Join us on Wednesday September 13 (7PM AEST / 10AM GMT) to discuss Abolition Revolution with authors Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean. They will be in conversation with Maria Giannacoupoulos.
About the book:
George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis triggered abolitionist shockwaves. Calls to defund the police found receptive ears around the world. Shortly after, Sarah Everard’s murder by a serving police officer compounded these calls in Britain. But to abolish the interlocking systems of police, prison and border power, we must confront the legacy of Empire.
Abolition Revolution is a historical, theoretical and practical guide to revolutionary abolitionist politics in Britain. The authors trace the evolution of policing and criminalisation from their colonial roots to their contemporary expression, as found in ‘Prevent’ and drug laws targeting Black communities. They also draw out a rich history of grassroots resistance, from the founding of the Notting Hill Carnival in 1959 to transformative responses to repressive community policing today.
With a forceful critique of carceral feminism, alongside an exposition of how these systems fail as a response to social dynamics such as crime, the book offers a compelling and grounded vision for abolition that takes us away from punitivity from above and into community based forms of accountability from below.
About the Speakers:
Aviah Sarah Day is a Black community organiser with Sisters Uncut and Hackney Cop Watch. The rest of her time is spent lecturing in Criminology at Birkbeck, University of London, organising in her trade union branch, and reflecting on how to build workers’ power through anarcho-syndicalism.
Shanice Octavia McBean is a Black writer and activist in Sisters Uncut. She grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham, before moving to Tottenham. Describing herself as a revolutionary and Afro-Marxist, she has also organised in anti-racist groups and trade unions.
Maria Giannacopoulos is a Greek-Australian academic of Law and Justice at UNSW’s School of Law, Society and Criminology working on decolonising approaches to law and criminology. She is currently writing a book titled Colonial Debtscapes: Austerity, Sovereignty, Law which counterposes the highly visible Greek debt drama with the continuing yet invisible sovereign debt crisis of colonial Australia to argue that in both debtscapes law operates to demand payment for or to conceal debt resulting in the extension of colonial power.