Criminal Law as a Tool of Power (Fall 2025)
Our Fall 2025 speaker series will explore the relationship between criminalization, criminal punishment bureaucracies, and authoritarian control. We will examine these topics through multiple lenses and perspectives, domestic and international, historical and contemporary. We’ll explore questions about the preconditions of authoritarianism, and how authoritarian regimes use narratives of crime and punishment, as well enforcement of criminal or quasi-criminal violations, to target marginalized groups and punish dissent. We’ll examine how states wield power to name and define conduct, or groups, as criminal and attempt to understand the politics of criminalization within the politics of authoritarian control. We’ll also take a deep dive into histories of punishment, exclusion, and legal regimes of racialized social control and xenophobia in the United States in an effort to understand how U.S. history forecasts and grounds emerging trends in patterns of arrest, detention, imprisonment, and deportation. Finally, we’ll feature speakers working to develop toolkits to name, shame, and uproot the use of criminalization in public policy as a tool of social harm, deprivation, and destruction.
All events in this series will be open to the public and livestreamed on Zoom. More details will be posted later in the summer. Please to receive updates about the series and other upcoming events.