Down by Law: Criminalization, Solidarity, and Survival in Europe

Place: Opera i Filharmonia Podlaska

How can complex sociological research on criminalization be translated into the language of comics? How can we communicate, in an accessible way, the realities of police violence, state indifference, and the everyday injustices experienced by people who use psychoactive substances, fight for abortion rights, or engage in sex work? How can we illustrate the complex landscape of Europe, where helping refugees, living in poverty, or being HIV-positive is punished? How can we speak about criminalization policies not from the perspective of those who make the law, but from the perspective of those who live it, navigate it, and resist it in an effort to survive?

We warmly invite you to the premiere of the comic Down by Law. Criminalization, Solidarity and Survival in Europe (PM Press), which will take place during the 19th Polish Sociological Congress. The graphic novel Down by Law was created by the CrimScapes research group—sociologists and anthropologists from Poland, Germany, France, and Finland. The team included Agata Dziuban, Justyna Struzik, and Agata Chełstowska, who, together with local artists and communities affected by processes of criminalization, translated the findings of the project CrimScapes: Navigating Citizenship in the European Landscapes of Criminalisation into the language of comics. Come see for yourselves!

Praise

“These ethno-graphics unveil the multiple forms of criminalization across Europe, from sex work to abortion practice, from to drug use to hate speech, and even from the poor unable to pay their fines to humanitarian workers conducting search and rescue operations at sea. They provide an inquiry into the dark side of contemporary societies.”

—Didier Fassin, author of Policing the City: An Ethno-Graphic

“Down by Law illustrates graphic stories of the everyday criminalization of sex work, abortion, drug use, poverty, HIV/AIDS, and refugee search-and-rescue missions, as well as the harmful effects of the regulation of online hate speech. It takes the reader from the prison cell to the streets, to the surveilled seascapes and online landscapes of digital oppression in various places in Europe and does the work of undoing the criminalization of everyday people, especially racialized and gendered, in our imagination. Abolition speaks to the power of imagining worlds otherwise; this creative-collaborative novel is a great, much-needed, and inspiring contribution to that project.”

—Vanessa E. Thompson, coauthor of Abolitionismus

Link: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1810