Submissions are open for all 10 streams for abstracts, panels and workshops.

This strand examines different manifestations of violence, harm, and vulnerability across institutional contexts. It is concerned with how institutions perpetuate and (re)produce punitive logics, policing regimes, surveillance, and embodied and emotional harms that diminish the capacity for intersectional forms of justice, equality, and liberation to flourish. We welcome scholarship concerned with these questions across different institutional contexts: from punitive welfare systems and social services; to educational settings; criminal justice systems; political institutions and beyond. We welcome contributions that seek to understand how violence, punishment, and harm manifest across different registers (emotional, discursive, embodied, cognitive, social, physical etc) within institutional settings. Institutional harms do not affect people equally, and we therefore centre accounts that critically examine how harm and vulnerability are shaped according to existing intersecting inequalities and injustices.  

 

As well as analyses of how, where and when contemporary violence and harm occurs, we seek contributions from scholars, educators and activists who work to imagine new ways of being with one another, alternative forms of justice, liberation, and world building. We therefore encourage papers that examine imaginative, intersectional, anti-colonial and non-neoliberal responses to contemporary institutional harms, violence, and vulnerabilities across settings; responses that seek to avoid the (re)production of new forms of surveillance, policing, and violence. We are particularly interested in contributions that explore responses to institutional violence that go beyond reformist agendas. This may include work that examines the capacity for institutional transformation, abolitionist thinking, transformative justice approaches, and non-reformist reforms.  

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List of invited topics: 

We encourage papers that interrogate institutional violence across contexts and which critically examine different responses to institutional violence.   

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• Analyses of how subjugation, surveillance, control, and punishment are (re)produced in different institutional contexts (e.g. educational, welfare systems and social services, and legal/justice systems); 

• Punitive logics and institutional surveillance within and beyond the criminal justice system; 

• People’s agency to resist and deal with everyday institutional violence;  

• Abolishing institutions – the possibilities and problematics;  

• Producing material change: non-reformist reforms and transformative justice;  

• Other alternative justice and care practices;  

• Critical examination of institutional processes like equality action plans, complaint systems and other forms of accountability. 

• Given recent accounts of violence and harassment within different institutional contexts (e.g. in politics and universities) we welcome papers that examine institutional feminist – restorative responses to harassment and abuse.  

• Increasingly, institutional harms cannot be understood in isolation from transnational movements and discourses. This is particularly the case with how transnational anti-gender movements are, for example, shaping national and local educational settings (through banning books, content and teaching about inclusive relationships and families) and regressive rolling back of reproductive rights. We therefore also welcome analyses of institutional violence and harm that connect with, and trouble the relationship between, transnational and local dynamics. 

• Welfare systems, including social services, have developed practices of violence for years against colonised bodies rooted in poverty and vulnerability under capitalist, racist, xenophobic, and sexist systems, even when well-being is a right. We welcome critical scholarship on how welfare systems, including social services, interact with communities and individuals they supposedly support. We particularly seek contributions that engage in intersectional analyses of how welfare systems (re)produce structural disadvantage and vulnerability, paying attention to factors such as poverty, migration, racialization, aging, adultocentrism, capabilities, cis-heterosexism, and/or gender-based violence.