Online seminar series: What is the Global South and why it matters - Session 15

Session 1: Criminology and Epistemic Disobedience 

Speaker: Dr Elena Vasiliou, Research Associate, University of Bath

This talk examines how knowledge is produced within European criminology, focusing on the intersection of the politics of punishment and the politics of knowledge. It argues that mainstream criminology often depoliticizes incarceration by severing it from colonial histories and structural oppression, thereby legitimizing state violence and genocide. Drawing on decolonial theorists such as Mbembe and Mignolo, the talk explores epistemic disobedience as a practice of delinking from Eurocentric frameworks and confronting the limits of disciplinary neutrality. Using the silence of European criminology regarding the genocide in Palestine as a point of departure, it considers how collective acts of refusal and critique can open epistemic breaks within institutions that sustain complicity with power.

Date and Time: Wednesday 18 March 2025, 1pm–2pm GMT

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About the speaker

Elena Vasiliou is a licensed psychologist, educator, and queer scholar. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Bath. Formerly a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Warwick and UC Berkeley (2022–2025), she led a qualitative study on self-destruction, power, pleasure, and pain in UK prisons. Her academic background bridges psychology, queer studies, and critical theory, with a strong focus on community engagement. Her first monograph, under contract with Bristol University Press, rethinks the “pains of imprisonment” through decolonial, psychoanalytic, and queer perspectives, and brings together the research she has conducted in Cyprus, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

About the seminar series

This online seminar series aims at both centring and critiquing discussions around the ‘Global South’.

Contributions will come from leading academics drawn principally from the social and human sciences whose research or practice engages with, challenges, or advances the concept of the ‘Global South’ and who, to do so, draw on a variety of theoretical, scholarship and research positions.

The series will be of interest to academics, professionals, students, researchers and policy makers eager to diversify their knowledge and make their professional practice more inclusive. It would appeal to those working in the areas of criminal justice including prisons, probation services and policing, education, nursing, psychology, social policy, sociology, and social work.

The series will take place every Wednesday, 1-2pm (BST/GMT), in February and March 2026, starting Wednesday 11 February. It will be Co-Chaired by Professor Elaine Arnull and Dr Amy Duvenage.

For more details and to register > 

If you have any questions, please email elaine.arnull@solent.ac.uk.