Fugitive care: beyond capitalist welfare | By Ida Danewid
Care is often seen as the antidote to violence and as a powerful frame for abolition: hence the activist slogan “fund care, not cops.” But while scholars of racial capitalism have done much to excavate the violent history of prisons, borders, and police, they have had less to say about the history of state care and welfare.
In this talk, I explore how state-sponsored forms of care have functioned as technologies of pacification, expropriation, abandonment, and control. By looking beyond the neoliberal period of “punitive welfare”, I examine the messy relationship between care and carcerality across three sites of the “benevolent” welfare state: public health, housing, and schooling. In sodoing, I work towards an anarchistic approach to abolition which seeks, notjust to fund care, but to transform and conceive ofitanew: whatIcall fugitive care.
Ida Danewid is Associate Professor of Gender and Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). Her work has appeared in Antipode, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Political Sociology, and International Studies Quarterly, among other places. She co-edits the journal Globalizations.
The meeting is part of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab seminar series Spring 2026.
The Beyond Inhabitation Lab provides an infrastructure to facilitate a process of collective study around the shifting terrain and politics of inhabitation globally, and is directed by Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone.
- To participate in person or online, you must register at this link
- More info Beyond Inhabitation Lab seminar series Spring 2026 at link Events – Beyond Inhabitation
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