Kirikiriroa Conversations

It is an opportunity to explore avenues of research or practice that may not have found a place in a lecture or publication. Why not discuss it in a friendly, open, informal environment? The format for presenting is that each conversation will be 15 mins long with 5 mins of questions. These start at 3:30PM in K.G.01. Afterward, come along to MCT's legendary Thirsty Thursdays (BYO) in our foyer (I.4.20) to continue the kōrerō. 

Fourth Conversation: "States of Continuity: Contextualizing Indigenous and Black Peoples’ Violent Relationship with the State in Racialized Settler-colonial Contexts"

Presenter: Dr. Adele Norris (co-authored by Dr. Juan Tauri).

Abstract: This talk discusses four events that illuminate the continuity of a racialized-colonial project focused on the extensive policing, surveillance and confinement of Indigenous people in Aotearoa New Zealand: (1) the Tūhoe Raids in 2007, (2) Armed Response Team (ART) trials of 2020, and (3) extra-legal photographing of Māori youth by law enforcement in 2021 and (4) hyper-imprisonment of Indigenous people. These events hardly emerge in recent academic discourses and when do, they are discussed separately. Scholars have extended Agamben’s (1998) conceptualization of the state of exception to account for ways coloniality shapes the West’s violent relationship with Indigenous and Black people. Devon W. Carbado’s (2019) concept of states of continuity explains the embodied character of racialized state violence to elucidate how the law enables policing to be enacted in predictable, racially targeted ways under the pretence of fear of safety. Populations designated as the exception are framed as a threat to the sovereign order, thus targeted for militaristic police intervention.