Teresa Stout
United States
Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2018
New College, Oxford
Funding: Oxford-Weidenfeld and Hoffmann-Grierson
Teresa graduated with high honors distinction from the New School in 2016. Prior to Oxford, as an organizer, Teresa worked on prison abolition efforts and housing justice for formerly incarcerated people, and worked on national policy initiatives surrounding security, homelessness, equal pay and healthcare reform. During studies at the Oxford Faculty of Law, Teresa undertook the Master of Science in Criminology and Criminal Justice at New College.
Their thesis, Discourses of Securitization: Arms Trade and Border Governance of the European Union, focused on bridging the fields of criminology and international relations through the study of risk management practices of FRONTEX. Using a process of material-semiotic network analysis, the thesis contests Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower, and argues that public-private partnerships of border control leads to violence that is specifically gendered and racialized. Further, that the lack of transparency of this issue, is a constitutive omission in border governance.
Following Oxford, Teresa graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Master of Philosophy in Politics and International Studies at Peterhouse in 2019. Their thesis, The Modern Middle Passage: Anti-Blackness Operationalized in the Arcitecture of the European Union’s Externalization Processes focuses on Afropessimist thought and its possibility to interrogate liberal ideologies within discourses of securitization and the EU’s response to migration, and the active externalization of European borders.
Currently, in their personal work, blending the personal with political - Teresa’s artistic and musical interests focus on biometric technologies, US/EU politics, processes of racialization, data accountability, surveillance as well as notions of post-modernity and queer community responsibility in diaspora and resistance. Teresa is a member of Association for Women’s Rights in Development as well as the African American Intellectual Historical Society.