The Annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture is held each Trinity term. It is named in honour of Professor Elizabeth Colson (1917-2016), a renowned anthropologist, who was Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, and director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Zambia from 1947 to 1951.

Deportations are a means of formally severing relation between subjects and the body politic. The plausibility of deportation as a lawful, ethical act depends on a host of juridically constituted rules concerning what a polity is, who its members are, and under what conditions one can be excised from it. In this talk, Jeffrey will argue that the legal machinery of deportation is one of the key sites in which we can see how law operates as an expressive, world-constituting embodiment of ethical commitment and a technology of abandonment – a form of state-authorized “letting die” that differs from intentional sovereign violence. In the United States, the implementation of the Convention Against Torture and the removal of Haitians with criminal convictions to Haiti provides a chilling opportunity to explore the limits of these practices of severing relation. Approaching this jurisprudence through an anthropological lens, this talk will examine how law creates ethical geographies of connection and how its modes of severing relation insulate states from responsibility for state-sanctioned violence.

The lecture will be followed by drinks in the Hall.