This is an intergenerational, transnational academic virtual event on race, law and the global pandemic, discussing the potential for radical change.

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?

Speakers:

1. Tendayi Achiume (UCLA Law)

2. Grietje Baars (City, University of London)

3. Ratna Kapur (Queen Mary University of London)

4. Abeera Khan (SOAS University of London)

5. Rob Knox (University of Liverpool)

6. Kojo Koram (Birkbeck, University of London)

7. Vidya Kumar (University of Leicester)