Over the last few years, Jonathan X. Inda has been working on a project that seeks to develop new ways to document, understand, and respond to the critical issue of state violence against two key racialized groups—Indigenous peoples and migrants/refugees—in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States. The project is collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature, involving a team of five scholars in four countries (Australia, the US, Canada, and the UK) who work across the fields of cultural studies, critical legal studies, sociology, anthropology, and media studies. The project specifically focuses on the deaths of Indigenous peoples and migrants in sites of state custody and responsibility, for example, police cells, prisons, immigration detention centers, and borders. Such racialized deaths—that is, the deaths of individuals marked as being racially different and consequently positioned as unequal in society—have become intractable problems in the three nation-states under study. The project examines how these deaths occur, as well as elucidates how legal and social accountability for them is understood and assigned or disowned. Furthermore, moving away from individual national contexts, they identify and map the transnational structures, processes, and explanatory frameworks that underpin such deaths.

An important part of this research project is the development of a website of case studies focused on migrant and indigenous deaths (https://www.deathscapes.org). The website is still a work in progress. It currently has 8 case studies (4 Australia, 2 UK, 2 US), with more to be added in the near future. They hope the website is useful in elucidating the nature of racialized violence and in bringing to light the stories of people who have perished at the hands of the state.