Abstract:

In previous work, I proposed a concept of « racial conflation, » or the conceptual conflation of « blackness » and « criminality, » as a framework to understand how black agentic action in the U.S. is persistently vulnerable to being re-authored through a frame of criminality. In this talk, I employ racial conflation as a tool to explore how black survivors of domestic and sexual violence are vacated of their self-determined intentions and supplanted with “phantom intentions” as the official explanatory narrative about their experiences of navigating conditions of violence and chaos.

Bio: Alisa Bierria is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is developing a manuscript entitled, Missing in Action: Agency, Race, & Invention, which explores how intentional action is socially imagined in contexts of anti-black racism, carceral reasoning, and gendered violence. Alisa’s writing is published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and in numerous scholarly volumes and anthologies.