Panel discussion

Police and prison are population and labour force management tools whose primary social function is to maintain social hierarchies and enforce exploitative social relations. As such, the police-prison  nexus  is  instrumental  to  capitalism and  is  an  obstacle  towards  a  radical  social-ecological transformation. This panel discussion will gather critical prisons and police activists and experts to discuss the social role of the police-prison nexus, how it may prevent any progressive and radical social-ecological transformation as well as possible alternatives.

Speakers:
Serge and Floréal are anti-prisons activists from Paris, France.
Angelika Adensamer is a lawyer and criminologist from Vienna who specializes on police, police  violence,  surveillance  and  the  right  to  demonstrate  and  has  published  extensively  on these  topics.  Angelika  is  also  a  co-founder  of  LINKS and  was  one  of  the party’s three  chief candidates for the 2020 municipal elections in Vienna.
Hawzhin Azeez is a Kurdish academic, poet and activist working as an adjunct professor at the Center for  Gender  and  Development  Studies at  the  American  University  of  Iraq  in Sulaimani. Hawzhin worked and lived three years in Rojava and wrote numerous pieces about it, including on the abolition of police.

Facilitator:
Louison Cahen-Fourot is a post-doc researcher at the Institute for Ecological Economics at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien. As a student, Louison has been a member of Génépi and co-facilitated an English workshop at a women’s prison for a year. He also took part in the Strategies for Degrowth conference as co-coordinator of the Money&Finance track.