I. Do you value me? It is I. Do you care for me? It is I. Do you understand me? It is I. Do you love me? It is I. Do you know me? Glass in a mirror. You will see. It is. Milk, sarnies and penguins. A feast to behold. If I could ask for another, if I were feeling quite bold. One fruit or biscuit is all that's allowed. I keep pinching from the counter, I'm feeling quite proud. We came in as victims. Feel like trash from the bin. We're innocents really, devoid of all sin. Learning new tricks and skills. More strings to our bore. By the time we get out. But we know what we don't know. We'll be all the wiser without a shadow of a doubt. We knew not when we came in. But we'll know it all coming out. Patriarchy. Isn't that what they say? Marching. Over-arching to get our voices heard. Hush now women. Don't be absurd. Women marching like it's 1912. When it's actually 2021. Votes for women. Or have we forgotten that one? Feminist, dyke, rebel, cause. How long do we keep our revolution on pause? Quiet down ladies. Don't make a scene. Let the men talk. Make law. Break more. All that you are. All that you stand for. Your rights. Your worth.  Whore. Tease. You're only here to please. Pleasure. Measure.  Your tits. Let us ogle. Let us grapple at all your womanly bits. Pankhurst nation. Abject deflation. Anarchy. Rise up. Speak up. Hitch up. And fight for your rights. Your worth. Your safety. Let no man gag you. Or grab you. Tell you you can't. You must silence your sounds. Push back.  Take down the system. The oppression. The obsession. That women are less and men are more. Equality. Justice. Truth. Are the things that we fight for. Decency. Not degradation. In this new era. A women's nation. Newfound occupation. Instigator. Not influencer. Or peaceful protest. Filled with fire. With fight for what is right. For suffrage. For suffering. Let the new dawn begin. In honor of all the women who have cruelly and unjustly lost their lives at the hands of men. And for all the women who continue to fight the inequality and injustice that remains. I would now like to introduce it to Anna Herman. The artistic director of Clean Break. And Jennifer Joseph. Clean Break member and artist. The director of Clean Break. And this is Jen Joseph. He's a member and an actor. Clean Break is a women-only theatre company. Set up in 1979. By two women in prison. Who set the company up. As they are leaving. And to share the stories of women's experience with the criminal justice system. To create change. To amplify their voices. And through theatre. And we've been kind of staying true to that mission. Over the past 40 plus years. Producing theatre. On stages. Working directly with women as well. In prisons in the community. At our own centre. In North London where we work. In a trauma-informed way. With women. With lived experience of the criminal justice system. And women who might be at risk of entering it. Through theatre and support. And yeah. And we... What else can I tell you about us? This piece of work was something that we felt really important about last year. The pandemic. The impact on all of us in prisons. And those inside them seem to be forgotten. By the public. In a way that they very often are. But it seems really important for us to. Amplify their voices. And also to work with them. Because prior to the pandemic. We had lots of projects that were cancelled in prison. And so. The contact with women in prison. Was severed. And we felt it was important. That there was a communication between them. And the public. And so we. We wrote to women. Who across all the prisons. Invited them to make contributions. To our. Peace. Which was then performed by our members. And shared with audiences. To really. Get a sense of what was going on inside prisons. For women. And some of the pain. And the. Anger. And the righteous anger. That experience. Was evident across all the 60. Pieces of writing that we had. And we just selected a few there. So. I'm going to. Just introduce you to Jen Jen. Has actually we're just saying it's been. 12 years. Since Jen first came into contact with me. Great. And I just want to invite you. To share. Sorry. Okay so. Just. To share a bit about your journey with. What it's meant to you. Where should I start. It was. The journey of my life. I thought I'd lived it seeing it all. By the time I was in my 40s. You couldn't educate me on anything new. And then I found myself. Tragically in trouble. And in prison. I have three children. A home. And a single parent. So for me it really wasn't the way to go. Is another story behind how that got there. But whilst in prison. I didn't see. No escape nowhere out. I'm in my culture. There's a saying. Once a man twice a child. Well I experienced at my 40. Years of age being a child again. In prison. And I thought that was bad. When I came out. And that was even worse. Couldn't find myself. I have three children. That are looking to me for support. To help them to grow. And yet they were doing that for me. The last thing I remember my daughter saying to me. Is mama love you. But I don't recognise you. And at that point. I knew something had to change. I didn't hear about clean break while I was in prison. But thank God. In the industry. That does drama. She knew about clean break. And all she said to me was. I know this place that allow you to act. Anything else she said after that. Went over my head. I thought these people don't know. But they're going to let me act. And I'm going to get there. And she said to me. Sort something out. And then come back to me. And I was going here. In a shallow pit of depression. And then she phoned me. Less than an hour later. And gave me the number for clean break. I thought. She really went through all of this for me. You know what. Let me call them. Best phone call of my life. At that point. I hadn't been on a train for 17 years. The only way to get to clean break. Was by a train. And I took that train ride. With pleasure. Without taking that train ride. I would not be the woman you see sitting here today. Clean break has helped me to become twice. The woman I was before. She has made my. They have made my children turn to me and say. Mum. We're so proud of you. Without clean breaks. Help, guidance, support. Pay my fares. Pay for my childcare. Giving me food. Cleaning break provided that. So even if it was just a one hot meal a day. You were sure to get it there. So thank lord. For an organisation like clean break. Who helped me. To be able to sit here today. And be a beacon of hope. To anyone who's coming from my position. Carry on talking amongst ourselves. I wonder. Or talking to you. But I don't know if anyone has anything specific. That they're interested in knowing. Or asking. Very happy to. Either take questions or. I can carry on. I'll ask Jen some more questions. I do that. I'll do that. And so what. What do you think in particular. Like in terms of solutions that you've experienced. Or things that you feel would make a difference. To have made a difference to you. And you feel would make a difference. To other women. Or to other people who have been incarcerated. What would you like to see. Different from your own experience. First off. I would like to know. That whoever's sentencing me. To a term. In prison. Knows the full facts of my story. I didn't go out there.  Intentionally to end up in prison. There were circumstances to it. Now I'm not saying anyone who commits crimes. All there's always circumstances. People in prison say I didn't do it. Literally. It wasn't really done to me. So if he had spent a moment. I mean they do have like probation. Looking to you and all that. But there's only so much you can tell these people. That you don't actually know. That I've got your life in their hands. So what do you tell them. Do you be honest and tell them. I was kidnapped. And I was held against my will. Back into the country. Or do you just say. I'm sorry. It was my fault. I shouldn't have let it happen. Where do you go with that. I need there to be a more. Vision coming from the people. That are holding that responsibility. Of looking at a mother. With children and a home. And a single parent. And then sending them to prison. That's what I need to happen. I still feel like we're a long way off that. Because I'm talking about it now. But this has been talked about. Many many years before me. So for me to still be here. And be talking about the same injustices. That are happening to women. Going to prison. Then where do we start. Like I need help. I want you to tell me. Where can we start. How can we make this different. Because it costs money to send the woman to prison. To keep a woman out of prison. And teach her how to be a woman. How to spend money. How to be a parent. How to be responsible. Because remember. Especially the young ladies. They were born into young parents. That didn't have no teachings for themselves. So if you put that teaching. Into some of these young women. That are going to prison. I think you get a better turnout. In this country. How is that. Oh my God. I smile at this point. Because it was my saving grace. Without. Dealing the arts. Without being a part of clean break. Without being able to put my energies. My sorrows. My depression. My worries. Somewhere. Then where would it go. None of us would win. And I certainly became a winner. Of the clean break on my side. For enabling me. To be here. And paying it forward. And. I mean there are women's centres. Of the clean break in a way. Operates like a kind of version of a women's centre. But through theatre. That's absolutely what we do. But we work in partnership with the other women's centres. Which is an alternative. To custody. I don't know if people know. But internationally. Looking at other models. I don't know if there is. There is stuff in the global south as well. Where there are alternatives. That are an alternative. Genuine alternative to imprisonment. I don't know. I'd love to understand a bit more globally.  