A One-Day Symposium hosted by UNSW Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice

The Deathscapes: Mapping Racial Violence in Settler Colonial Societies (2016-2020) project presents new understandings of the practices and technologies, both global and domestic, that enable state violence against racialised groups in settler states. Within the violent frame of the settler colonial state, centred on Indigenous deaths as a form of elimination and the consequent expropriation of unceded Indigenous Country, the deaths of other racialised bodies within the nation and at its borders—including Black, migrant, and refugee deaths—reaffirm the assertion of settler sovereignty. To focus on Indigenous deaths and other racialised deaths is not to collapse the differences between racialised groups but to bring into focus some of the shared strategies, policies, practices and rationales of state violence deployed in the governance of these different groups.

In this one-day symposium, we ask speakers to address how the key issues raised by the Deathscapes project continue to resonate across different Indigenous nations, settler geographies and the larger transnational asylum seeker and refugee deathscapes. We also ask speakers to reflect on the transnational dimensions of the relations of power that shape contemporary deathscapes; on the lines of shared activism and solidarity that continue to challenge and resist the lethal practices of the settler state and so-called “post-colonial” states; and on urgent moves towards the abolition of the settler prison-industrial-border complex.