Browsing by Subject "Abolition"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    The Body is Where Freedom Begins: Black Feminist Embodiments of Carceral Abolition
    (2022-06) Wright, AK
    The Body is Where Freedom Begins: Black Feminist Embodiments of Carceral Abolition investigates how Black individuals intimately live, resist and care amid carceral forces. This interdisciplinary project brings together carceral abolition and healing justice to borrow theoretical and methodological tools from Carceral Studies, Black Feminist Thought, and Queer and Trans Studies. Carceral abolition, a topic within Carceral Studies, is a project to end policing and imprisonment by cultivating a society that addresses socioeconomic inequalities that lead to incarceration. Healing justice is the process of centering individual and collective healing in movements for social change. Healing justice is an activist praxis that argues that to address socioeconomic issues such as racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and environmental degradation, one must uplift healing work that invokes care, ways in which individuals prevent and deal with harm, for the bodies of our communities. I argue that it is everyday forms of care in the afterlife of slavery and ongoing colonial projects, that allow for survival and resistance amid carcerality, which are significant for carceral abolition. Understanding a transformation of intimate relationships as integral to carceral abolition, this project utilizes historical analysis, literary analysis, podcast analysis and also semi-structured interviews with healing justice facilitators in Minneapolis to link communal relationships, care work andsocial justice.
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    The Fight for the Right to Teach: Mapping the Terrain of the Diversity Gap" in Teacher Education"
    (2016-06) Dyke, Erin
    Recently, there has been a resurgence in research and policy surrounding U.S. education’s demographic imperative, or the “browning” of K12 students and the “whitening” of teachers. Teacher education has largely responded to this “diversity gap” with research that supports white teacher candidates’ racial identity formation and cultural competence. Policy and reform efforts from within and beyond teacher education tend to frame solutions for the “diversity gap” as inclusion and representation (recruiting more teacher candidates of color) and/or to create more robust and critical university-based teacher education programs (against the upswing in fast-track labor market approaches to preparation). There are fewer examples that critically reflect on and explore how teacher education, as an institution, excludes and marginalizes people of color. Using a critical bricolage methodological approach that includes institutional ethnography, participatory activist research, and feminist memory work, I study the diversity gap from multiple positional perspectives within and beyond the institution. First, I draw from a year-long collective memory work study with a teacher candidate of color during the course of her program. Framed within an analysis of the ways in which neoliberal logics guide the structure and practice of institutions of teacher education, I consider the ways in which alliances and ethical practices of subversive study across institutional hierarchies can contribute to challenging the institutional reproduction of whiteness in teaching. Next, I explore the specific needs and desires for indigenous immersion teacher preparation that can support Ojibwe language revitalization from two years of ethnographic research with Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia, a non-profit organization that develops Ojibwe language texts and curriculum. I challenge the institution’s selective inertia with respect to indigenous-led efforts toward educational self-determination and illuminate tensions between “diversity gap” solutions that argue for inclusion and access without mention of decolonization. Finally, I shift to the landscape of urban education in the Twin Cities and the work of the Social Justice Education Movement, a directly democratic education union of which I am a co-founding member. While we have undertaken a variety of issues and work in social justice education, I focus in on our short-lived campaign to demand the districts support more staff and teachers of color. Racialized tensions articulated through our organizing forced us to rethink our initial demands for inclusion and broaden and challenge our collective understandings of what kind of education we were fighting for. Our collective, movement-embedded study of who engages un/misrecognized and institutionally devalued educative work further illuminates the need to re-think the category “teacher” and processes of state certification/legibility. Taken together, these three angles, or what I term “positional perspectives” enable me to argue for a paradigmatic shift in the ways in which critical teacher educators articulate the problems with and solutions for the “diversity gap” in teaching. I conclude with a series of questions and provocations to consider how teacher educators can de-link from their investments in the profession and its management of knowledge authority, and contribute more effectively to movements for decolonial futures.
