June 8, 2023
17:00-18:30

Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford

Please note: that the recording for this event is now available here

Efforts to decolonise criminology have not always foregrounded the role of the state in disrupting and entrenching intersecting inequalities. My multi-sited ethnography of Britain’s emerging ‘modern slavery’ jurisprudence in relation to ‘county lines’ drug trafficking shows why such an analytical task is called for: here, the same government that has driven up levels of inequality, implemented austerity politics and pursued a ‘war on gangs’ has also invented some of its most marginalised constituencies as victims and modern slaves. Drug dealers involved in the street level economy of heroin and crack cocaine linking cities to smaller towns – commonly referred to as county lines – are no longer treated as criminals to be punished but as slaves in need of saving. Drawing on fifteen years of ethnographic research on Britain’s marginalised council estates that are home to many of the Black and mixed race young men now discovered as slaves, and triangulating this with an ethnography of Crown courts, government offices and police stations, I analyse what happens when criminals are rethought as victims. While those tasked with the role of identifying and responding to ‘modern slavery’ come with genuine intentions, they struggle to distinguish victims from perpetrators, slaves from their masters. Ultimately, my analysis questions the idea that the politics of redemption unfolding in austerity Britain constitutes a departure from the much theorised ‘punitive turn’. Rather we can think of it as an instance of pacification conducted in the moral register of slavery – not to address empire’s racial and classed afterlives but to govern Britain’s disenfranchised populations as the enemy from within.

May 9, 2023
18:00- 19:30

University of St Gallen

This was the inaugural lecture for the Chair of British Cultures at the University of Sankt Gallen

You can read the official university announcement about Insa’s appointment here.

18 April 2023
14:00-15:30 London time

Event took place via Zoom. You can find out more / subscribe for updates about the group here

There are two very different conversations about slavery now, one on “modern slavery” that antislavery campaigners and NGOs largely drive, the other on the “afterlives of slavery” driven by activists and scholars who think critically about race and colonialism. This study group is interested in both conversations and the connections between them. The launch event brings together a panel of researchers whose work highlights problems with the discourse of “modern slavery” in several different contexts.

Chair: Julia O’Connell Davidson

Panelists

Angelo Martins Junior on Sub-Saharan African migrants

Insa Koch on county lines in the UK

Pankhuri Agarwal on bonded labour in India

Samuel Okyere on working children in Ghana

Sharmila Parmanand on sex work in the Philippines

March 28, 2023
16.15 Uhr bis 18.00 Uhr

Universität Luzern, Raum 3.B47

At a time when Black Lives Matter has brought the legacies of transatlantic slavery to the global headlines, the British state has discovered slavery of a different kind: the evils of ‘modern slavery’. ‘Modern slavery’ has been defined as an urgent contemporary problem facing domestic citizens on ‘home ground’. This is nowhere more evident than in the case of ‘county lines’, the name given to the street level drugs economy of heroin and crack cocaine that is connecting larger cities to coastal and market towns. The runners of this illicit trade – working-class, white and black young men from marginalised social housing estates – are no longer treated as criminals but as ‘modern slaves’ in need of saving. Yet, the making of ‘modern slaves’ hinges upon fraught processes of techno-moral governance which divorce individuals’ de jure vulnerability from the state’s de facto production of classed and racial domination. Thus, in the name of saving the vulnerable, the state expands its remit of control into the most intimate realms of people’s lives. What is more, by distinguishing those who are considered worthy of legal victimhood from others who are not, it has reinvented the figure of the ‘modern slave master’ in the body of the male black working-class youth. Far from constituting a departure from punitive modes of governance, the politics of victimhood entrenches deep seated inequalities while further distancing the state from the afterlives of Empire in postcolonial austerity Britain.