Haunting the Criminological Imagination: Abolition as Diasporicised Method
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Event Co-Organised with the Abolitionist Imaginaries and Praxis discussion group
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Abstract
Dr S.M. Rodriguez advances abolition as a diasporicised method - a way of knowing shaped by displacement, social reproduction, and legacies of survival. Rather than an invention of Western legalism, abolition is understood here as a travelling inheritance born of the colonial carceral order itself: a knowledge system carried through communal intimacies, non-human praxis, and the kinship of those abandoned by states. Simultaneously, this lecture calls for the diasporicisation of abolitionist study, proposing a criminological method that reconfigures how we imagine connection and comparative bases. To haunt the criminological imagination is to confront the field with its suppressed genealogies and spectral inheritances, exposing how criminology has attempted to epistemically disappear resistance by taking “crime” and “deviance” as givens rather than colonial constructions. To diasporicise abolition is therefore to displace criminology’s epistemic centre, demanding that the study of harm begin with those who have survived it, and to reimagine the "North/South divide" through such a new beginning.
BIO:
S.M. Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights and Human Rights in the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. They are the author of The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational LGBTI Organizing in Uganda (2019), which used ethnography, interviews, and policy analysis to challenge the scholarly imagination of European and American human rights intervention in LGBTI politics in Africa as inherently helpful. They are the founder of Black Queer Movements, a knowledge exchange hub for African activists across the continent and Diaspora, and of The Black Professors Pipeline, which addresses underrepresentation of faculty of African descent in the U.K. higher education.Committed to anti-violence in their community and research, Dr Rodriguez’s research joins anti-carceral, Black, and trans feminist approaches to interrogate sexual politics, especially as related to criminal law and “correctional” practices. As such, their work explores various practices and philosophies of justice and transformative changemaking in the African Diaspora. Dr Rodriguez has published in numerous journals, including Agenda, Criminology and Criminal Justice, and Comparative Sociology, and within several books by Oxford University Press and Routledge. Rodriguez is currently working on a second book on penal abolitionist philosophy and African political womanhood.
