Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill (25 Feb 2025)

Join Adèle Oliver and the Homerton Anti-Racist Reading Collective to explore creative expression & music as beacons of resistance.

Details: 25 February 2025, 17:00 – 18:00. Light refreshments will be provided.

Location: Skillicorn Room, Homerton College, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 8PH

Registration: Please sign up via Google Forms

Event details

We will be joined by Adèle Oliver, scholar, artist, linguist, and the author of the landmark book Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill. The book is an evidence-based call to keep rap lyrics outside of UK criminal courts steeped in British colonial history. This talk will explore some key concerns of Oliver’s book Deeping It, tracing the aesthetic, musical, and liberatory legacies behind the force that is drill. Adèle will also discuss the process of writing the book and dismantling hierarchies of knowledges as well as where the campaign Art not Evidence intervenes on the current use of rap lyrics in UK courts. Expect readings, music, movement in this exploration of Black artistic resistance, expression, and suppression.

About the speaker

Adèle Oliver is a writer, artist and PhD researcher from Birmingham. Her book Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill counters panic-fuelled discourse on UK drill, gang violence, and knife crime, ‘deeping’ drill as a complex Black artform, born out of generations of commentary on and resistance to technologies of colonialism, consumerism, anti-Blackness, and more. Adèle is also a core member of Art Not Evidence and works as an expert witness in cases that use Black youth culture, music, and idiomatic language as evidence of bad character, criminality and/or gang affiliation. Outside of this work, Adèle is a musician, producer, and avid capoeirista.

View this event on the Homerton College website.

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