The Carceral Geography Working Group is pleased to invite you to a one day forum, bringing together academics, scholars, activists and advocates to reflect on how carceral logics, unfreedoms and liberatory practices are manifested in settler colonial spaces. What does it mean to live under these systems and to resist them in settler colonies?
Carceral logics and systems of unfreedom are part of the ongoing occupations of Indigenous lands, genocides in settler colonies, policing and prison systems, and in carceral practices operating at transnational, national, state/regional, and intimate levels within communities, and increasingly circulating through and as digital technologies.
Resistance, opposition, decolonising praxis, anti-colonial refusal and the daily undoing of these unfreedoms are ongoing. Yet universities themselves have become ever more visible sites for surveillance, silencing, banning and unfreedoms.
We ask: How do academics, researchers, activists, scholar-activists and communities respond, oppose, refuse, resist or organise across these systems, and what liberatory practices are already emerging?
When: Friday 31 July 2026, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm AEST (Sydney time).
Final Program with links to individual recorded sessions
Welcome to Country: Melissa Stubbings, Dharug Cultural Practitioner and Manager of Merana Aboriginal Community Association for the Hawkesbury Inc.
Session 1: Indigenous Justice/Undoing Settler Colonial Violence
Uncle Dave Bell & Aunty Amanda Hall: Young Spirit and Mentoring Program (YSMP)
Session 2: Refusing Settler Carceral Violence
Christopher Kirkbright: Balgarbalgar Dreaming Poetry Performance
Kim Alley: Global Indigenous solidarity in a time of genocide
Session 3: Carcerality and Unfreedoms: Pasifika Peoples and Kashmir
Ather Zia: Temporal Dynamic of Settler Colonialism in Kashmir
Cammi Webb-Gannon: Radical Hope and Joy as Decolonial Strategy in West Papua
Session 4: Palestine, Witnessing, Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Identities
Alana Lentin: Fascism, Settler Colonialism and the Black Radical Tradition
Micaela Sahhar: Some Notes on Erasure
Diana Johns: Witnessing life under occupation (a personal account).
Session 5: Network of Anti-genocidal, Decarceral and Anti-colonial Criminologies
Maria Giannacopoulos & Leighann Spencer: Anti-genocidal, Decarceral and Anti-colonial criminologies
Watch this space: an article on the forum by Dr Zainul Swaleh (Macquarie University), a member of the Carceral Crossings Collective and Chair of Session 5, will be published soon.
Speakers & Bios
Kim Alley: Kim Alley is an Aboriginal academic and researcher, with more than fifteen years’ experience in researching and teaching Indigenous, Australian and Middle Eastern Politics, Policy and History. Her work focuses on settler colonial histories and resistance politics, examining settler nationalism, militarism and political violence, as well as social movements for change and liberation and transnational activism. Dr Alley’s work seeks to highlight how such histories and activism impact and inform Indigenous Settler relations today both in Australia and internationally.
Uncle Dave Bell: Uncle Dave Bell is a Wiradjuri Elder born in Cootamundra and a well known and respected community leader. Uncle Dave is the founder of the Young Spirit Mentoring Program(YSMP) which has been running for over twenty years and has changed the lives of thousands of young people and families in powerful & far-reaching ways. The YSMP is an Aboriginal-led multicultural program that started from the Block in Redfern where Uncle Dave learnt about spiritual well-being from the Elders that gathered there.
YSMP: https://youngspiritmentoring.wordpress.com/; YSMP: www.mudyin.com
Maria Giannacopoulos: is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice at UNSW Sydney. An interdisciplinary scholar taking decolonising approaches to both law and criminology, her work has a sustained focus on law’s relationship to colonial power and its expanding carceral reach. She is a co-founder of the Network for Anti-genocidal, Decarceral and Anti-colonial Criminologies (NADAC) and is currently co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Criminology titled Criminologies of Genocide: Genocide Past and Present.
Aunty Amanda Hall: is a a proud Worimi and Kamilaroy community leader. She is passionate about culture, community, healing and supporting criminalized Aboriginal peoples and young people. She is experienced in circle sentencing processes and is part of the Young Spirit Mentoring Program team.