If anyone. The experience is you go to prison. You do the sentence. And then if you want to come out early. You're being tagged. So you can't go out of your house. Certain hours. You can't do certain things. You can tell them you work. And they can make exceptions. If you bring proof and things like that. But there is no change. If they can tag you. And keep you in your house. Why can't that be the sentence from the beginning. Just what I'm saying. Because your liberty is gone anyway. Because the next man is telling you. He's taking away my kids. Putting them into care. Taking away my home. And we'll struggle already to keep her home. And our kids safe. Then to take it all away. Then a woman comes out. And she's got to start it all again. Show me how that is fair. Because I don't get it. I have a question. I. Jen has not mentioned this. But Jen is a really superb actress as well. And I just wanted you to maybe talk about the new skills that the woman gained. Because for example Jen. Do you have an agent? Right. So the woman gained new skills. And find out that they have skills that they didn't know they had before they went into prison. Also what I think is I found the messages so impactful for me. And I think for everybody. There are some things that relate to women in general. I think there may be women here who might think boy I'd like to get involved in something like that. Both in clean break as well as potentially some kind of therapy, dramatic therapy. Is there anything you can say around those few issues? It's a lot. Do you want to talk some of the skills you feel? First off I've since going to clean break in 2012 and that was in Shakespeare with the Don Mar warehouse.  I just think what a big yawn. It's nice when people are going to put you together and put it out there. I've done a lot of Shakespeare trust me. Even though you think to yourself I want to act. When you're coming from my sort of background you never see it as a realistic dream. You never think I'd love to do that. I can do that but I'm never going to get there. Well lo and behold I'm not saying going to prison was a good thing but thank God I did. Because then I ended up an actor and a professional one at that. Being paid as well. So the thing about theatre the powerful thing is that for Jan it was a career choice and able to follow that path. It's not always that and we have a lot of women who come and it's about confidence, it's about self-esteem, well-being, it's about support. It's about being creative. Liz Whitbridge, she was a set design she trained at clean break and she was just nominated for a favour wasn't it for a set on favour and even like it wasn't me, to me that's a big deal because Liz has come from far to be nominated for her work. That shows what good job clean break is doing. And that is an important part which is about challenging the industry because the theatre industry as well as the criminal justice industry the sector of both industry well theatre particularly is an industry why it's predominantly middle class it doesn't feel that there are opportunities for women as Jen said she aspired to it but thought that's never something that I can achieve and part of our aim and our ambition is to challenge is to break down some of those barriers to challenge the industry by being part of the industry but creating pathways for our members to actually be part of it and to have different stories being told, being heard, being seen and different kind of careers for it. So skills can be within that but also very broadly for a lot of women that isn't their journey and their journey is one of is very very different and our aim is not to necessarily to have a lot of gents we'd love to have a lot of gents but it's also about whatever direction of travel someone wants to come it's very very much about supporting that woman on the journey that she wants to ask the good thing about Clean Break as they listen to what you're interested in and then they open the door giving you the opportunity to achieve that. I'm really really thankful for Anna and Jen coming today and Ollie and the organisers of this conference to include this aspect of carcerality because sometimes you find in academic circles they just concentrate on the academic aspects of it and not involve the community or what's going on within the community so I think this is absolutely brilliant and I hope that you will potentially leave so if we want to support whether financially or maybe come to some of the presentations or performances that we can support so I just want us to give a big round of applause for Anna and Jen and Dej I'm going to be told off Dej is sitting there, we are touring so we take our work to universities conferences, live performance not the film but in live versions telling women stories different stories by playwrights and we are having touring in February and March so if you want to take a leaflet, if you have a conference or an event or you want to pass it on to someone else please do, thank you very much thank you so much and also thank you to Caroline for actually facilitating that discussion we're really grateful that you could join us we're now going to move on to the concluding roundtable discussion if Eddie, Anna and Lisa wanted to come up, we've also got Vanessa online if you can hear me Vanessa I can, thank you Ali amazing stay tuned is it possible to get Vanessa on the perfect? thank you so much firstly just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you so much for coming to this conference I know, I speak on behalf of everybody here that I've really learned a lot and I'm just really really grateful for everybody giving up their time and their wisdom and for sharing their experiences and all their knowledge with us you know you've also created a really positive atmosphere and really like common really discussions and I think that's really appreciated by everybody I also just want to thank the staff at SAAS particularly the IT catering cleaning staff, administrative staff none of this happens by itself, it depends on a lot of labour so yeah just thank you to everybody who's been a part of this and then Kate Grady isn't here but thank you to Kate Grady and to Scott Newton as well for their invaluable support and also to Caroline who's been just unbelievable and amazing throughout this conference so yeah thanks to everybody I'm now I'm really excited to chair this round table discussion, what does it mean to decolonise criminal justice so throughout this conference we've seen just how difficult it is to entangle systems of carcerality and criminal justice from colonial histories, legacies and continuities and you know perhaps most explicitly we started this with our first panel prisons across prisons as colonial relics across Africa to see how many prisons that are still in use today were literally built by colonial authorities and throughout this conference we've seen how this extends far beyond of course the African continent and indeed way beyond prisons also to policing and judiceries and beyond physical infrastructure obviously and you know colonialities don't just appear in prison walls or on the police uniform but also in the hierarchies of race class and gender that these systems uphold and so this begs the question if we are committed to decolonisation which I hope we are then what does this mean for the future for our systems of criminal justice and it may seem trivial but I think it's important to ask this question what does it mean rather than how can we decolonise systems of criminal justice because I think the former really opens up a possibility that the latter doesn't which is that we're not able to decolonise systems of criminal justice and it's precisely understanding what it means to decolonise systems of criminal justice that might lead us to conclude whether this actually is a worthwhile endeavour or not because there is this kind of fundamental tension between transforming our systems based on decolonisation or maybe dismantling altogether and what does decolonisation actually