Abolition and the University
Co-organized with Abolition Worlds
Facilitated by Allan E.S. Lumba
Please join us for a virtual conversation on anti-carceral movements and the university with professor and author Dr. Dan Berger.
Dan Berger is professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell and coordinator of the Washington Prison History Project. A historian of activism, Black Power, and the carceral state, his most recent book is Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey.
This event is sponsored by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture.
This event will take place on Zoom.
Organizers
Allan E. S. Lumba is a cultural and social historian of Asia and the Pacific. He engages questions of racial capitalism, imperialism, and decolonization. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Washington. His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, charts the historical intersections and tensions between race, knowledge, sovereignty, and the capitalist market in the United States and the Philippines. He is currently at work on an infrastructural history of sinking cities around Asia and the Pacific, titled “Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City.” This new project has recently received funding from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University (2024) and the SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2024-2026).
Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Concordia University
Balbir K. Singh is Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice, as well as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She is the Director of Dark Opacities Lab, a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy. Using anti-colonial methods of reading and sensing, Singh builds on theories of opacity in her in-progress manuscript “Militant Bodies: Racial/Religious Opacity and Minoritarian Self-Defense,” which takes a materialist feminist approach to explore questions that center post-9/11 racial and religious hyper-policing of Muslim and Sikh bodies. Currently, she serves as Reviews Editor for Art Journal and is part of the Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Colelctive. Singh has been published in journals including Sikh Formations, Critical Ethnic Studies, QED, Surveillance and Society, Rhizomes, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Spectra, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas.
This working group seeks to explore the internationalist histories and global possibilities of abolitionist intellectual and social movements. We frame our questions from Angela Davis’ findings that the prison industrial complex was historically rooted in colonial and imperial forms of a global order, Ruth Gilmore and Katherine McKittrick’s insight that carcerality remains crucial to present-day racial capitalist accumulation, and Harsha Walia’s notion that imperial displacement and migrant mass detention remains the true origins of the so-called “border crisis.”
Allan E. S. Lumba is a cultural and social historian of Asia and the Pacific. He engages questions of racial capitalism, imperialism, and decolonization. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Washington. His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, charts the historical intersections and tensions between race, knowledge, sovereignty, and the capitalist market in the United States and the Philippines. He is currently at work on an infrastructural history of sinking cities around Asia and the Pacific, titled “Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City.” This new project has recently received funding from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University (2024) and the SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2024-2026).
