In this episode, we speak with Lisa Guenther about the relationship between the death penalty, sovereignty, and abolition. Lisa is an abolitionist who is currently a professor of philosophy at Queen’s University in so-called Ontario, Canada, and has written extensively about the death penalty, solitary confinement, and socialgue death. Lisa deconstructs the state’s right to kill or let live, that is, the relation between the western philosophical tradition’s conception of sovereignty and the death penalty as it specifically operates within settler-colonial racial capitalist social relations. From there, we move to discuss abolitionist forms of relationality that interrupt sovereignty’s hold on life and death.
https://soundcloud.com/rustbeltabolitionradio/the-death-penalty-sovereignty-and-abolition