require so I'm really delighted to be joined by four amazing speakers the first is Anna Aliverty who is a professor of law at the School of Law University of Warwick her research explores questions of national identity and belonging in criminal justice and of law, sovereignty and globalisation she has led extensive empirical work in the UK's criminal justice and immigration systems she's the author of Crimes of Mobility Policing the Borders Within and she is also co-director of the Criminal Justice Centre at Warwick and the Associate Director of Border Criminologies she's also co-editor of the book The First Question rethinking the colonial legacies, epistemologies and geographies of criminal justice our second speaker is Dr Eddie Bruce Jones who is the Executive Dean of the School of Law at Birkbeck he's a member of the New York Bar and Associate Academic Fellow of the Inner Temple he's author of Race in the Shadow of Law State Violence in Contemporary Europe and he serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute of Race Relations and Rainbow Migration on the Board of the Centre of Intersectional Justice he has advised various intergovernmental and civil society organisations on issues of racism and human rights including the Office of the UN High Commission on Human Rights and the Equality Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe he's an editor of the Journal of Immigration Asylum and Nationality Law and Advisor to the European Law Open Dr Lisa Long is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology she joined Leedsbeck University in 2015 with a range of criminology modules her research interests include race and racism's inequalities in the criminal justice system and critical race theory slash criminology Lisa was awarded her Doctorate in 2016 by the University of Leeds and her monograph Perpetual Suspects Critical Race Theory of Black and Mixed Race Experiences of Policing is recently published with Power Grave Macmillan and finally we have Vanessa E. Thompson joining us online who is an Assistant Professor in Black Studies at the Department of Gender Studies Queens University her scholarship and teaching focuses on Black Studies and Anti-Colonialism State Violence and Abolition Critical Racism, Migration and Border Studies Multiracial Solidarities Internationalism from Below and Activist Ethnographies She's published on Blackness and Black Movements in France and Europe more broadly and Black Abolition Struggles and World Making Vanessa is a member of the International Independent Commission on the Death of Uri Jallow and organizes with abolitionist feminist collectives in Europe and globally That's a very big wrap chief for all of these speakers so thank you so much for being with us and I thought I just ask each of you to offer some kind of opening brief remarks on what you broadly think of this question of decolonizing criminal justice Ana did you want to? Yeah sure Hello everyone It's difficult to follow up from the film I still have my emotional state but I'll try So what thinking about the question that Oli posed and thank you very much Oli for the invitation and for organizing this amazing conference So thinking around the question that Oli posed around what do I understood to mean this idea of the relationship between decolonization and criminal justice and for me decolonization is the construction exercise that builds on a range of traditions and this way I'm a bit unease about thinking about different kind of strands of criminology or criminological theories around you know soldering or decolonizing or abolitionist theory I think feminist theory political race theory I think you know decolonization builds a lot around the concepts the ideas the rethinking about epistemology epistemologies that are taking forward and are kind of free rethought in the colonial theories and cultural studies et cetera so it is a reconstruction work that is both intellectual, it's political and it's ethical and it engages with rethinks the practices the concepts the spaces the epistemologies that we shape the way we understand our field of research and in particular its foregrounds historical, very complex and very diverse historical processes that we might call colonialism and imperialism because as we saw throughout the conference the way in which we dealt with and we conceptualize colonialism and the context that we study are very different and with it you know there's the importance of acknowledging that diversity of context is very different in terms of historical terms although when we refer to colonization at least in the context of the British context we think about the British, the French 19 18th century the process of the colonization for instance of Latin America is very, very different and it has different legacies and implications and in the same way the way in which we study white settler societies is very different from the processes that happen in countries where the white population was not a majority so again it is a very complex and diverse field and it also demonstrates that this idea of the post that is very much criticized in a way the post-colonial the idea of decolonizing very much race the issue of to what extent there is a historical line they are dividing history from contemporary processes and the question of legacies now we can talk about legacies and how conceptualize legacies and study them empirically in terms of thinking about the contemporary process and in terms of this broader field of work of literature of scholarship the question of the criminal justice question is so important because criminal justice processes and institutions have been at the center of the modern capitalist colonial system and it's kind of very much legitimize the culture and the material processes that drove those processes and you know as criminology as the study of those systems and the idea of crime is the science of the other so obviously you know it's quite significance for the for the project of decolonization and so my thinking around that about this idea of decolonizing the criminal justice and pointing to all this arguments before is to what extent we can decolonize a system and apparatus that has been so central for colonization and exploitation racial exploitation where you know race in a sense has been kind of inventing or scientifically legitimize by many of the practices scientific scientific practices and so I'm thinking when this dilemma is raised about an idea in abolitionist theory about this idea of the horizon right the abolitionist horizon and we can't you know kind of expect that all this system of oppression that builds on structural inequalities are going to go away tomorrow but the idea of the horizon and perhaps decolonizing horizon perhaps give us a roadmap to think about how to advance those projects and we've been discussing those in different sessions within the conference I think at the intellectual level there's quite a lot of scope for rethinking and questioning state sanction categories the where, the why the who, the what of criminal justice the concepts and categories and practices that serve as the scaffold of the system and shapes its core and its limits how and for us as people who try to make sense of all these practices you know in many ways there has been quite a lot of work in questioning precisely the idea of the limits of the criminal justice in terms of the nation state and we see that for instance in terms of migration research the extent to which the nation state is a challenge as a framework as a special framework and ask us to rethink criminal justice practices in terms of interconnections, global interconnections the circulation of idea, the literature around troubles of the criminal justice penal transplants global transplants and this is of course an area that is very much close to me because I've done quite a lot of research around this idea of immigration and again there has been quite a few papers in this conference about this topic and to what extent you know the of the penal apparatus around border controls and migration controls very much is part of that system it's not outside and it's kind of resembling and morphing so another point that I wanted to make and with that I allow my colleagues to talk about the work that the contributions that many the colonial scholars and southern scholars have made in relation to the more ethical dilemmas or perhaps the positionality of us in terms of how we see the do we research the criminal justice and how it has been researched in terms of you know the dominance of Anglo Anglo-American scholarships scholarship in English as a lingua franca and how those narratives and those pieces of research also frame the way in which I see the criminal justice so we need to be as well very aware of these biases and also you know try to think about the narrow way in which conceptions about this range of practices and systems have been theorized, thank you Hi everyone, thank you for inviting me to this and it's been really great to connect with people across different disciplines and hello to my colleague Vanessa and there is that on the screen so I am not a criminologist and I think that I'm a bit disconnected from within the discipline of criminology what's you know what these debates are like so I'm looking forward to reading your book Anna but I was pleased to hear that I'm thinking in a similar direction in terms of what you were referring to as the abolitionist horizon and maybe the horizon of decolonizing as a project because when I hear the term decolonize and then you just plug in whatever you want afterwards decolonize education, decolonize anything you can think of has decolonized as an adjective these days and I guess the trap is a really ready made packaged version of whatever critical theory you want is now you know the fad is to call it decolonizing but there's a real set of urgent political commitments that is also within that and I think I really like the way that you point to the lineage of different forms of critical thinking within academia but also that have emerged from social movements so critical race theory critical feminist thought critical race feminism post-colonial theories and also from movements that don't have the airtime or aren't easily accessible within western academia that are likely ones that could really give us good frameworks for thinking about what that horizon could potentially look like so one thing that in terms of approaching the concept of decolonizing criminology or decolonizing carceral policy one thing to think about is what we even mean by decolonize so of course that's opening up the can of worms that we're going to have to open with that with the idea of where the limits are to criminal justice and all of those things need to be defined so that we can grapple with them but some things that I think come to mind with coloniality are the idea of the state and the state form as one of the central ways in which that's negotiated maybe not the only one but definitely the state as a way a mechanism for controlling populations and as a vehicle for colonizing and having that coloniality be enduring so in one of the panels we're looking at different ways in which coloniality and colonial borders on the African continent for example have then shaped the way in which both certain types of governmental regimes operate but then also reinforce certain ideas about how people what people locally are thinking or the relationship of different people to one another layered on top of and this came up in a side conversation outside of the panel a way in which the assumption that there are groupings that are more naturalized than the groupings that are colonial and that one or the other is authentic and there's this discourse that comes out of the legacies of colonialism that are not helpful in understanding what's happening on the ground with people who are actually producing their own ways of thinking about themselves and about the possibility of this horizon so I think one thing is to think about how we can frame coloniality as a particular type of frame that we need to intervene on and how that differs and how it's similar to some of the other frames that we might be thinking about such as race or such as bordering per se because I think that can give us a clue as to whether the questions that we're asking are the ones that are going to meet the needs and I guess that brings me to a second reason of being dubious but also knowing that it's politically urgent is because the idea of the carceral state so if we're going to decolonize criminology or decolonize carceral policy where does that begin and end? Because it certainly isn't only the laws that are on the books, it certainly isn't only prisons as you mentioned Ali and it isn't only the history books and how we think about institutions in the past but then it isn't even only carceral policy where do we talk earlier about public health there's a way to frame public health as an alternative way of thinking about how to drive social policy but then there's also a way of thinking of public health as an extension of carceral policy and I think that came across really well in that talk and it gets us to think can we solve can we only decolonize carceral policy and I think this also came up with a comment about can we deal with carceral policy in India without dealing with caste and in what order or in what consolation do we have to bring these conversations together and I guess that is the problematic that we're faced with I think also Professor Bhattacharya mentioned this in that same exact panel we're faced with all social movements and in making the comparison with abolition it's not a destination it's a process of unpicking and working and constantly reviewing the downsides to anything that looks transformative so I suppose I just wanted to highlight the idea that it raises more questions which I think are productive ones that we need to take seriously but also in different places the answers to these questions might be quite different and how they overlap with other movements and other frames of these movements will be quite different so I'm looking forward to that kind of conversation Thanks Eddie I will keep it brief because I think all the thoughts I've had have kind of been expressed in different ways that has come out really clearly over the last couple of days and that has kind of really got me thinking that's been highlighted already by the panel is that complexity and how all of these questions and possibly answers very indifference spaces and in different locations but I think regardless of that all of the kind of the thing that brings all of those different contexts together is the history of the colonial history is the processes, the ideologies around that and actually the role of criminal justice systems and institutions in reinscribing or kind of reaffirming colonial power after the dismantling of kind of empire so I think that's the thing that possibly draws all of those things together and I think I thought I knew what that looked like before the last couple of days and my paper is now full of lots of notes of me trying to kind of bring all of the discussions that we've had over the last couple of days together because it's really kind of perhaps changed but one of the things that really struck me over the last couple of days and kind of I suppose he was a really visual representation of all these things that we're talking about the kind of history and the process and the ideology, the geography, the space the all of those things was Emily Russell's paper yesterday, one of the panels where she had geo-referenced I think she called it which was like putting the it's a process I'm not familiar with but putting kind of contemporary geographical kind of measurements old plantation map in the Assam region and one of the old tea plantations and so she what she was able to show through that process was to kind of map the contemporary state violence and trust and distrust in policing directly to specific locations on that plantation map and it really struck me as being what we're talking about but this is what it looks like that was a really striking moment for me for the last couple of days that kind of draws on with those things together Vanessa, are you okay to give something for once? Sure I think we'll be able to hear me well I have a little echo and I'll just go on it's just on this slide, it'll be fine I'm very sorry to not be able to be there in person with you all and thank you so much for inviting me for the possibility to be in conversation with such great colleagues and obviously also the people who joined the conference and participated at the conference and all of us thank you so much for organizing this to you and folks that were involved in organizing this conference particularly also and folks who were doing the labor that often invisibilized and really thrilled to be in conversation with you and I'm speaking to you from the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee people who defend their communities against settler colonialism on an everyday basis and care for these lands and I think it's very crucial that to understand abolitionist struggle as struggles against settler colonialism also in a continuing form and there's a I recently started on social media unfortunately I forgot the name of this but it was retweeted many many times and I find it quite crucial to say everyone wants to decolonize everything now except for the colony and I think that that's a quite important reminder so when you ask about some of the reflections on the relationship between decolonization and criminal life and criminal justice what actually came to mind was Ruth Wilson Gilmour's reminder that mass incarceration and one articulation of racial capitalism right is class war and to build on that I would say criminal justice is a racialized class project and thereby also is class war but I would like to talk about this a bit