YSMP: https://youngspiritmentoring.wordpress.com/; YSMP: www.mudyin.com
Diana Johns: is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Melbourne. Her work explores the effects of criminalisation, the impacts of imprisonment, and the possibilities of restorative and relational justice practices, particularly for children and young people, their families and communities.
Christopher John Kirkbright: is a respected Elder descended from Wiradjuri, Gamilaroi and Ngiyampaa and Wangabine dialect speakers. A lawyer, educator, linguist and poet, he is former Registrar of Aboriginal Land Rights (NSW), former solicitor with the NSW Aboriginal Legal Service, and former lecturer in Community Management (Governance) at Macquarie University. He is a former CEO of the Yarrawarra Aboriginal Cultural Centre, with more than three decades of work in law reform, cultural leadership and language revitalisation.
Alana Lentin: is a Teacher, writer and Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University on Gadigal-Wangal land. She works on the critical theorization of race, racial capitalism and antiracism and is Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University. She is the author of The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy (Pluto 2025) and Why Race Still Matters (Polity 2020). Previously she published The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a neoliberal age with Gavan Titley (Zed, 2011), Racism: A beginner’s guide (2008) and Racism and Antiracism in Europe (Pluto, 2004). She co-edits the Lexington Books ‘Challenging Migration Studies’ books series and the ‘Decolonization and Social Worlds’ series at Bristol University Press. She is a member of the Founding Collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Her academic and media articles as well as videos, podcasts, and teaching materials are free to be used and available at www.alanalentin.net
Micaela Sahhar: is an Australian-Palestinian writer and researcher. She is a Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her first book, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: an encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family (NewSouth Publishing), won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the 2026 NSW Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction and the Multicultural NSW Award, and longlisted for the Stella Prize. Her current research engages narrative appropriation, questions of representation and the problem of archives in settler-colonial contexts, with scholarly publications in Mashriq & Mahjar, Middle East Critique, and Racism, Violence and Harm: Ideology, Media and Resistance (eds. Monish Bhatia, Scott Poynting and Waqas Tufail; Palgrave Macmillan).
Leighann Spencer: (she/they) is a PhD scholar, criminologist and human rights advocate. Their expertise is in state and non-state policing and justice in the context of global abolition. She is a co-founder of the Network for Anti-genocidal, Decarceral and Anti-colonial Criminologies (NADAC) and is currently co-editing the Journal of Criminology special issue titled Criminologies of Genocide: Genocide Past and Present.
Melissa Stubbings: Melissa Stubbings, is a Dharug Cultural Practitioner and Manager of Merana Aboriginal Community Association for the Hawkesbury Inc.
Cammi Webb-Gannon: is a Senior Lecturer with the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Wollongong. She is a decolonisation ethnographer focusing on the Pacific Islands region, with a long-term interest in West Papua’s independence movement and, more recently, decolonisation in Kanaky (New Caledonia). Cammi is the Coordinator of the West Papua Project at the University of Wollongong.
Ather Zia: PhD, is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. Her research focuses on Kashmir, militarization, settler colonialism, gender, and decolonial theory, with an emphasis on questions of political violence, memory, and resistance. She is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir and has co-edited books including Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak?, Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, and A Desolation Called Peace; and special issues on Kashmir and Palestine in Identities (Taylor & Francis, 2020) and Kashmiri Futures in English Language Notes (Duke, 2023). Her poetry collection In Kashmir: Writing Under Occupation (2025) was published by Agitate Collective. Zia is the founding editor of Kashmir Lit and co-founder of the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective. She is a former co-editor of Cultural Anthropology and currently serves as Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures. Zia’s works span academic scholarship, poetry, and public commentary, engaging interdisciplinary approaches to questions of violence, sovereignty, memory, neocolonialism, and decolonial futures. Check Zia’s website here
Organizers of the Events: Lara Palombo (Macquarie University) & Claire Loughnan (University of Melbourne) Contact us: Lara.Palombo@mq.edu.au; Clairebl@unimelb.edu.au