The Racial Violence Hub

Video Library

The hub is committed to the creation of pedagogical tools that enable professors and students to make critical connections between race, state violence, and terror. Resources include interviews with leading scholars which analyze and reveal the racial underpinnings of modern states.

Key Concept: Disposability

Dr. Sherene Razack describes “disposability” as a key concept in her work. She answers the following: What is disposability as a concept? Who does the settler state target as “disposable”? How is disposability understood broadly? How does the concept of disposability impact Indigenous peoples? How is disposability understood geographically? How does gender relate to disposability? What is the relationship between disposability, the sex industry, and Indigenous women? How does disposability operate in the sexual contract? What is the role of the law with respect to disposability? How did the law treat Cindy Gladue as disposable?

Key Concept: Gendered Racial Violence

Dr. Sarah Haley, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Gender Studies at UCLA and author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, discusses gendered racial terror. She answers the following: how did the chain gang & violence against black women establish white supremacy? How does the gendering & “ungendering” of black women function in the prison (Spillers)? How does violence against black women establish the racial social order? How does she understand black women’s refusals to be objects of terror? How does anti-carceral feminism inform the study of racial violence?

Key Concept: The Security State

Dr. Inderpal Grewal, Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, discusses key concepts in her newest publication, Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First century America. She describes her labeling the United States a security state, discusses how empire comes into operation through patriarchy, and explains how security becomes masked as a humanitarian project. She touches on the four figures in her book: the security mom, humanitarians, security feminists and the shooter and discusses their significance before she outlines the central takeaways of her text. 

2018 Plenary: Gendering Anti-Mexican Violence

Dr. Monica Muñoz Martinez, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brown University, discusses her work in Latinx studies, immigration, histories of violence, histories of policing, and public memory in US History. Martinez is the primary investigator for Mapping Violence, a digital project that documents histories of racial violence in Texas. She is a founding member of the non-profit organization Refusing to Forget that calls for a public reckoning with racial violence in Texas.

2020 Panel: Feminist Scholars on Policing and Empire

In the wake of a global movement sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, there is an urgent need for feminists to deepen our understanding of the connections between the violence of police and the racial capitalist order policing sustains globally. Featuring:

2021-22 Series Opening: Traffic in Asian Women: Categorical Violence and Innumerable Loss

Dr. Laura Hyun Yi Kang is Professor and former Chair of the Department Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Traffic in Asian Women  and Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. Kang analyzes the establishment, suppression, forgetting, and illegibility of the Japanese military “comfort system” (1932–1945). Kang traces how “Asian women” have been alternately distinguished and effaced as subjects of the traffic in women, sexual slavery, and violence against women. 

The Racial Politics of Settler State Genocide in Palestine

  • Dr. Vadasaria’s work asks: What explanatory power does the concept of race and racism yield for the question of Palestine? Further, upon what epistemic centers should critiques of racism be used to understand the centrality of land struggle in Palestine? Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work explores the role of swarming, as a network of interlocking violent collisions against the colonized, and its genocidal ramification on Palestinians in Occupied Jerusalem. Featuring:

    • Dr. Shaira Vadasaria, Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies in the Sociology Department, the School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburg
    • Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Global Chair in Law, Queen Mary University of London 
    • Commentator: Dr. Lana Tatour

Genocide Management: Carceral Reformism, Policing, Sexual Violence and the Role of Law in North America

  • Dr. Rodríguez situates the politics and consequences of reform and reformism within the US and modern hemispheric policing regimes. Dr. Razack’s work considers whether sexual annihilation changes how we understand raciality in the law and the spaces that law preserves for genocide. Featuring:

    • Dr. Dylan Rodríguez, Professor at the University of California, Riverside and Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society
    • Dr. Sherene H. Razack, Distinguished Professor, Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, UCLA

Imaginaries of Dissent: South Asia

Dr. Arondekar’s work asks: How do subaltern imaginaries of dissent rupture the incorporation of caste and sexuality into the Hindutva/homonationalism corpus? How can such histories of sexuality be forms of gathering and feminist hope, instead of forces of dispersal and attenuation? Dr. Bhuyan, Azad, and Bordoloi’s paper examines the legal and administrative procedures by which an estimated 1.9 million residents in the state of Assam, India have been excluded from the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) and thus are at risk for de facto statelessness. Featuring:

  • Dr. Anjali Arondekar, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, founding Co-Director, Center for South Asian Studies, UC Santa Cruz
  • Dr. Rupaleem Bhuyan, Associate Professor in Social Work, University of Toronto
  • Abdul Kalam Azad, PhD candidate, Athena Institute, VU Amsterdam.
  • Anupol Bordoloi, United Nations Development Program
  • Commentator: Dr. Inderpal Grewal

“Stories of dreadful iniquities and unutterable suffering:” Feminist Voices on Violence, Memory and Displacement

This presentation focuses on Armenian feminist writer, journalist, educator, and activist Arshaguhi Teotig and her monograph Amis Me I Giligia, a historic text testifying to the aftermath of the 1909 Cilician massacres against Armenians. Dr. Bilal raises questions about theorizing Teotig’s indigenous feminist voice in relation to the genocidal/colonial structures and feminist silences in Turkey today. Featuring:

  • Dr. Melissa Bilal, Associate Director of the Armenian Music Program, Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA

Genocidal Violence in the Americas

Dr. Posocco’s work examines the case of sexual and labor slavery in armed conflict known as ‘Sepur Zarco’ and focuses on “‘Bodying forth’ as tied to performative forensic imaginaries and forensic aesthetics in the courtroom, the broader Guatemalan body politic, and beyond. Dr. Rinaldi’s presentation engages with an archive of prisoner writing and visual art to show how the Canadian correctional system functions as a tool of settler colonial governance. Featuring:

Land, Climate Change, and Genocidal Violence in North America and South Asia

Dr. Dhillon’s talk explores the current militarization and securitization of the Canadian northern border in the wake of climate change and the accelerated melting of the Arctic and closely examines historical and contemporary patterns of settler colonial violence and border control in the region. Dr. Zia’s work traces how the Indian settler-colonial policies in Kashmir are poised for de-development of the region in order to further dispossess the Kashmiri people and complete India’s neocolonial project in Kashmir. Featuring:

Feeling Genocide: Matrifocality and Black Church Arson

Dr. Todne Thomas is Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University. She has co-edited New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions  with Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman. Her latest book, Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality  explores the internal dynamics of community life among black evangelicals, who are often overshadowed by white evangelicals and the common equation of the “Black Church” with an Afro-Protestant mainline. Her current research examines the familial and spiritual experiences of black evangelicals and the neoliberal displacement of black sacred space.