in more depth by also also maybe following up on what Eddie said to really think about what we actually mean when we talk about decolonization and also how it is mobilized hegemonically especially with regard to the articulation of neoliberal racial capitalism so when I think of decolonization this is directly linked not just to an epistemological project but to what people have been doing in their struggle towards to build life to build life affirming politics and structures and to get rid of the economic, political, epistemological systems and exploitative systems that actually dehumanize and super exploit and abandon the majority of the world and the majority actually of the people on this planet so with decolonization all kinds of forms of anti-colonial politics come to mind as well as anti-colonial revolutions and the Haitian Revolution I think is one of the abolitionist cornerstone if we think of it through history which was a radical revolution aiming at the abolition of the plantation economy as well as of the system on which exploitative economies depend upon and I think that very crucial in terms of the holistic approach right so it's not just one institution it's not just one articulation that produces pre-mentor death but it's actually an holistic approach like Eddie also was pointing to that looks at the interconnections of the system of violence and expropriation and exploitation so another example is of course the general strike of enslaved people in the U.S. during the Civil War that W.E.B. Du Bois has famously argued in black reconstruction that black enslaved people are not only workers but that he has furthermore shown that enslaved people constantly struggled against their massive overworking conditions as well as legal and social spaces and during the Civil War enslaved people increasingly ran away took up arms against their masses and intentionally sabotaged and disrupted the global production and these actions of course were not accidents but there were a form of abolitionist politics and I think what's really important that it was not just about this mantling and getting rid of the plantation economy to then be transitioned into the label wage relation but to actually dismantle the system that requires enslavement that requires colonialism and that now requires or produces neoliberalism so the strike that led to the formal abolition of enslavement was aimed at abolishing the system that makes enslavement possible colonialism possible et cetera and I'm referring to these two examples and we can draw on much more examples it was already said on the panel that there are so many variations of colonialism and also empire but I think when we when we look at some of these accounts historical road map and there are many others in terms of the various anti-colonial revolutions then I think it becomes more clear that decolonization is as Hans-Chanot has also argued a phenomenon and a politics of dismantling and he really called it violence that decolonization is always a violent process and I think it's important to name that that doesn't mean just physical violence but it means undoing in a very radical way the systems and institutions that particularly but not exceptionally render vulnerable and disposable and killable the racialized segments of the working class and working populations all over the world and of course the current dominant conjuncture of decolonization instead shows that it is not understood as an add-on right like you can decolonize the curriculum an integrationist project you can decolonize the anti-discrimination boards, policy boards you can decolonize all kinds of documents and structures and it's just the kind of integration into the state school into the existing system to also diversify the processes of exploitation and the processes of dehumanization so I think that's why I think it's really important to stick to the kind of materialist struggle of decolonization when we think about decolonization and also think about the layers of violence that Fanon was actually pointing to right and saying that we can understand it in many sense of the term here and maybe two other points one was that whereas Fanon and many others of these kind of anti-colonial revolutionaries understood decolonization as a violent process and thereby also as a kind of event I think it were particularly anti-colonial feminists and radical anti-racist feminists who actually conceptualized and argued what Abby already mentioned in terms of decolonization being a process it's not an event, it's one big large event, it's not something out there, it's not something in the future it's something that people are doing on an everyday basis and like in rehearsal as Ruth Wilson Gilmore called it it's the practice of life in rehearsal which also shows that radical transformation is rather a process than an event and I think this understanding of decolonization already points to the problematic of assuming that criminal justice can be rendered more just or can be decolonized because the concept of criminality as well as the criminal justice system itself is deeply entrenched in the systemic logics of control super-expertation and dehumanization we just have to think of the employment of police law politizist and such in the 16th century in Europe and I think that's important when we talk about racial capitalism as we learned from that it's not just started with the expansion of Europe to the continent of Africa or to the occupation and made a genocide in the America and mass genocide in the Americas but itself already was operating within Europe against Roma against Polish people and what have you that's not just a part of capitalism it's racial but all of it is racial and within that process with the constitution of politizism as the break of the feudal order the function of criminality was to recruit the poor masses into a kind of condition, into a kind of system and also criminalize their means of survival of survival in conditions of mass poverty and I think these two functions criminalization of survival as well as recruitment into exploitation are still two of the functions we see that the criminal justice system is still doing. Of course this has break I'm not talking historical linearity here but if we think about the role for instance that criminalization plays as a mode of control and as a mode of of dehumanization if we think of the role of criminal justice as a practice criminalization as a practice plays in terms of capturing, controlling measuring, exploiting black enslaved people and thereby also recruiting them into the system of super exploitation as enclavement and also of course other forms of colonization and that's where I would say there is no coming together of criminal justice which is so deeply rooted in an understanding of security that as Marc has said is actually the understanding of the or the main principle of the bourgeois society that's kind of understanding of security which is deeply related to property relations deeply related to the systems of racialized super exploitation and abandonment so I would rather say in terms of the relation that this is an antagonistic relation the relation between criminal justice and decolonization that does not mean and that's why I find it important to think of it as a process in terms of abolition that does not mean that people should not struggle for abolitionist reform within these kinds of justice criminal justice arrangements but maybe we'll talk about the difference between abolitionist reform and reformist reform also called non-reformist reforms and reformist reform more further I just wanted to actually make argue that I think even this kind of bringing together the question of is the criminal justice system decolonizable I would say it's actually not if we take decolonization seriously. Thank you Thanks so much Vanessa So I'm going to ask me one more question because I really do want to open it up to the audience because I think you will have far more interesting questions to ask I just wanted to kind of build on this idea of the inability to decolonize an inherently colonial concept or set of structures and I wondered if this idea of the problem of decolonizing criminal justice translates to the question of decolonizing criminology and the criminal question because you know a lot of people would synonymize decolonizing criminology with southernizing criminology and this idea of very diversifying what we mean when we say crime understanding that crime is a colonial construct in itself so in that regard we could argue that decolonizing criminology is actually a useful way of unpacking what crime means how colonial histories, colonial legacies still inform how we understand crime a gang, how we understand these kind of concepts and so in that sense decolonizing criminology almost seems worthwhile but then I'll leave you with a quote by Franz Fanon who said ok so comrades let us not pay tribute to criminology by creating a decolonized version of the