Womxn's struggles and imagining justice beyond prison walls: A conversation with Silvana Tapia Tapia
16 May 2024 / 16:00 London time
open to all / via zoom
Organized by Adriana Perez-Rodriguez
How is penality reinforced in the name of protecting women against violence? How has justice been framed in terms of carcerality and what other worldviews have been discarded? What is at stake?
In this online event, we will discuss with Silvana Tapia Tapia her most recent paper “Human Rights Penality and Violence Against Women: the Coloniality of Disembodied Justice“ to delve into the intersections of human rights discourse and penality, particularly as it concerns the protection of women from violence.
Tapia Tapia’s work is grounded in the anticarceral and women’s struggles in Ecuador, which have helped her identify the tensions and contradictions that emerge when justice is defined in terms of punishment. Crucially, such delimitation takes place at the expense of eliminating different possibilities of living together based on embodiment, relationality and situated knowledge.
As part of our Countering the Colonial Project, this conversation aims to provide breathing spaces for grappling with questions of justice, feminism and decolonization at times when prison walls and criminal law are centred as the arbiters of imagination.
About our fellow traveller
Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia is a research fellow at Birmingham Law School where she looks at non-penal human rights alternatives to respond to violence against women from a feminist and decolonial perspective. Silvana is the author of the book “Feminism, Violence Against Women, and Law Reform. Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador”, published by Routledge in 2022. This book won the Hart Publishing-Socio-Legal Studies Association book prize last year.
Silvana has worked as Assistant Professor of Law and Coordinator of Research at Universidad del Azuay’s Law School (Ecuador). Her research on domestic violence has been consulted by Ecuadorian municipalities and used by immigration courts in the USA to inform their decisions to grant asylum to Ecuadorian women fleeing violence. Silvana has had 6 successful cases so far. Silvana also collaborated as editor in the production of the 2020 Shadow Report for the CEDAW Committee, prepared by the National Coalition of Women (Ecuador).
Registration
If you would like to receive our newsletters, please subscribe here: