Join LGSMigrants for a reading group on 'Against Borders: The Case for Abolition' with Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha.
Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished.
Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, which impact migrants and citizens both.
In this book, Luke and Gracie tell what should by now be a simple truth: borders are not only at the edges of national territory, in airports, or at border walls. Borders are everyday and everywhere; they follow people around and get between us, and disrupt our collective safety, freedom and flourishing.
Against Borders is a passionate manifesto for border abolition, arguing that we must transform society and our relationships to one another, and build a world in which everyone has the freedom to move and to stay.
This reading group will focus on Chapter One, 'Race', and Chapter Eight, 'Abolition'. We will come together to discuss, ask the authors our questions and reflect on how to build a world with no borders. PDFs of the relevant chapters will be sent out when you sign up, or you can buy the book from Verso for £6.99:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3983-against-borders
When: Monday 5th December 2022 - 18.30-19.45
Where: Zoom - the link will be sent on the day. Make sure you register to receive it.
The link will be sent on the day and the chapters will be sent once you sign up.
Everyone is welcome, even if you don't have time to do the reading!
About the authors
Gracie Mae Bradley is a writer and campaigner with particular interests in migration, policing, surveillance and abolition. She has a decade's experience working in NGOs in England, including as Director of the civil liberties group Liberty. She is a founding member of the grassroots Against Borders for Children campaign, on the Board of SOAS Detainee Support, and a co-facilitator for the Black Abolitionist Futures reading group. Gracie's other writings include From Grenfell to Windrush in 'After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response' (2019), the poem Unlawful Gathering in ‘When This Is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic’ (forthcoming 2023), and contributions to the Guardian, Independent, Vice, OpenDemocracy and more.
Luke de Noronha is an academic and writer working at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre, University College London. His first book, 'Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica' was published in 2020, and he was one of the co-authors of 'Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State' (2021). He has also produced a podcast with deported people in Jamaica, Deportation Discs.
