Reader in Philosophy & Design
Tia is currently working at the intersections of political theory and philosophy of race, anti-blackness, policing, and freedom. They have recently published work on the philosophy of policing, care as counterinsurgency, the relationship between race and neoliberalism, and Kant’s relationship with slavery.
Bio
Tia’s most recent book, is Everything is Police (University of Minnesota Press), https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/everything-is-police
This book considers how institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to worldmaking. Policing is constitutive of colonial modernity, and Tia Trafford argues that the result is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. From the plantation to the prison, global apartheid, and pandemic control, this book examines why and how policing has become the most ingrained, commonsense—and insidious—way of managing our world.
Tia is also author of The Empire at Home: Internal Colonies and the End of Britain (Pluto Press), and Meaning in Dialogue (Springer Press). They are also co-editor of Alien Vectors: Accelerationism, Xenofeminism, Inhumanism (Routledge) and Speculative Aesthetics (MIT Press).
Research supervision
Tia supervises a range of PhD students whose work intersects with cultural theory, political theory, queer theory or post-colonial theory. They are interested in supervising students whose work considers aspects of:
- Political Theory
- Political Economy
- Coloniality and Race
- Cultural Theory