Race and Law in the Time of Covid-19

Virtual Event (please sign up via Eventbrite )

Organisers: Dr Brenna Bhandar (SOAS University of London) & Dr Vanja Hamzić (SOAS University of London)

Speakers: Professor Tendayi Achiume (UCLA Law), Dr Grietje Baars (City, University of London), Professor Ratna Kapur (Queen Mary University of London), Abeera Khan (SOAS University of London), Dr Rob Knox (University of Liverpool), Dr Kojo Koram (Birkbeck, University of London) & Dr Vidya Kumar (University of Leicester)

From the disproportionate rates of illness and death amongst people of colour, to the risks faced by the high numbers of racialised people in frontline work, Covid-19 has shown how contrary to ‘not discriminating’ between people, long-standing inequalities are rendered ever starker during pandemic times. Contemporaneously, existing and new networks of care and numerous calls to act and think otherwise suggest that there is potential for radical change during and in the aftermath of this pandemic.

In the last weeks, the global Black Lives Matter movement has reignited discussions on police violence, the indiscriminate killing of Black, racialised and trans and non-binary people at the hands of private individuals and the state, and radical levels of inequality that have been revealed and compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic in equal measure. Abolitionist calls to defund the police, to redistribute state funds for mental health and social welfare, for education, have entered the mainstream. In the UK, demands to reckon with the legacies of British slavery and colonisation have resurfaced again. This is all happening at a moment when institutions of higher education are under sustained attack with hundreds of workers facing redundancy and degraded working conditions, which will surely impact people of colour disproportionately.

We ask: what law’s got to do with this, both as an imperial tool of racial discrimination and as a platform potentially open to new forms of radical subversion?

Note: This event will take place on Zoom . Please register for a 'ticket' via Eventbrite and leave your full name and email address. An hour prior to the time of the event, the organisers will send you an email containing your individual Zoom access details.