Thursday, February 11, 2020   4:00-5:30pm

“Abolition & the Ivory Tower: Cops Off Campus, Cops Off the Planet & Some Lessons from Black Study”

SA Smythe - University of California, Los Angeles

Crystal M. Fleming, PhD candidate in English, Respondent

In today’s climate of abolition—abolish ICE, abolish the police, not to mention drawing on the tradition of the abolitionists of the 19th century—and with a rise in open and unapologetic expressions of white supremacy, it is perhaps a good time to retake up the questions raised by The Society for New Abolitionists, and see where Abolitionist Futures meets a much longer tradition of abolition and offer a model of praxis for whiteness studies and antiracist education. 

Zoom Registration is required.Registration deadline February 10.Please click here to register.

To download the event poster, click here.

Faculty Reading Group: "Global Carceral States and Networks: Racialized Policing, Mass Incarceration, and Migrant Detentions"

Tuesdays during Fall 2020

Co-led by Robert T. Chase/History and Zebulon  Vance Miletsky/Africana Studies

Discussing how racialized policing, mass incarceration, and migrant detentions and deportations constitute what the French theorist Michel Foucault named as a “carceral network”. Supported by CAS in collaboration with the Center for Changing Systems of Power. Zoom Registration is required.  Click her for details.

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and History at Stony Brook University. His articles have appeared in the Trotter Review, the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, and the Journal of Urban History. His book, Before Busing: Boston’s Long Freedom Movement in the ‘Cradle of Liberty’ is forthcoming by the University of North Carolina Press in February 2021.

Robert T. Chase is an is a scholar of 20th century American history whose research fields include U.S. politics and state-building; civil rights, Black Power and the Chicana/o Movement; and, the history of policing, incarceration, and migrant detention. His two books are We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (UNC 2020) and Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigrant Detentions, and Resistance (UNC 2019).

SA Smythe is a poet, translator, and scholar currently working as an assistant professor in the Departments of Gender Studies and African American Studies at UCLA. Smythe’s first book manuscript, provisionally titled Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean, studies literary and other cultural responses to colonial border regimes, citizenship, and other relational aspects of inequality and oppression between Europe (in particular, Italy), East Africa, and the Mediterranean. Smythe also engages black trans poetics as critic and practitioner politically invested in otherwise black belonging and nonbinary reading praxes. Forthcoming in that vein is a full collection of poetry, titled proclivity, which centers on a familial history of black migration (across Britain, Costa Rica, and Jamaica), trans embodiment, and emancipation. Smythe is also the editor of Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity, a special issue of Postmodern Culture. Smythe is a coordinating committee member of the faculty wing of the California Cops Off Campus Coalition (UCFTP) and organizes with other abolitionist/anti-carceral groups both across Turtle Island and in Europe.

Crystal M. Fleming is Associate Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies and Associate Faculty in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. She has conducted research on racism and anti-racism across the globe, working on empirical projects in the United States, France, Brazil and Israel.  Her latest book, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy and the Racial Divide, combines memoir, critical race theory, social commentary and satire to debunk common misconceptions about racism. Her first book, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France, builds on her award-winning dissertation and marshals ethnographic data, archival research and in-depth interviews with French activists and descendants of slaves to examine how commemorations of enslavement and abolition both challenge and reproduce the racial order. Her scholarship appears in journals such as The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Poetics, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race and Mindfulness. Her essays and op-eds can be found in popular venues like Vox, The Root, Everyday Feminism, Black Agenda Report, Black Perspectives and Huffington Post.