IN PRAXIS COLLECTIVE

Liberal social control as pacification (Naarm/Melbourne)

• WHEN: Thursday 30 October 2025 @ 6:15pm
• WHERE: Kathleen Syme Library and Community Centre (251 Faraday St, Carlton VIC 3053)

Join us in a slow reading of an article by Markus Kienscherf. Together, we will consider how liberal social control is a form of pacification targeting specific populations, individuals and spaces.

No preparation required – we will read the essay together; there is no expectation for anyone to read aloud.

We encourage those who join us to make a contribution to Crime Scene Australia (BANK DETAILS – Bank Account Name: Crime Scene Australia; Bank Account Number: 12560334; BSB: 313 140).

Liberal social control as pacification (London)

• WHEN: Date + time TBC
• WHERE: Location TBC

Join us in a slow reading of an article by Markus Kienscherf. Together, we will consider how liberal social control is a form of pacification targeting specific populations, individuals and spaces.

No preparation required – we will read the essay together; there is no expectation for anyone to read aloud.

We encourage those who join us to make a contribution to Crime Scene Australia (BANK DETAILS – Bank Account Name: Crime Scene Australia; Bank Account Number: 12560334; BSB: 313 140).

[October 2025] Liberal social control as pacification

Paper: Beyond Militarization and Repression: Liberal Social Control as Pacification (2016) (paper) by Markus Kienscherf, who argues that liberal social control is best understood as a form of pacification targeting specific populations, individuals and spaces.

[October 2025] Military-Academic-Industrial Complex? @ Demilitarise RMIT 2-Day Event

Paper: The Political Economy of Australian Militarism: On the Emergent Military–Industrial–Academic Complex (2023) (paper) by Sian Troath. Troath argues that one of the key forces underpinning Australia’s militarization is an emergent military–industrial–academic complex (MIAC), comprised of increasingly close relationships between universities, defense, and defense industry.

[September 2025] Wolfe and Lloyd on Settler Colonialism and Neoliberalism

Essay: Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime (2016) (essay) by David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe. A key figure of the black power movement of the 1960’s, Malcolm X highlights the centrality of global solidarity and the need for land based revolution.

[September 2025] Malcolm X on Solidarity

Speech: Message to Grassroots speech delivered by Malcolm X (1963). A key figure of the black power movement of the 1960’s, Malcolm X highlights the centrality of global solidarity and the need for land based revolution.

[May 2025] Whiteness and Property

Chapter: The House that Jack Built: Britishness and White Possession (chapter) in The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015) (book) by Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Her work looks at Indigenous sovereignty within the context of colonial understandings of race, property, and land.

[March 2025] What is Fascism and Where does it Come From?

Essay: What is Fascism and Where Does it Come From? (2021) by Geoff Eley. A historical analysis of fascism in Germany and Italy, allowing us to better understand how it shows up today around the world.

[November 2024] Frantz Fanon: On Violence

Chapter: Concerning Violence (chapter) in The Wretched Of The Earth (1961) (book) by Frantz Fanon. Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Caribbean and African psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary whose works, including Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are hugely influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and post-Marxism.

[September 2024] The criminal foundations of Australian policing

Essay: The Criminal Foundations of Australian Policing (essay) by A/Prof Amanda Porter in When Cops Are Criminals (2024) (book) edited by Veronica Gorrie. Amanda Porter (Yuin, she/her) is a lecturer, researcher and community advocate based at Melbourne Law School. Amanda researches processes of criminalisation and racialisation in policing, with a special interest in police powers and police accountability law.

[August 2024] Cultivating radical care

Essay: Cultivating Radical Care (2024) by Dr. Noor Ghazal Aswad, where she offers a reimagining of how we might foster radical care and solidarities with those in pursuit of hope, justice, and liberation in apocalyptic times. Dr. Noor Ghazal Aswad draws from the rhetorical tradition, post-colonial theory, critical theory, social movement theory, and transnational studies.

[June 2024] Questioning the ‘sense’ of common sense

Essay: Common Sense as a Legacy Project (2023) by Sara Ahmed featured on her Feminist Killjoys blog. Sara Ahmed is a feminist writer and independent scholar. Ahmed works at the intersection of feminist, queer and race studies. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds as well as institutional cultures.

[May 2024] On the importance of degrowth movements

Essay: Recognizing the “De” in Degrowth – An Anarchist and Autonomist Engagement with Degrowth (2020) by Alexander Dunlap featured on The Anarchist Library. Alexander Dunlap is a Research Fellow and writes about political ecology, environmental conflicts, extractivism, and political control.

[May 2024] The academy and the settler state

Chapter: Refusing the University (chapter) by Sandy Grande in Toward What Justice? (2018) (book). Sandy Grande is a professor of political science and Native American and Indigenous studies.

[April 2024] Censorship from left and right essay by bell hooks

Essay: Censorship From Left and Right (essay) by bell hooks in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation (2006) (book). bell hooks’ life work engaged in critical feminist thought and praxis that disrupted systems of power, domination, and taken for granted cultural norms that maintain these systems.

[April 2024] The politics of solidarity: Decolonising non-Indigenous solidarity

Chapter: Reckoning with Complicity (chapter) in Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles (2022) (book) by Dr Clare Land. Clare is a non-Indigenous scholar who supports land justice and Indigenous-led struggles at the Moondani Balluk Academic Unit at Victoria University

[March 2024] International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination focus: Indigenous sovereignty

Chapter: Don’t Feed the Native (chapter) in Another Day in the Colony (2021) (book) by Chelsea Watego, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman and Indigenist health humanities scholar, prolific writer, and public intellectual

[March 2024] International Women’s Day focus: No decolonial feminism without Palestine

Essay: (Re)Centralising Palestine in Decolonial Feminist Theory (essay) by queer Palestinian feminist sociologists Dr. Nour Abu-Assab and Dr. Nof Nasser-Eddin

[February 2024] What can we learn from a history of struggles for freedom and the people who have resisted?

Speech: Closures and Continuities speech delivered by Angela Davis (2013) in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2016) (book)

[February 2024] How do we sustain working/studying at academic institutions that expect us to state our positions in top tier publications instead of in our praxis?

Essay: On Defiance and Taking Positions (2001) (essay) in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000) (book) by Edward Said.