Dr Maria Giannacopoulos, Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice in the Faculty of Law and Justice at University of New South Wales, Sydney, will deliver a hybrid seminar on "Indigenous rights and colonial crimes in the debtscape" on 8th of May 1-3pm in TSI 109. Further details to follow. All are welcome.
RSVP here
Title: Indigenous rights and colonial crimes in the debtscape
Abstract: This lecture unravels Australia’s colonial debtscape, where (colonial) sovereignty, debt and austerity are so intertwined in a deeply colonising way, that its existence is barely perceptible. Sovereign debt under colonial conditions is not recognised as such. Colonial law, imposed without consent, criminalises, over-polices, punishes, and subjects Indigenous peoples to systematic and enduring austerity while disavowing the deep sovereign debt accrued and maintained through state violence. Colonial law in Australia is born from and enabled by unpaid sovereign debt but the legal apparatus works ceaselessly to hide this fact. By acting ‘as if’ Australia was not founded in conditions of illegality, the laws of the illegitimate power are affirmed. This buries the sovereign debt owed to First Nations Peoples, licenses the accumulation of further debt, and unleashes violence and unacknowledged austerity over Indigenous peoples on their own lands. Instead of repayment, reparations, or economic and racial justice to for those to whom debt is owed, the deathworlds of dispossession persist in the place of decolonisation.
Bio: Dr Maria Giannacopoulos is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Criminology Law and Justice in the Faculty of Law and Justice at UNSW, Sydney. She is a leading scholar in decolonising approaches to law and criminology. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Vice Chancellors Award for Excellence in Teaching for working to decolonise the discipline of criminology. In 2023 she delivered the annual John Barry Lecture in Criminology at the University of Melbourne and was shortlisted for the Law, Literature and Humanities Prize for her article ‘White Law/ Black Deaths: Nomocide and the foundational absence of consent in Australian Law’. She is the special issue editor (with Kristopher Wilson and Rhys Aston) of volume 27 of Law Text Culture on the theme of ‘Imagining Decolonised Law’.
