Projects
The Racial Violence Hub
This site creates a virtual community of feminist critical race scholars, artists, activists, and organizations working on issues of racial violence and the state. The Hub’s goal is to foster research, develop critical pedagogies and share resources for anti-violence practices around state violence against Indigenous and racialized peoples. The Hub emphasizes the race line that runs through state violence and terror.
Questions taken up include: How should feminists respond to racial violence? What is the connection between moments of extraordinary racial violence and our everyday world? How do we understand violence at specific sites, e.g. carceral sites, schools, streets, borders? How do individuals come to participate in, remain indifferent to or approve of violence? What is the role of hegemonic masculinity and femininity in these processes? Subordinate gender and sexualities? How do states legally authorize acts of racial violence and how do legal narratives operate to secure social consent to acts of racial terror? How do Indigenous and racialized communities resist state violence?
The RVHub offers an opportunity to explore these questions in collaboration with other scholars, artists and activists. Hub activities include an annual workshop, the ongoing development of a closed virtual network that serves as a repository for shared research and teaching resources, online graduate courses, and publications.
Race & Deaths in Custody
We invite users to consider these deaths in custody as racial violence. This website, intended for activists, scholars, teachers and students, promotes a critical race analysis that informs, as it highlights, resistance.
Deaths in custody, when considered in terms of who dies and how often, unmistakably present a systematized and racialized system of what Zygmant Bauman described (for refugee deaths) as waste disposal: regular police shootings of Black and Indigenous men and women; the disproportionate deaths of Indigenous people and refugees in detention either from neglect or excessive use of force; in nearly all cases, a profound lack of state or official accountability.
To see these deaths as a single, broad, multi-faceted and interconnected phenomenon of the disposability of racialized surplus populations requires making a case for its systematized, racial and global underpinnings. To do so, this website is organized around the concept of racial infrastructure. Each case study offers glimpses into the systems that produce and sustain the deaths of Indigenous and racialized people, such as legal and policy collaborations between states, and a shared repository of racial, professional and scientific knowledges that obscure police use of force and state neglect, instead highlighting disease and dysfunction of those in custody.