discipline or indeed anything else that draws its inspiration from her humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation which would be almost sort of seen caricature so with that in mind I wondered what you think are the limitations of decolonizing criminology or whether these limitations are beyond the purview of what decolonization can remedy whoever wants to go first yeah Lisa yeah I think I would agree with Fanon in the sense that criminology is inherently a racist discipline it's kind of born out of a biological understanding that's heavily racialized around what a criminal is and all of our understandings that kind of come from that premise so even though there's been efforts to shift away from the kind of biological versus of the discipline we always kind of come back to it and of course the eugenics and the more recent versions of that and the twin studies and adoption studies and all those kind of things that keep us coming back to that and even when we're not talking about biology we're still pathologizing particular behaviors and there's not really a serious undertaking within the discipline apart from kind of in small pockets of work that centralize kind of race within criminology and understandings of the kind of it's always framed in terms of elevated offending rather than social control and so yeah I don't think so I think there is a turn increasingly towards prisons and policing as areas of study within criminology and particularly if you look at degree programs within different universities and what students have access to as criminology students it's very much centered around policing and prisons with a view to perhaps in future criminal justice practitioners rather than engage in any sustained critique of their operation or the way that they maintain racial relations within society so I think for all of those reasons I'm a fan I wondered if Anna you might disagree being author of Decolonizing and I wondered how you kind of navigate these tensions well so we have quite a lot of discussions with my colleague Enrique Carvalho Rastas de Chamberlain and Maximus Soso about this idea of what you know what is Decolonizing criminology and what criminology is in a sense because you know it has been traditionally an assemblage of different disciplines sociology anthropology law and I do agree absolutely with Lisa and this is what I said at the beginning that there is such a heritage right to the discipline thinking about for instance the work of Lombrosso and from Lombrosso onwards and you know thinking about whether criminology has a future in a decolonial future it's a bit like thinking about for instance the discipline of anthropology right that had the same or similar tensions problems, problematics around the orientalization of whole populations and the legitimization of racialized oppression and you know part of anthropology can't escape that but I think there has been quite a lot of rethinking of the discipline perhaps in the last five decades and I think that's a work that for criminologists arrive a little bit late but I think from different angles there are quite a lot of you know pushbacks that we can think about semiology and starting to look at the idea of crime as the object of criminology and questioning and interrogating that object so there has been a range of strands within the discipline and perhaps from kind of non-Orthodox areas of discipline that have been really healthy in starting this conversation so I think there is a future, there is a conflict of interest here because if we kind of end criminology I lose my job but aside from that I'm thinking in the kind of the debates within anthropology that has happened that perhaps are taking up in similar ways from different perspectives. I think probably when I'm thinking about it I tend to think of it as using the scholarship that's developed around decolonising and drawing decolonising principles that can help us to enforce kind of perspectives to help us to understand it in different ways but possibly not to claim that we can decolonise discipline itself but perhaps that there are principles within the scholarship that we can draw on to kind of undo some of the kind of harms that are perpetuated through our understanding of crime and justice and systems and all of those things. Vanessa, who wants to come in? Maybe I'll just go really quick just to pick up on the anthropology thing so I'm an anthropologist I guess I don't know if I'm in a law faculty but I have the same consternation with anthropology both feeling like in the age that we live in it can hold certain types of questions that legal questions that the law faculties may not be able to hold in an academic sense but then when I think about what Vanessa said to meaningfully decolonise something what would it take for us to actually have integrity around what that means I don't think anthropology even today the critical anthropology could sustain something that we could then call a decolonial anthropology and I'm okay with that because it's also about disciplines and what they mean in higher education so it is called a discipline and it is there to kind of and I don't use this term lightly but police the way that we're allowed to put things out into the world and how seriously they're taken so that is a part of the structures of higher education and I think that's worthy of a broader critique but I think we have to decide whether calling something decolonial is the critique that also will incorporate a critique of the way that we've structured higher education or whether we're using it as a vehicle for reforming from inside in which case we might as well just call it a socio-legal or sociological criticism of the discipline from inside of it which I don't think arises to the level of something that we should call decolonial so it's okay that it cuts off the future of criminology maybe it's just that education and the way that we think about knowledge will be different in that future world and maybe to add on that because I mean obviously all this every discipline has these colonial implications right I mean anthropology to also sociology if we think of the pathologization of the urban poor in Chicago often racialized and how for instance also black sociologists have countered this but also literature the humanities medicine so I think this is a question that is obviously again not addressing criminology and I would rather detach from a term like decolonizing a discipline first of all because disciplines are also as Katherine Kittrick reminds us they have an empire function in terms of how they complementalize knowledge right so interdisciplinarity is so important and that's why we see that in liberation studies for instance interdisciplinarity meaning drawing on specific and grounded forms of knowledge and the various genres they actually by which these knowledges are shaped and disciplining discipline actually cut off that process to even think as entangled for instance or as being in relation so I think there is a crucial paradox when we try to decolonize one discipline because within the process of decolonization we would smash discipline that doesn't mean that people could not have a particular interest but disciplinarity itself is part of colonial knowledge production so this is one thought that comes to mind and I think the other relates to the question of these interrogations often from people in the third world context today so called global south that were actually interrogating anthropology sociology and other like disciplines by also writing back and I think it's important to acknowledge that and it's important to also name this as a form of crucial of radical critique and interrogation but I don't think we have to frame it as decolonization because decolonization is not just uncovering and dismantling something like abolition but it's actually building something and I don't know what the building of criminology for instance in the measures of the liberated future can actually be so if we look at the attempt or the aim or the project is to interrogate the colonial histories and presences of these disciplines I think that's critical and necessary and urgent and people are doing this even like all the people on the panel is like what is our interest and our project and at the same time I think because decolonization is also a multi-temporal project that is also looking towards the future while maybe looking back I think criminology does not really have a huge contribution to play and that's okay because I hope that in the liberated world we would do knowledge production and education completely different and that would also mean abolish the discipline Thanks so much Vanessa Do you have any replies to that or should we go to the audience for some questions If anyone has a question please raise your hand Nick is one of our amazing volunteers at the back is going to I'll get a few But dreadfully it is of course a comment not a question but isn't it the case I know all