This workshop emerged out of a desire to bring together feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist scholars whose work begins with the recognition, so profoundly underscored by the social movements Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, that the lives of Indigenous, Black and racialized peoples have not mattered for many states. If Indigenous, Black and racialized people are often declared expendable, it is important to understand how disposability is organized. Populations deemed surplus and outside of the category of the human are increasingly penned in, confined to prisons, to deathworlds and to spaces of the deepest marginality, and marked for death in those spaces. Such evictions from the modern are profoundly gendered. In this workshop, participants explore the theme of disposability exploring the multiple modalities of terror required to evict Indigenous, Black and racialized peoples from a common humanity. Aiming to challenge paradigms of injury that see the dehumanization of the Indigenous, the African and the racialized other as a relic of an earlier age, participants explore how such practices are ongoing and constitute the modern. We explore how to imagine and create an alternative future. Working in a collaborative mode, we seek to examine how our own scholarly tools and practices can install what it sets out to challenge.
Opening Keynote
Dr. Charles A. Sepulveda, (Tongva and Acjachemen)
Assistant Professor, The University of Utah, Department of Ethnic Studies
“Racial/Colonial Violence Against the Tongva”
Panel: The Politics of the Visual
Dr. Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Gender Studies Department, UCLA
Paper Title: “Razing Landscapes which Mark Us for Death: Indigenous Documentary Films”
Recommended Reading:
- Goeman, Mishuana. “Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place: The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie.” Theorizing Native Studies. Eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
- —. “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment.” Native Studies Keywords. Eds. Smith, et al. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015.
Dr. Kimberly Juanita Brown,
Assistant Professor, Mount Holyoke College, English and Africana Studies
Paper Title: “Mortevivum/Sempervivum”
Dr. Sunera Thobani, Associate Professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, University of British Columbia
Paper Title: “Racial Horrors, Westernizing Desires: The Visual Politics of Empire”
Recommended Reading:
- Pugliese, Joseph. “Transcendence in the Animal: Guantanamo’s Regime of Indefinite Detention and the Open in the Cage.” Villanova Law Review 60.3 (2015): 573-626.
Panel: Terroristic Death
Dr. Alicia Camacho, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale and the Associate Master for Ezra Stiles College
Paper Title: “X-Ray Technologies at Border Checkpoints, State Optics, and the Imaginary of Lawful Violence”
Recommended Reading:
- Camacho, A. S. “Hailing the Twelve Million: U.S. Immigration Policy, Deportation, and the Imaginary of Lawful Violence.” Social Text 28.4 (2010): 1-24.
Dr. Shannon Speed (Chickasaw), Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, Professor in Gender Studies and Anthropology, UCLA
Paper Title: “Indigenous Women Migrants: Navigating the Shadowy Space of Neoliberal Multicriminalism”
Dr. Sherene Razack, Distinguished Professor and the Penney Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies, Department of Gender Studies, UCLA
Paper Title: “Terroristic Death and the Prison”
Recommended Reading:
- Razack, Sherene. “Gendering Disposability.” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 28.2 (2016): 285-307.
- —. “Racial Terror: Torture and Three Teenagers in Prison.” Borderlands 13.1 (2014): 1-27.
Panel: Sovereign Violence
Dr. Inderpal Grewal, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, Affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program, Yale
Paper Title: “‘The Shooter’: White Racial Sovereignty, Normative Citizenship, and the State”
Dr. Leslie Thielen-Wilson, Assistant Professor in Gender Equality & Social Justice, Faculty of Arts & Science at Nipissing University, North Bay
Paper Title: “Trespassing: Settler Violence in the Time of Reconciliation”
Recommended Reading:
- Thielen-Wilson, Leslie. “Troubling the Path to Decolonization: Indian Residential School Case Law, Genocide, and Settler Illegitimacy.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 29.2 (2014): 181-19.
Dr. Kali Nicole Gross, Professor of African American Studies, Wesleyan University
Paper Title: “Murderess: African American Womanhood, Violence, and Sovereignty”
Recommended Reading:
- Mbembé, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40.
- Painter, Nell I. Soul Murder and Slavery. Baylor: Markham Press Fund, 1995.
Panel: Disposable Muslims
Dr. Sherene Seikaly, Associate Professor, Department of History, UC Santa Barbara
Paper Title: “Are We All Muslim? The Promise and Challenge of Solidarity”
Dr. Leti Volpp, The Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, UC Berkeley
Dr. Gada Mahrouse, Associate Professor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University
Paper Title: “Moderate Emotional Responses to Extremist Violence: Muslim Expressions of Gratitude and Hope after Quebec City Mosque Shooting”
Panel: Slow Death
Dr. Jaskiran Dhillon, Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Anthropology at The New School for Social Research
Paper Title: “NODAPL: Standing Rock, Indigenous Resurgence, and Scales of Colonial Violence”
Recommended Reading:
- Dhillon, Jaskiran. “Indigenous Youth Are Building a Climate Justice Movement by Targeting Colonialism.” Truthout. June 20, 2016.
- Dhillon, Jaskiron, et al. “The Standing Rock Syllabus Project.” Public Seminar Oct. 21 2016.
- Stark Kiiwetinepinesiik, Heidi. “Criminal Empire: The Making of the Savage in a Lawless Land.” Theory & Event 19.4 (2016): 1-17.
Dr. Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law, Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare, Hebrew University of
Jerusalem
Paper Title: “At the Limits of the Human: Reading Childhood from Palestine”
Recommended Reading:
- Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. “Clowns in Palestine Cry: The Occupied Bodies and Lives of Jerusalem’s Children.” Journal of Palestine Studies (2016): 13-23.
- —. “Infiltrated Intimacies: The Case of Palestinian Returnees.” Feminist Studies 42.1 (2016): 166-193.
- —. “The Occupation of the Senses: The Prosthetic and Aesthetic of State Terror.” British Journal of Criminology (2016): 1-22.
Dr. Carmela Murdocca, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, York University
Paper Title: “Lives on the Line: Racial Violence, Humanitarian Governance and Reparative Projects”
Recommended Reading:
- Murdocca, Carmela. “Visual Legalities of Race and Reparations.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 29.2 (2014): 219-234.
Panel: Solidarities Amidst Violence
Dr. Malinda S. Smith, Full Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta
Paper Title: ‘The Fierce Urgency of Now’: Confronting Racial Violence and the Ivory Tower
Recommended Reading:
- Smith, Malinda S. “Africa, 9/11, and the Temporality and Spatiality of Race and Terror.” At the Limits of Justice. Eds. Suvendrini Perera and Sherene Razack. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.
- —. “Commissioning “Founding Races” and Settler Colonial Narratives.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 46.2 (2014): 141-149.
Dr. Grace Kyungwon Hong, Professor of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies, UCLA
Paper Title: “Strife and Solidarity in the Struggle: U.S. Women of Color Reimagine Global Decolonization”
Dr. Aisha Finch, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies, UCLA
Title: Metaphysical Dilemmas: Black Women, Violent Exploitation, and the Possibilities of Freedom
Paper Title: “Metaphysical Dilemmas: Black Women, Violent Exploitation, and the Possibilities of Freedom”
Recommended Reading:
- Camp, Stephanie M. H. “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861.” The Journal of Southern History 68.3 (2002): 533-572.
Closing Plenary: Possibilities for the Virtual Hub
Dr. Sherene Razack, Distinguished Professor and the Penney Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies, Department of Gender Studies, UCLA
Sarah Montoya, Doctoral Candidate, Gender Studies, UCLA