#safety

Speakers:
China Mills (chair)
Stella Dadzie
Derica Shields
Gargi Bhattacharyya
Tumu Johnson

19:00 – 21:00
17/10/2023

ICF @ Block 336

336 Brixton Road
London SW9 7AA

 

Description

A panel conversation between Derica Shields, China Mills, Tumu Johnson, Stella Dadzie and Gargi Bhattacharyya that explores the welfare state as one thread connected to a wider tapestry of state violence, which produces the premature sickness and deaths of poor, racialised and disabled people. The panelists will discuss how racial capitalism, eugenics and coloniality are designed into welfare state infrastructure, and why state violence is a feature of the welfare system, not a bug. They will also look at historical and present-day forms of resistance to what we might call “welfare state violence”. Looking at these projects, they ask: how can we create community-led approaches to safety and justice?

This event will be BSL interpreted.

Biographies

Stella Dadzie is a feminist historian, writer and education activist. She is a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) and is best known for The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago, 1985), which won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature, and which she co-authored with Beverley Bryan and Suzanne Scafe. She has written widely on curriculum development and good practice with Black adult learners and other minorities. She is well known for her contribution to tackling youth racism, and is a key contributor to the development of anti-racist strategies with schools, colleges and youth services. She has appeared in documentaries and radio programmes to discuss her work.

Gargi Bhattacharyya is a writer and teacher living and working in London. They write and teach on issues of inequality, social justice and state practices.

Derica Shields is a writer and editor from south London. She works across multiple disciplines, with a particular focus on Black diaspora aesthetics, cultures and epistemologies. In 2021 she published A Heavy Nonpresence, a multi-generational oral history project that gathered seven Black Londoners’ accounts of their interactions with the UK welfare state. The project was introduced by an essay analysing the co-development of the modern welfare state with measures to expel or instrumentalise Black peoples. Currently, Derica is a 2022–23 artist-in-residence at Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, where she concluded work on Bad Practice, a book that considers how, in worlds structured against Black life, Black failure might point towards liberatory possibilities. Bad Practice is commissioned by Hannah Black and forthcoming from Book Works.

Tumu Johnson is currently a co-director at the feminist disabled women’s collective, Sisters of Frida and has been involved in feminist organising around abolition and the continued struggle for Disability Justice. She currently works part time in the NHS as a Psychologist and also works for a community peer counselling project. 

China Mills leads the Deaths by Welfare project at Healing justice Ldn – researching welfare state violence alongside those most impacted. She is committed to research practice that cultivates and restores dignity, belonging and safety, in community with those harmed by state violence. She has published widely on suicidality and state violence, structural oppression and mental health, and is the author of Decolonising Global Mental Health (published by Routledge). She is also a member of the Poverty and Stigma design team at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, working alongside people with lived experience of poverty.