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We are live! Will also be live tweeting here in this thread so please feel free to follow along. #WeCanBuild https://twitter.com/decrimfutures/status/1306294240016621573
Becka Hudson @becka_sh is our host, currently introducing our speakers - @KojoKoram, @graciemaybe, Stella Dadzie and @NadineElEnany. Thank you all for being here with us!
Resources and/or books that are referenced throughout the panel will be collected into a document and sent out to everyone who has registered, along with discount codes for Stella and Nadine's books.
Becka Hudson @becka_sh is a researcher, particularly on personality disorders (PDs). PDs are estimated at 13 to 14% in the UK, but up to 80% of the UK prison population are diagnosed with a form of personality disorder. Even conservative estimates put it around 60%.
Having a PD diagnosis is a double-edged sword [for prisoners]. It is often one of the few ways you might be able to access mental health support [but] comes with this conception of risk - a kind of inherent risk that is inside the person.
So, what has any of this got to do with imperial history?
At the height of the British Empire, psychiatry itself was tested and forced as part of the colonising project and was deeply tied up to colonial confinement, imprisonment, and the control of populations.
At the height of the British Empire, psychiatry itself was tested and forced as part of the colonising project and was deeply tied up to colonial confinement, imprisonment, and the control of populations.
Nadine: UK immigration law and policy is not only shaped by British colonialism - which is often the way it's talked about - it is itself an extension of colonialism.
@NadineElEnany #WeCanBuild
@NadineElEnany #WeCanBuild
Nadine: Windrush scandal provoked an outcry, but how some activists and scholars responded was not in line with abolitionist goals. It recognise[d] white British people as being the rightful holders of British citizenship, while everybody else is a guest.
Nadine: I try in the book to present what I call a 'counter-pedagogy' to immigration law that will begin to get us to think and speak differently about who is entitled to resources, to understand Britain itself being the spoils of empire.
Stella Dadzie: I found it very interesting [working at the Mayor's Commission for African Heritage, looking at heritage orgs in London] that many of the people we spoke to really did fail to make that connection about black history, as if it came from another planet.
#WeCanBuild
#WeCanBuild
Stella: I think it's important when we engage with discussions about decolonising the curriculum, and decolonising our heritage orgs that we make an effort to [...] recognise that there is no "great" in Great Britain without that history of colonialism, slavery and imperialism.
Kojo Koram: There is a little throwaway vignette from [Tony Blaire's] autobiography which is interesting about Britain's relationship with its own relationship with the colonial history overall ...
Kojo: In 1997, one of his first assignments [as UK Prime Minister] is to go to Hong Kong and hand over pretty much the last major British Colony to the Republic of China ...
Kojo: The Chinese President says "This can be a new point in British-Chinese relationships and we can put our ugly violent history behind us." and Blair has no idea what this violent history was he was talking about or referring to ...
Kojo: The history he is talking about is the opium wars. Two major opium wars in the middle of the 19th century [...] that facilitated the handover of Hong Kong to the British in the first place
Kojo: (cont.) so the fact that their didn't know about this particular event made you question why he thought that Hong Kong was in British possession.
Kojo: Here [with Blair] we have a boarding school-educated, Oxford-educated British Prime Minister who is not only completely ignorant about this event but openly writing about it without any embarrassment or shame.
Kojo: People can look at Jim Crow, [etc] on the reliance of drug laws fuelling massive incarceration in the USA, and it plays a big role here in the UK as well. 1 in 8 prisoners in the UK at the moment is in prison for drugs offences.
Gracie Mae Bradley ( @graciemaybe): What we don't talk about is how that status of being a 'rights holder', that status of being 'civilised', always have an outside. It always has an outside that is uncivilised, savage, undeserving in some way.
#WeCanBuild
#WeCanBuild
Gracie: Those outsiders tend to be produced through processes of racialisation, criminalisation.
