Friday, May 16, 2025

4:00 – 6:00PM

Royce Hall 306

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Join us on May 16, 2025 in Royce Hall 306 for a colloquium with Alisa Bierria, UCLA Gender Studies. The talk will take place from 4:00PM – 6:00PM with a reception to follow.

Maneuvering Agency

Researchers have documented patterns in which black women who have experienced sexual or domestic violence are not believed, perceived, or supported as survivors. Indeed, police, prosecutors, and other state actors that regulate “crime” and “criminals” often provoke, exacerbate, and regulate violence for black survivors, rationalizing the criminalization of black survivors through manipulating discourses about their agency. In this talk, I describe several forms of “agency maneuvers” through a discussion about the politics of intention and how action/reaction is rationalized. I will also propose methodological approaches for theorizing agency given this analysis.

Alisa Bierria is a black feminist philosopher and an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her forthcoming book, Inconceivable Agency: Race, Gender Violence, & the Carceral Imagination, proposes a pluralistic, qualitative philosophical framework for agency that can account for action taken within a matrix of violence. Through focusing on insights from black survivors’ lives, experiences, and visions of freedom, she argues that we must not only ask “how much” agency are subjects allowed within conditions of subjugation, but also what kinds of agency are projected onto subjects, and what kinds of agency are formed through acting with the intent to survive.

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