Speaker(s):
Bio
Koshka Duff is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham and a Leverhulme Research Fellow for 2026. Their research spans social and political philosophy and critical criminology, addressing themes of policing, dissent, love and intimacy. Recent work includes a study of police strip-searching practices in Theoretical Criminology and a chapter problematising the liberal ‘right to protest’ in Davanna & Rossi’s Policing in Crisis? (Bristol University Press). Their popular edited collection, Abolishing the Police (Dog Section, 2021), was shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. Their first monograph, The Criminal is Political: Popular Illegalities and Shameless Solidarities, is forthcoming with Minnesota University Press.
The Criminal is Political: Popular Illegalities and Shameless Solidarities
"Are those people blocking roads and burning bins political protesters or criminals? Does irregular border crossing make you a criminal? Are bankers and politicians the real criminals? Politics is defined by disagreements over who to treat as criminal. Taken for granted, however, is the association of criminality with wrongdoing. Across the political spectrum, ‘criminal’ is used as a depoliticising slur. Insofar as a person is deemed criminal, they are assumed to lack political consciousness and motivation for their actions.
My project examines how this derogatory concept of the criminal operates ideologically to exclude important forms of dissent from being recognised as political contestation. I trace the concept historically, from the colonial entanglements of Locke’s proto-liberalism to regimes of racialised carcerality today. Feminists have shown that the exclusion of what is deemed ‘personal’ from the sphere of the political is itself a (conservative) political move. I argue that the construction of ‘the criminal’ as a category opposed to the political constitutes a similar barrier to emancipatory social transformation.
This derogatory and depoliticising approach to ‘the criminal’ remains nearly ubiquitous, even in radical scholarship and praxis, despite being problematised from a variety of perspectives. In recent years, abolitionist, decolonial, and queer politics and theory have been sharpened by global uprisings against police violence, such as Black Lives Matter. In recognising that the law is constructed and maintained to uphold particular forms of social power – including hierarchies of race, class, gender, disability, species and sexuality – critical theorists and movements encourage us to reassess criminalised agents as potential figures of political resistance and liberation. Yet even these critiques often return to assumptions that things would be better if police spent less time engaging in repression and more time ‘fighting crime’.
My project aims to show what is wrong with these assumptions and demonstrate the joyful generativity of a politics beyond them. Its approach is developed in conversation with social movements facing criminalisation, as well as scholars across disciplines, and informed by my own experiences of criminalisation. The first to make a rigorous philosophical case against the equation of criminality with wrongdoing, it demands a profound reorientation of political thought to attend to the perspectives of the criminalised."
Add to calendar