Due to unforeseen circumstances this talk is cancelled
Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities and colonisation. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, which impact both migrants and citizens.
In this talk, Gracie Mae Bradley, co-author of Against Borders, sets out the case for abolishing borders. Drawing on over a decade of campaigning against the hard edges of state power, Bradley outlines how our world is currently structured along multiple axes of oppression and colonisation to immobilise, immiserate and impoverish people, to the detriment of our collective flourishing. Bradley reflects on how the project of border abolition is one of reimagination and building a world yet to come, rather than simply tearing down fences, walls, and detention camps. Bradley focusses our attention on the importance of speculative fiction in bringing abolitionist imaginaries to life, drawing on the significance of her art practices for her political work.
Bradley’s talk will be followed by in conversation with Dr John Wilkins, Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Enterprise Fellow working with both Trinity College Dublin and IMMA. Together, we reflect on some of the arguments of this elegant and powerful book – that invites us to dream of a reconfigured world of global solidarity, where the borders between nation states no longer control and define us, and where people and states in the global south can better mitigate the climate crisis. This talk also draws on themes from our current exhibition, Howardena Pindell A Renewed Language.
Presented as part of IMMA Outdoors and will be followed by Free Music in Courtyard, featuring all ‘living things’.