the panel have kind of said this institutionalized knowledge production for us is so deeply embedded in the will to conquer the world which is really what Vanessa has just been saying but the tricky bit for criminology is it's not only about the conquering but the contemporary administering of the violent world not all disciplines have that Anthropology is a bit off the hook aren't they because all their worst crimes in the past criminology is still doing some pretty horrible violence now so I think I just feel like that that brings some other challenges which are not that we're not all engaged in them and it's easy criminologist but I wonder if we should speak a little bit to each other about how we envisage the role of knowledge production in freeing us all because critique is easier isn't it but the imagining of the next world which I think is neither disciplinary or probably in the institutional structures of knowledge we have have been trying to persuade people that however ugly our current conditions of knowledge production are we do need to know things together the world we want to the reason why our class enemies want to collate all of the culture and history and resources is because there's some power in knowing the world but I wonder if decolonization is the most helpful metaphor language of thinking of what our collective liberatory knowledge production might be given the decolonization is one bit of it to position ourselves in terms of what our repertoire of knowledge production is anyway there's a very long comment I'm sorry I'm never going to do that again let people actually ask questions then thanks so much Gagi we're going to take two more in this round and then thank you and thank you everybody for what you've said so far I suppose in terms of the framing I was thinking kind of is it more useful to kind of use the framing of Angela Davis of kind of is criminal justice obsolete and if not how can we make it so and then kind of beyond that in dealing with broader kind of what we can see of the crimes of colonialism what sort of process of world making can we envision the radical redistribution of wealth and power necessary and reparations without relying on those colonial institutions or international institutions that exist today and kind of how previous attempts to do that have failed partly because they have relied on those like trying to emulate those structures if that makes sense oh and also the Queen is dead there's just a lot of anti-imperial decolonialism which seems to have good evening thank you so much to all the panelists for your very thoughtful and intriguing reflections and questions I have two questions for you much related to the question before me on decolonizing criminal justice I think it forces us to rethink about our conception of safety considering that a lot of our beliefs about safety derive from um colonial threats to white supremacy and so as we are rethinking that I guess my question is how do we advance the conversation to creating a space to interrogate what those new paradigms are for safety and then my second question is a lot of our conversation is around criminal justice which is essentially holding people accountable for our conceptions of what crime is but where in that accountability structure do we hold colonial powers accountable for their crimes should we take some answers from those three questions now and then we'll do another round and while you're thinking yeah I guess it's interesting you say about crimes of colonialism because then J.M. Moore speaks about how useful is criminology when we talk about things like slavery which were legal they weren't criminal in the legal sense so yeah thanks for these questions and comments who wants to kick something feel free to answer any of them I mean I just want to come back because these questions have to do with the question of power ultimately and come back to some of the ideas that have been already talked during the conference around practices of care practices of love at the grass root level radical trauma as a framework to understand individual actions and this is of course super powerful and it's kind of this idea that Vanessa was mentioning about the practices of people ordinary people going about their own life every day it's not a utopia but it's just every day practices and this is why I think the idea of decolonization is more political because it builds on this radical but perhaps you know banal practices in the sense of being practices that people engage with to sustain their everyday life and to connect with each other and to ensure basic levels of safety and livelihood my perhaps interrogation is kind of a pushback around those thinking about the importance of them is you know where is the state right and who think about the state as fundamentally progressive institution right how do we because it seems to me that there is a fragile basis if there is no kind of power in built in this practice I don't know I'm just thinking through my my thoughts in a way but you know it's the question of what do we do with power ultimately there's always going to be we live in a world that no matter how equal it is there's always going to be a power relation so it's the question of what different institutions we recreate to support these practices of care I just want to say really quickly for the on the first part of your other question which was the framework of our is criminal justice obsolete I've always been I mean the book is a great book I've always been confused about the concept of criminal justice being obsolete though because it's serving its purpose it continues to serve its purpose which is to reproduce these colonial kind of frames I think there's a danger in adopting that as a paradigm unless the real impetus behind that is to say you know it's doing damage because I think the active damage that the criminal justice thinking and carceral logic does is maybe better articulated by something approaching you know a radical interrogation of criminal justice but yeah I don't know what to replace kind of this radical I don't know what other words to use other than radical rethinking of criminal justice and then the second part of the second question which was about holding colonial powers to account I think that's a really interesting one because it does go to the point that you know it might not take something that resembles what we think of now as a crime or what's articulated as an international crime under the Rome Statute all these legal you know the legal trappings that we give to it doesn't necessarily map on to and infrequently maps on to a real moral ethical sensibility you know what justice looks like so it might be that those are two different questions it's kind of like we can be we can we can aim to completely unravel criminal justice as we know it and still think of a way to address you know global responsibility for for oppression but I think that's just the big visionary questions like what comes next just kind of falling on from Eddie's point there around the criminal justice system being obsolete and I think there's a and that kind of concept of how we understand justice and I think there's a real tension between kind of the bigger questions around how we conceptualize these things and then the actually very immediate questions about safety and going back to the idea of safety there's the conceptual work to do but there's also the very immediate question of how to keep people safe within a system that we're nowhere near dismantling and kind of you know the day before we all started discussing these issues two miles down the road a young man being shot dead by the Metropolitan Police Chris Cabba and that's not an isolated incident you know this is something that happens frequently perhaps not in the context of shooting but deaths following police contact in this country disproportionately Chris Cabba was a young black man disproportionately affected black men in this country so I think you know we need to think about some of these immediate questions around actual safety as well as how we conceptualize it and that's really where I struggle between the kind of thinking and the ideas that we're talking about in terms of decolonization and abolition and actually I don't expect to see any kind of abolition in any meaningful sense in my lifetime and in fact all of the kind of global politics suggest the opposite at the moment so I think we also have to do some work about thinking about safety in the real world context and how we can engage to interventions that undermine the structures that are already there in ways that keep people safe in the current moment as well as conceptualizing it and thinking about what it might mean in the future because what do we mean by future and I just think that we have to perhaps engage with some of that thinking immediately actually rather than leaving it for a future that possibly none of us in this room will ever see and I think that's where that's kind of my issue in