Discussing Decolonisation 2025/26 Summer Finale
About this Event
York St John’s Discussing Decolonisation 2025/26 summer finale event will take place on campus and online from 10am until 16.30pm (BST) on Friday 26th June.
Building on last year's summer event, this one-day event will explore decolonisation beyond, across and against borders. We will interrogate the colonial history of contemporary border, migration and surveillance regimes, and consider what migrant justice and border abolition might look like and entail, in both theory and praxis.
The day will include a livestreamed keynote by Dr Monish Bhatia (York), a hybrid panel with postgraduate and early-career researchers, and a plenary discussion with local community organisers and scholar-activists. As always, the event is free and open to all, with refreshments provided.
Please find the event schedule with indicative timings below, and see our (draft) Event Programme for more information, including titles, abstracts and bios for all speakers.
Event schedule:
- 10.00–10.15: Arrivals and coffee
- 10.15-10.30: Opening remarks from co-conveners, Lucy Potter and Dr Laura Key (York St John)
- 10.30-12.30: Session 1 – Livestreamed keynote, including film screening and Q&A, with Dr Monish Bhatia (University of York)
- 12.30-13.15: Lunch
- 13.15-15.00: Session 2 – Hybrid panel discussion with postgraduate and early-career researchers (PGR/ECRs)
- 15.00–15.15: Comfort break
- 15.15–16.30: Session 3 – Plenary discussion with local community organisers and scholar-activists
- 16.30: Close
Keynote speaker:
is a sociologist and critical criminologist at the University of York, where he works on the racialised governance of migration, state violence, and the expanding architectures of immigration control. His research combines sustained ethnographic fieldwork with people seeking asylum, illegalised migrants, and those subject to deportation with critical theoretical analysis of how harm, surveillance, and racial violence are institutionalised through bureaucratic and legal practices.
His keynote traces the conceptual and political connections between colonial surveillance, its logics of risk, dangerousness and racial sorting, and the administrative machinery that today governs illegalised migrants in postcolonial Britain. It asks how technologies that appear neutral and humane reproduce and deepen racial hierarchies, and what it means to resist surveillance when the state’s permission to punish appears without end.
The talk will be followed by a screening of No Release (directed by Sînziana Cojocărescu, BÉZNĂ Theatre), a film adaptation of the research, which bears witness to two migrant men living under GPS monitoring – and to the violence, dignity and resistance that surveillance cannot fully contain.
More information available from our Discussing Decolonisation 2025-26 Summer Finale draft event programme
This event is part of the ongoing Discussing Decolonisation series at York St John University. If you would like to receive updates about forthcoming events in the series, along with recordings and materials from past events, please sign up to our mailing list.
If you have any questions about the event itself, please email co-conveners Lucy Potter ([email protected]) and/or Laura Key ([email protected]).
*Please note that this event is being hosted in person, at the YSJ campus in York, with the option to join online via MS Teams for those who cannot attend in person. Please select either 'in person' or 'online' when booking your place, and let us know ASAP if you need to change your ticket to help out our catering team.
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Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
