Transatlantic Dialogues
Transatlantic Dialogues: A Symposium on Race, Imprisonment, and Transformative Justice
This event will be held both in-person and online via Zoom
Registration for in-person attendance, please register here.
Registration for online attendance, please register here.
- Keynote Speakers: Malik Al Nasir; Malcolm Mays
- Co-Discussant: Dr Adam Elliot-Cooper
- Moderator: Chelsea Jackson
In the wake of the deeply troubling and dystopic events of the past few years, along with the insurgent forms of public resistance that ensued in response to the legal and extra-legal violence visited on Black communities and calls to abolish the prison system and the police, we are urgently being compelled to re-imagine and re-orient our approaches to equity, justice, and the pursuit of freedom. We have collectively witnessed the state-sanctioned abandonment of people who contracted COVID-19 while imprisoned in overcrowded ‘correctional’ facilities like Angola State Penitentiary in the US. Additionally, the likelihood that a prisoner held on remand is from a BME group across England and Wales has steadily risen since late 2019. It is imperative to dissect these issues within a broader transatlantic framework, to engage their differences and continuities. While each context has its unique challenges—from stop and search in the UK to the US carceral state—the shared threads of racial injustice run deep. This transnational symposium is dedicated to exploring these issues from the perspective of previously incarcerated peoples.
Please see the symposium program here.
Speakers:
Malik Al Nasir
Malik Al Nasir is an author, poet and academic from Liverpool. His memoir ‘Letters to Gil’ is a compelling account of his childhood experiences in a brutal UK Local Authority care system, which at eighteen, left him traumatised, semi-literate, homeless, and destitute. A chance meeting with poet and activist Gil Scott-Heron was to prove life changing, setting him on a path to success. Malik is currently reading for a PhD in history at University of Cambridge on a full ESRC scholarship, and he’s recently been awarded the prestigious ‘Sydney Smith Memorial Prize’ for ‘outstanding achievement’ at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge as well as The Vice Chancellors Award for ‘Global Impact’.
Malcolm Mays
Born and raised in South Central, Los Angeles, Malcolm Mays is a modern-day renaissance man. Recognised for his filmmaking at an early age, with his first film premiering at the Telluride Film Festival, Mays has continued to pursue a multifaceted career as an actor, writer, filmmaker, and philanthropist.
Recently featured in The Hollywood Reporter as “The Next Big Thing”, the multitalented artist has successfully maneuvered through an often-tragic cycle of gang violence and transformed his experience into personal and professional triumph.
Known for his starring roles in the award-winning series “Snowfall” (FX), “Them: Covenant” and “Raising Kanan” (Starz), Mays has also appeared in the acclaimed films, “Southpaw”, “Life of a King” and “The Day Shall Come”. He has also written several studio films including, “New Jack City 2” (Warner Bros), “Ferguson: The Michael Brown Story” (Warner Bros), “Steal Away: Robert Smalls Biopic” (Amazon), “Inseparable” (Imagine/Nike) and “Lebron Lego Sports Movie” (Universal).
As a member of a socially stratified community, Mays has made it a priority to give back. A once at-risk youth, he works closely with the Unusual Suspects Theatre Company, a non-profit organization that brings after-school theatre workshops to at-risk middle schoolers and high schoolers at educational facilities and juvenile detention centers in Los Angeles. Mays was honored for his work with the organization at their annual gala alongside Tiffany Haddish.
Adam Elliott-Cooper
Adam Elliott-Cooper is a lecturer in the School of Politics and IR, Queen Mary University of London. Elliott-Cooper is the author of Black Resistance to British Policing (MUP, 2021) and Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021).
Chelsea A. Jackson
Chelsea A. Jackson, The Equity Architect, is a political scientist, scholar, activist, TEDx speaker and founder of Equity Architecture which helps organisations to ‘walk the talk’ by leveraging the power of social justice and AI. Part of the feminist collective Cradle Community, co-author of Brick by Brick: How we Build a World Without Prisons (2021). With a career stretching across higher ed, the non-profit/ charity sector, marketing and consulting, Chelsea managed the $30M Global Racial Equity Programme at WPP until 2022 where she worked on projects including the Cannes Festival of Creativity, Black Equity Organisation, Gizmology and dozens of global racial equity programmes. A Rhodes & Harry S. Truman Scholar, she holds three Masters degrees: Political Science & African American Studies from Emory University; Criminology & Criminal Justice and Public Policy from the University of Oxford. A peer-reviewed academic, her research in racial and ethnic politics has been presented at the American Political Science Association and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Co-founder of an Atlanta student group in 2014, Chelsea has organised with Black Lives Matter ATL, DC, Law for Black Lives DC, Mothers4Justice Ubuntu, Cradle Community, and Oxford Mutual Aid and has spent the past 10+ years working in the intersections of social change and racial justice.
This event is sponsored by Mansimble Tea & Estate.
The ‘Race Talks’ seminar series aims to foster critical conversation about race, racialization, and processes of race-making. The seminar series will provide a forum for students from across the University who are interested in integrating critical race approaches and feminist scholarship in their work. It may be of particular interest to students in the Centre for Gender Studies and those working with the Race Research Cluster in the Department of Sociology.
At each seminar, an invited speaker will give a short talk about the seminar topic and then invite participants to share their reflections. A number of the seminars will also have a curated reading list, which participants will be encouraged to read beforehand and prepare questions and thoughts to share with the rest of the group.
Organised by Ola Osman, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies (oo273@cam.ac.uk).
