‘Beyond Sanctuary’ with Ananya Roy and Veronika Zablotsky

Roy and Zablotsky remark that “this book is not a blueprint for radical sanctuary but rather an accompaniment to global revolt toward liberated life-ways.” Working through diverse radical positions, they challenge readers to ask: “What is sanctuary on stolen land?” They understand the present as shaped by the enduring aftermaths of settler colonialism and white supremacy, and argue that this condition demands a critical rethinking of justice, freedom, and reparatory justice. This edited volume is a significant contribution to the Black radical tradition, Indigenous studies, postcolonial thought, and critical refugee studies, in its effort to “think (from the West) otherwise.” It is also an urgent read, as uncertainties accumulate and we struggle to see beyond the shocking scenes that flood our daily lives. Most importantly, it is a call to continue our engagement with migrant communities in our cities, even when there is no guarantee of the outcomes. 

Speakers 

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and holds the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Roy is the author of Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (2010) and City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (2003), and co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (2003). She also led a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, which helped establish a global field of inquiry into housing justice shared by scholars working in universities and in social movements. 

Veronika Zablotsky is a political theorist whose research examines postcolonial and feminist perspectives in political theory, critical migration studies, and transnational diaspora studies. She teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. She was a Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism” at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, University of California, Los Angeles; the book Beyond Sanctuary (2025), co-edited with Ananya Roy, emerged from this collaboration.  She is a founding member of the Critical Armenian Studies Collective at the University of Pennsylvania.