my work kind of figuring that out to figuring out the difference between what props up the system and what keeps people safe and that for me I've kind of reached a point actually where I feel that if if something that we propose in terms of how we minimize harm keep people safe within the current system prevents the next Chris Kaba prevents a young man being traumatized from repeated stop and search has cut somebody's sentence I think those things cannot be seen to undermine abolitionist thinking if actually there is some real world immediate safety for somebody if that's just one person I think that matters as much as the ideas I just wanted to say that because I do have to leave in a couple of minutes so I know that's kind of deviating slightly from the question but I do sometimes feel concerned and I started my area of research very much from an activist perspective so as I do have some concerns that we do need to do the thinking but we also have to do the work of keeping people safe in the current moment and so there's perhaps a danger of over theorizing the future sometimes that takes us away from the current moment and what is happening and what we can do in that moment and we've seen some real great examples of that over the last couple of days as well but we don't necessarily have to call it abolition or decolonizing always because I think the other thing that that does is it excludes conversation it excludes communities, excludes activists because the work that they're doing has been going on for a long time before we were developing a scholarship in the immediate context and they might not recognize it as doing the work of abolition but that's what they have been doing and I just think, yeah, I think sometimes I just have to think perhaps it's all about the immediate context, that was a little bit repetitive towards the end not too, I think we touched on this in our panel on abolition about we heard from Iona Taylor who talks about the role of care in abolition and what she's doing is she's an abolitionist but she's doing things every day from every day abolition and it's not just about a theoretical pipe dream she is practicing abolition by collectively forming the assistance of care so I think theorizing versus practicing or maybe those distinctions on that are really important Vanessa, did you have anything to say about these questions that we heard? Yeah, thank you, great question so really my mouth has been spinning on so many things I think, I mean I would completely agree the people are doing the work and often they are and those of us who consider themselves abolitionists, I think being an abolitionist is always also working with the people and being in solidarity with the people and most of the folks who are doing this are also doing it outside of it so I think that's really important because it was never just, I don't even consider it a university base or a university discussion because it is grounded in practices of liberation historically as well as in the present and I think that's where we see also in these times of multiple crises of racial capitalism and times of catastrophe people are doing the work and I think that's very, very important to also consider the wins, right? It was the global black spring that even inspired so many movements to engage further with abolition like the German context that is actually the context when very much politically grounded and work with a lot of abolitionist groups we have seen so many new movements and new alliances working trans-nationally internationally like really pushing against border regime, castle regime regimes of psychotrization and at the same time we see a lot of like organizing now even with labor movement if we think of the US having so many labor struggles since like we haven't seen this since a long time so I think it's also really important to see the possibilities in these moments that are now emerging and that has so much to do with struggling and defending a politics of life and I think that's what abolition is about right? A lot of people don't call it that way but that's actually what a lot of folks are doing all over the world as Ruth Wilson give often reminds us. In terms of the questions thank you so much for these I find it crucial the question on education because of course we still need to know and I think there are a lot of great historical examples like the freedom schools like the popular learning spaces all around the world often connected to anti-colonial projects where we saw that we have I think models of thinking of education in really different radically different ways as not an institution that actually reproduces the social inequalities and also the nationalist and racist capitalist inequalities were coming up against but rather to really have radical democratic, popular places or structures where people can come together to learn and engage collectively in the process of learning and I'm always inspired when I talk with you about these questions like also what they actually want to learn and I find it inspiring how many even young children or youth I know would say I would like to learn why my friend has asthma I would like to learn how to take care of communities in this situation and in this conjuncture of climate catastrophe not crisis catastrophe like people need skills and knowledge of climate education right it's such a crucial it's such a crucial knowledge project to engage with or children individuals projects that engage with working and respecting the land I think we have so many models out there that could inspire how education could be radically transformed and then maybe one other point and that's on the point of holding accountable because I do know also in the UK and the question of what makes us safe people are really doing the work of listening to future systems uncut and many many other groups and collectives that are already struggling around these questions what makes us really safe right starting from social infrastructure that are not nationalist design but that are actually transnational and that what people actually need to feel safe right but it needs social infrastructure and some and in the abolitionist I would say in terms of abolitionist activists we have debates around what roles should and can state should play in these in these configurations in these projects right I think because I think there are various strands also radical abolitionism some rather drawing maybe on anarchist ideas others rather drawing on socialist ideas I think we have to figure it out obviously it needs kind of infrastructure but I'm also a bit like the connection between the state and nationalism it's so strong that we know we need these global infrastructures which could also be maybe a form of culminating or we have struggled through this right and then in terms of the question of accountability thank you so much for that question I think it's definitely important to continue and to even scale up the resistance of challenging and holding accountable the colonial former colonial powers and particularly the major capitalist states of the north if we just think for instance of what's of the flooding in Pakistan like we have to hold the state accountable in terms of climate reparations right now and I think this is also an abolitionist part of abolition right as Dusseldorf and Gilmour often says abolition is red and it's green and it's international and of course with this comes the resistance to state and also the struggle to hold states accountable particularly in this time of continuing crisis Thanks so much Vanessa and I'm really sorry I would have loved to take more questions but I'm being told that there are 150 people waiting outside for an event at 7 turns out so I have very very strict turnarounds for crammed events planning but I just want to thank all of our speakers one more time Anna, Eddie, Lisa and Vanessa for such an engaging and wonderful talk and thanks to the audience


Hey, hey, Si and I for dinner. How are you doing? What's your opinion on Anarchy? I think we should all govern ourselves. There's no doubt about it. The smaller the government, the better. Right? We need bare minimum. Bare minimum centralized collaborative organization to take care of some of the logistics that we as humanity need to do to go beyond our limitations that are bound based on this planet. There should not be any governments that tell individual human beings how they should or should not live their lives. They can pass laws, as a collective we can pass laws. You cannot murder people, right? I think that's legitimate, right? So if you murder someone, then the collective can hold you accountable, but the collective has no right to tell you what you can eat, what you can read, what you can think, who you can talk to. They cannot, they should not be able to mandate what you can eat, what you need to consume, what type of chemical experiment you have to be a part of, right? We all need to be more responsible for our own lives.