Insa Koch: Anthropology as Political Labour - On Law, State Racism, and Logics of Salvation
| Termin |
Dienstag, 27. Mai 2025, 16.15 - 18.00 Uhr |
|---|---|
| Veranstaltungsart | Vorlesung/Vortrag |
| Reihe | Anticipating Anthropologies |
| Einrichtung | Philosophische Fakultät I |
| Veranstalter | Seminar für Ethnologie |
| Veranstaltungsort | Seminar für Ethnologie, Seminarraum |
| Straße | Reichardtstraße 11 |
| PLZ/Ort | 06114 Halle (Saale) |
Beschreibung
Professor Insa Lee Koch currently holds the Chair of British Cultures at the University of Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.
At a time when Black Lives Matter brought the legacies of transatlantic slavery and racial empire to the fore, the British state has renewed its fight against slavery of a different kind: ‘modern slavery’ on home ground. Codified in the Modern Slavery Act 2015, slavery has been re-imagined in policy, policing and law as a contemporary evil emanating from within some of the most over-criminalised and under-protected demographics: street level drugs dealers. Travelling from the communities in which drug dealers and their families live to the police stations, government offices and criminal courts where for the first time modern slavery trials are heard, this multi-sited ethnography challenges the idea that neo-abolitionist efforts constitute neutral, less even benevolent, juridical developments. Thus, at the same time as the British state has expanded the remits of legal victimhood to include those previously criminalised, it has allowed substantive inequalities to flourish and resurrected the image of the ‘slave master’ in the body of racialised working class youth at a time of deep neo-liberal and racial crisis. The murky politics of redemption unfolding in Britain today not only shows how the language of abolitionism, justice and progress has become co-opted and weaponized by liberal elites but in doing so raises crucial questions for a critical and decolonial anthropology of politics, law and the state.