Abolitionist Feminism after the murder of Sarah Everard

Aviah Sarah Day can be found teaching and researching at Birkbeck, University of London when working, and organising in her East London community the rest of the time. She is involved in Sisters Uncut, a national direct-action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services and state violence as well as Hackney Cop Watch. She is co-author of the book Abolition Revolution with Shanice McBean, which is due to be published by Pluto Press autumn 2022.

Aviah Sarah Day will present themes from her book Abolition Revolution, which she co-authored with Shanice McBean. She will detail the recent explosion of anti-carceral and abolitionist organising that has come about in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder by a serving Metropolitan police officer. In particular, this presentation focuses on police intervention training organised by direct action group Sisters Uncut as a response to a growing lack of confidence in policing. This training was announced as a practical intervention following the revelation that Everard’s arrest and abduction took place in full view of bystanders who did not intervene on the assumption that they were witnessing ‘legitimate’ police activity. Crucially, this training is co-produced by community-based police and immigration enforcement monitoring groups from across the UK as well as scholar-activists. This presentation will demonstrate the benefits such scholar-activist approaches, highlighting this as a crucial opportunity for abolitionist scholars, activists and scholar-activists to contribute to a growing abolitionist movement.

This seminar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by the Department of Sociology.

• SC199 Career Development and Making a Difference

Essex students within the department can attend this event as part of eligibility criteria for module SC199. Once attended, you can complete a short reflection on what you learned by attending the event. This can be downloaded via Moodle and then uploaded to FASER.