Join us to celebrate the launch of Border Abolition now with editors and contributors Simon Campbell, Kathryn Medien and Joel White.
Borders must be abolished. Borders produce and are produced by carceral, racist, classist, sexist, and xenophobic regimes.
Border Abolition Now demands transformative politics to dismantle these systems of oppression. Taking the key tenets of abolitionism and applying them to the debate around borders, the contributors bring a rich understanding of the history and context of carceral and policing systems. Heralding from different countries, disciplines, and activist struggles, they show how their theories are being realized through feminist decolonial praxis, and how personal experiences of borders and organizing against them inform abolition.
Expanding the debate to areas including asylum, detention camps, mobility, and climate change, Border Abolition Now offers new tools for anyone working to defend freedom of movement for all.
Simon Campbell is an activist-researcher focusing on border infrastructures, state violence and abolitionist struggles against the border regime. In recent years, Simon has been part of a number of solidarity groups engaged in documenting pushbacks at European borders, including the Border Violence Monitoring Network. He is reading a joint MA in South Eastern European Studies at the University of Belgrade and University of Graz.
Kathryn Medien is a Lecturer in Sociology at The Open University. Her research draws on feminist and anti-colonial social theory to explore the colonial and imperial politics of state violence and resistance to it. She has been published in the Sociological Review, Theory, Culture and Society, Current Sociology and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Joel White is a writer, activist and researcher. He gained his PhD at Edinburgh University Social Anthropology with a dissertation entitled 'Holding Space: Friendship, Care and Carcerality in the UK Immigration Detention System.' He is committed to the importance of combining campaigning and academic work where possible and works closely with a number of groups in Glasgow that organise around mutual aid, migrant solidarity and anti-racism. He has also been involved with the Arika and Counterflows festivals, occasionally does music and journalistic writing, and helps run a small record label called GLARC.
The event will be chaired Gracie Mae Bradley. Gracie is a writer, policy expert and campaigner concerned with what it means for people to live flourishing lives. She is co-author of Against Borders: The Case for Abolition, among many other writings.
As always tickets are free but must be booked in advance and you can pre-order your copy here with 10% discount applied at checkout