Politics/Poetics of Migration: Breaking Up With…Carceral Romance: In Conversation with Robyn Maynard and York Students

Date: February 12, 2026

Time: 2:30-5:00pm EST

Location: 280N York Lanes, York University 4700 Keele St, North York (In-person only)

Register here: https://research.apps01.yorku.ca/machform/view.php?id=291853

Event Description:

This project is a two-part intellectual and community engagement initiative around the 2025 updated edition of Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives. First, throughout January 2026, several campus-wide book club sessions were organized with graduate and undergraduate students, where they discussed the urgent themes of the book. Second, on February 12, 2026, there will be a public book launch, which will include a community dialogue. The initiative is designed as a research series in which undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and community members engage the text in-depth before convening in a large public forum with the author.

Speaker Bio:

Robyn Maynard is an Assistant Professor of Black Feminisms in Canada at the University of Toronto-Scarborough in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, with a graduate appointment in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the St. George Campus. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the Present (Fernwood, 2017) and the co-author of Rehearsals for Living (Knopf/Haymarket, Abolitionist Papers 3, 2022).  She has published writing in the Washington Post, World Policy Journal, the Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Scholar & Feminist Journal, and a number of peer-reviewed book anthologies. Maynard’s research and teaching focus on transnational Black feminist thought Black social movements, policing, borders and carceral studies, Black-Indigenous histories and praxis, Black Canadian studies, as well as abolitionist and anti-colonial methodologies.