Professor Joseph Pugliese1, Dr Maria Giannacopoulos2
1Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 2Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia
With the ultimate aim of ending deaths in custody, the Deathscapes project maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres, working across the settler states of Australia, the US and Canada, as well as the UK/EU as historical sites of origin for these settler colonial states (https://www.deathscapes.org/). Six months on from the launch of the Deathscapes website Professor Joseph Puglisese (Co-Chief Investigator with Professor Suvendrini Perera of the Deathscapes project) will be in dialogue with Dr Maria Giannacopoulos about the site. The dialogue will foreground the ways that Indigenous deaths, in a colonial context operate as an ongoing clearing of the land and together with deaths of other racialized bodies within the nation and at its borders–including Black, migrant and refugee deaths– function to reaffirm the assertion of settler sovereignty. Both speakers have used Deathscapes for teaching (in Cultural Studies and Criminology respectively) and so will be reflecting on the teaching value of the site.
Biography:
Professor Joseph Pugliese is Professor of Cultural Studies and Research Director in the Department of Media Music Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. He is author of State Violence and Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones and is Co-CI (with Suvendrini Perera) of ARC Discovery Project “Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States”
Dr Maria Giannacopoulos is Senior Lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies in the College of Business Government and Law at Flinders University. She conducts critical legal and critical race research with a focus on the areas of sovereignty, asylum/migration and colonialism.