Seminar with Dr Elena Vasiliou, University of Warwick

Criminology and Epistemic Disobedience

This talk examines how knowledge is produced within European criminology, focusing on the intersection of the politics of punishment and the politics of knowledge. It argues that mainstream criminology often depoliticizes incarceration by severing it from colonial histories and structural oppression, thereby legitimizing state violence and genocide. Drawing on decolonial theorists such as Mbembe and Mignolo, the talk explores epistemic disobedience as a practice of delinking from Eurocentric frameworks and confronting the limits of disciplinary neutrality. Using the silence of European criminology regarding the genocide in Palestine as a point of departure, it considers how collective acts of refusal and critique can open epistemic breaks within institutions that sustain complicity with power.

About the speaker

Elena Vasiliou is a licensed psychologist, educator, and queer scholar. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Bath. Formerly a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Warwick and UC Berkeley (2022–2025), she led a qualitative study on self-destruction, power, pleasure, and pain in UK prisons. Her academic background bridges psychology, queer studies, and critical theory, with a strong focus on community engagement. Her first monograph, under contract with Bristol University Press, rethinks the “pains of imprisonment” through decolonial, psychoanalytic, and queer perspectives, and brings together the research she has conducted in Cyprus, the United States, and the United Kingdom.