Popular narratives portray society as made up of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people. Figures of the citizen, the worker, and the graduate are contrasted with the deviant, the criminal, and the dropout. For the safety of ‘good’ people, we are supposed to put ‘bad’ people in …
Read morePrisons and universities are two sides of the same coin: Eli Meyerhoff on Abolition
In North America—where I live as a settler and guest in Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee lands—abolition means confronting settler-colonial realities, the prison-industrial complex, legacies of slavery, exclusionary migration regimes, and the violent bordering, confining, and ghettoizing practices that are part of this landscape. Coming from …
Read moreDismantling the architectures of global apartheid: Konstantin Kilibarda on Abolition
Let us not sever abolition from the people who inhabit and constantly remake it, over the course of an apocalypse that remains uncontained. Abolitionists are the people who imagine, practice, wage, and thrill in the radical and irrevocable destruction of things for sake of …
Handcuffed in her own home by “border security” cops, the single mother of a baby girl who had five minutes to choose whether to bring her “citizen” child with her to jail or have her separated from her mama for the first time since …
Read moreFighting for freedom in ways we may have never imagined: Stefanie Gude on Abolition
Abolition and the Evolving Pursuit of Freedom Abolition reminds us to pursue freedom. It names the systems that thrive on a lack of freedom—white supremacy and settler-colonialism, patriarchy and heteronormativity, capitalism and debt. It critiques the violent forces that structure unfreedom—police and prisons, borders …
Freedom. A freedom informed by the social vision of the Black radical imagination. Framed by the tenets of love, compassion and communal fellowship, the social vision of the Black radical imagination represents a path to undo multifaceted relationships to power and forge new connections. Such …
Abolition is both a negative process of dismantling oppressive structures and a positive process of imagining, creating, and sustaining the sort of relationships, practices, and institutions that would make oppressive structures obsolete. Abolition is not a telos, if by telos one means the end …
Read moreThese are the moments in which another world becomes possible: Lisa Guenther on Abolition
Abolition is both a way of seeing the world and a way of being in and acting in the world. For me, it means understanding the connections between settler colonialism, the carceral state, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, racialized capitalism, etc. But it is also a …
Read moreWe cannot reform away oppression. It must be abolished: Brian Lovato on Abolition