Robyn Maynard: Abolition and/as World-Building

Inspired by Ruth Wilson Gilmore's assertion that "abolition is a presence," this lecture attends to the world-making capacities of abolitionist struggle, focusing on past and present Black-led freedom-making practices that at once challenge the features of multi-sited anti-Blackness and bring forth new forms of lived justice.

About the speaker

Robyn Maynard is the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Fernwood 2017), and a finalist for the The Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. The book, her first, is a CBC, Toronto Star and Globe and Mail national bestseller in its fourth printing. It was designated as one of the “best 100 books of 2017” by the Hill Times, and is the winner of the 2017 Errol Morris Book Award.

Maynard has published writing in The Washington Post, World Policy Journal, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, Canadian Woman Studies journal and Maisonneuve magazine.

Her writing on policing, criminalization, gender and anti-Black racism is taught widely in universities across Canada and the United States. Robyn has been a part of grassroots movements against racial profiling, police violence, detention and deportation for over a decade.

The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC), and the Department of Geography, Planning, & Environment, as well as the Decolonial Perspectives and Practices Hub and the Black Feminist Futures Working Group.