Public Lecture with Robyn Maynard on Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Join us for a talk & discussion with Professor Robyn Maynard on how policing works across borders to uphold racial capitalism and Western imperial power.
The talk will draw from Maynard's best-selling book, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.
Professor Maynard’s book offers a comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization, and punishment of Black lives in Canada. In the revised and expanded edition, Maynard exposes Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance to document how half a century of police reforms have expanded the scope and scale of policing and undermined Black freedom struggles in the wake of global Black uprisings in 2020.
She traces the afterlives of slavery across multiple institutions and illuminates the state’s role in perpetuating colonial dispossession, racial profiling, police killings, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, and the school-to-prison pipeline. At the same time, Maynard foregrounds the ubiquity of Black resistance while offering new insights on how to build liveable futures without policing.
Advancing a compelling vision for making policing obsolete and building new forms of safety, Policing Black Lives is a key text to guide and inspire activists, students, scholars, and all those working toward Black futures beyond surveillance and confinement.
The event will be chaired by Sarah Lamble, Professor of Criminology and Queer Theory.
The talk will be followed by a Q&A and audience discussion.
The event will be held in-person and online. If you book an online ticket, the joining link will be sent out the day before the event.
About the speaker:
Robyn Maynard is an Assistant Professor of Black Feminisms in Canada at the University of Toronto-Scarborough in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the Present (Fernwood, 2017, 2nd edition Duke, 2025) and the co-author of Rehearsals for Living (Knopf/Haymarket, 2022). She has published writing in the Washington Post, World Policy Journal, the Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Scholar & Feminist Journal, and a number of peer-reviewed book anthologies. Maynard’s research and teaching focus on transnational Black feminist thought and Black social movements, policing, borders, and carceral studies, Black-Indigenous histories and praxis, Black Canadian studies, as well as abolitionist and anti-colonial methodologies.
Contact name: Sarah Lamble
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