The summer of 2020 was a time of unprecedented anti-police action, with millions of Americans coming together to protest police violence. These protests were also responding to what the pandemic made clear: that socioeconomic precarity is itself a form of state sanctioned violence. This conversation between Prof. Alex Vitale (Brooklyn College) and Kay Gabriel considers the importance of this moment and the political possibilities it reveals. Moderated by Ben Mabie.
THIS EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE ON ZOOM. FREE WITH RSVP.
Part of COVID 19 & ITS AFTERLIVES, a series sponsored by NYU’s Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation, NYU’s Center for the Humanities, NYU Skirball, NYU’s Special Collections, Verso Books, n+1, and Minetta Creek Collective. Organized by David Sugarman with support from Daniel Cheng (Verso).
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and a Visiting Professor at London Southbank University. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally.
Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. With Andrea Abi-Karam, she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She’s an organizer with NYC-DSA’s #DefundNYPD campaign, and lives and works in New York.
ABOUT THE SERIES
This series of events considers the possibilities of the post-pandemic future. Bringing together writers, artists, curators, archivists, academics, and organizers, “COVID19 and its Afterlives,” examines how the structural dynamics that predated COVID19–precarity, vulnerability, inequality–have been exacerbated by this past catastrophic year. In inventorying our pre-pandemic social and political failures, from health care to housing to labor, policing to politics to prisons, this series hopes to help us learn the pandemic’s lessons, and works to illuminate the promises of the future.