Territories of the Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee// Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation Treaty Territory // Dish With One Spoon Treaty Territory
 
The organizing committee for the 2020 Abolition Convergence invites you to come dream with us! We invite each of you to join us in hopes that our relationships will advance movements and shifts that bring about the futures we dream of! So come create, connect, explore and dream with us!
 
Proposals: We will be open for proposals from September 1, 2019 – December 31, 2019 and welcome a wide range of artistic, activist, academic submissions! We also encourage folks to submit proposals that will help to build our children and youth tracks!!
 
Ideas for proposals may include but are not limited to:
    Workshops;
    Wellness spaces;
    Art, Multimedia, theatre and game-making spaces;
    Relationship building and sustaining;
    Panels
    Academic paper presentations
    Caucus meetings;
    Performances;
    Community Kitchens;
    Multi-session themes;
    Trainings/Skillshares;
    Roundtables;
    Spaces for creation and collaboration;
    Social Spaces
    And more! 
 
Our organizing committee is a collaboration of artists, activists, academics, and people with direct experience with the carceral system. Our group includes Indigenous folks, Black folks, people of colour, white folks, queer/trans* and 2-spirit folks, younger and older folks, folks who have been incarcerated and people who have worked and struggled against incarceration, detention, deportation, and settler colonialism in various ways.
 
In this light we want to encourage and make room for the participation of people/communities who face oppression or who may typically have less access to similar platforms including youth/students, Indigenous peoples, Black people, Latinx people and other racialized folks, 2SLGBTQIA+ people, Muslims, Jewish folks, Palestinian people, women, trans*/non-binary folx, people with different abilities, migrants, poor folks, sex workers, prisoners and other people who are directly affected by state violence.
 
We welcome proposals from anywhere in Canada, the United States or internationally. We recognize that lack of funds is often a barrier to participation and we will do our best to offer some subsidies for travel if a need is identified and funds allow.
 
Proposals & Registration: To register to attend or to submit a proposal, please fill out our registration form – and tell us a little bit about yourself:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1iSb4ikPzzUic190uyrWwOii5LJpD2b7rFhvv-F3-mrI/viewform?edit_requested=true
 
Cost: In an effort to make the convergence financially accessible to as many people as possible, we are proposing the following registration costs (Note: All funds are in Canadian dollars and $1 CDN = $0.75 US):
 
    Free – I am a youth, unemployed, underemployed, unfunded student, or someone who is formerly incarcerated
    $1 – $100 (sliding scale) – I am employed but receive no funding from my work or school to attend the convergence
    $100 – $200 (sliding scale) – I receive funding from my work or school to attend the convergence
    
Payments can be sent by e-transfer to: abolitiontoronto@gmail.com
 
    Twitter: @abolitionTO
    Instagram: @abolitionTO
    Facebook: @abolitionjournal
 
Questions? – Email us at abolitiontoronto@gmail.com
 
Please include a clear description of your proposed session, information as to how long it will be, whether you have any access needs, and whether you would like to conduct your session in a language other than English. We will accept proposals in text, audio or video format based on whatever is easiest for you.
 
Please let us know if you are bringing children and would like them to participate in the children’s track for the event! If you have specific accessibility needs, if you have dietary restrictions, or if you require support with accommodation and travel give us that information and we will do our best to support your attendance and participation in this convergence. We are continually in a process of trying to make all events accessible, but please let us know if there are things we’ve missed!
 
For more information on the convergence, please go here: https://abolitionjournal.org/more-information-on-convergence-2020/
​

On April 6, 2020, Birkbeck, in the University of London, will host a workshop on Critical Perspectives on Land Registration. 

From the call for papers:
In 2018, the Law Commission released its extensive report on updating the Land Registration Act 2002. The same year, HM Land Registry announced its ambition to become “the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data, and aiming to achieve comprehensive registration by 2030”. Meanwhile, other states around the world have taken steps towards paperless, digital platform-based conveyancing. ‘Proptech’, the use of digital platform-based technology to find innovative ways of extracting value from real estate, is emerging as a new industry in late capitalist economies around the world. In the English and Welsh context, the proptech industry is being actively supported by HM Land Registry, even as law struggles to regulate it. Even, arguably, as the courts and others struggle to conceptualise just what land registration actually does, how and why it does this, and whether we actually want it to do what it does.
The history and doctrinal contradictions of the LRA 2002 and its predecessor, the Land Registration Act 1925, are well studied.  What is less well-studied are the implications of the changes effected by systems of land registration. Which rights the law recognizes, how it recognizes them, and how the different rightsholders interact with each other are complex questions which tacitly rank competing claims to and in land and, by extension, rank those making these claims. The transfer of entitlement to enclosed, privatized land is thus not only a necessarily complex legal task, but also one that is dependent on and productive of relations of power. For a very long time, as Alain Pottage has demonstrated, that power was located in local community memory (Pottage 1992, 1994). The seemingly banal change in legal process from proving and transferring title through paper deeds to relying on a central register involved a shift in power away from local community memory and toward a central administrative archive, and a corresponding shift in the very idea of what was being proven and transferred (ibid). This legal technology was first trialled in the colony of South Australia, and its dispossessory effects on racialised populations and on women, whose relationships with land tend to be less amenable to registration, are now being acknowledged (Hanstad 1998; Ye 2009; Mollett 2010; Bhandar 2015; Keenan 2017). As we move away from paper registries and toward digital technology, new constructions of property are being produced and with them new formations of power.  It is striking that these changes towards digitisation are happening before courts and others have fully conceptualised just what land registration does.
In light of these developments, new perspectives on land registration and its social, economic and political significance are pressing and important. For legislative schemes in which registration is necessary for the agreed title transfer to take effect, land registration does not merely provide the machinery for dealing with property, it manufactures new constructions of property.
In this one-day workshop we seek papers which engage with the broader significance of land registration.  How does land registration change our understanding of property, what effects has land registration had on who can make claims to land and how, and how do these changes in our relationship to land matter more broadly? We are especially interested in papers applying critical theoretical lenses to land registration.
Please send a maximum 500 word abstract to Dr Sarah Hamill (sarah.hamill@tcd.ie) and Dr Sarah Keenan (s.keenan@bbk.ac.uk) by 1 March 2020.

More information is available here (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/remote_event_view?id=9409).