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    Pedagogies of Abolition: A Phenomenological Exploration of Radical Study in Black Trans Communities
    (2022-06) Alexander, Qui
    Education is often positioned as a solution to incarceration while simultaneously using police (or commonly named School Resource Officers) to enforce discipline; or metal detectors and cameras for surveillance within school buildings as a measure of “safety” (Meiners, 2011). Sojoyner (2016) argues that both schools and prisons function as enclosures of Black life. Carceral progressivism positions education as a solution to societal oppression by “emancipating” students from enclosures, rather than actually abolishing the conditions that create said enclosures (Shange 2019). This is an example of how traditional education-based modes of study (Meyerhoff, 2019) enforce the carceral logics this work seeks to resist. This study is a phenomenological exploration of how pedagogies of abolition manifests in the everyday lives of Black trans folks. I define the phenomenon pedagogies of abolition as the process of teaching/learning an abolitionist praxis (Q. Alexander, 2022; Dyke et al., 2018; Love, 2019; Meiners, 2011; Rodriguez, 2019). Abolitionist praxis serves as a Black radical mode of study (Meyerhoff, 2019) working to transform our reliance on carceral state power and the logic that perpetuates it. This study specifically asks: how do pedagogies of abolition manifest in the everyday lives of Black trans folks? and how do those manifestations teach us how to study in abolitionist ways? Taking up a Black radical mode of study, this study uses a study group to create a fugitive network (Harney & Moten, 2013) of Black trans folks committed to abolition. The researcher studies with and alongside the group to articulate where and how these pedagogical moments manifest and work to shape our abolitionist world-making practices. This study explores three specific manifestations of pedagogies of abolition: relational ethic, embodied knowledge and holding change, both within the study group itself and in the lives of the participants. The three manifestations explored in this study illuminate the ways in which (modes of) study that center relationality, embodied ways of knowing and intentional building of collective spaces, create methods to enact an abolitionist praxis in our everyday lives. Grounded in the researcher’s experiences as a Black trans community educator, this research explores Black trans life as inherently pedagogical, teaching new ways of being and knowing that do not rely on carcerality, anti-Blackness, and gender based violence.
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    Speculating Abolition: Alternatives Models Of Redress In Black And Indigenous Feminist Speculative Fiction
    (2024-04) Ornelas, E.
    Policing and prisons don’t solve the problems of interpersonal and institutional violence and harm, and in fact fail those most vulnerable to violence. Speculating Abolition: Alternative Forms of Redress in Black and Indigenous Feminist Speculative Fiction, analyzes contemporary North American Anglophone fiction from Black and Indigenous women, queer, trans, and Two Spirit people in order to conceive of a world free of the carceral settler state. In the hands of Black and Indigenous peoples, speculating as a gerundive verb form—rather than an adjective—is a distinct practice of reading and creating, defined by its promise of imagining otherwise. Hence, I ask: How do these works help envision alternatives to forms of redress like the criminal punishment system? What do literary texts illustrate as possible options for and limits to resistance in the face of gendered, racialized, and colonial interpersonal and institutional violence? And how can these speculative visions transform broader debates about models of justice? The arc of this project traces ways to enact redress without policing and prisons, instead moving toward healing and away from harm. The introduction grounds the work in an abolitionist feminism that takes seriously the critiques of traditional Western forms of “justice.” My first chapter asks necessary questions of the place of punishment in lieu of the carceral settler state, particularly in the case of egregious crimes like sexual assault witnessed within Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn. The second chapter argues that a crucial part of addressing interpersonal and institutional violence without state apparatuses is to directly confront those who are causing harm, like in Mariame Kaba’s short story “Justice” as well as Cherie Dimaline’s (Métis) The Marrow Thieves. When facing conflict head-on isn’t effective or feasible, my third chapter encourages a turn inward towards those most affected by violence, through the fugitivity, generative refusal, and cultural reclamation seen in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts and Adam Garnet Jones’s (Cree/Métis) short story “The History of the New World.” Finally, the conclusion speculates about the application of these lessons for scholars and activists to prefigure abolition. Ultimately, I present a case against punitive measures for those who commit harm, by asserting that more restorative and transformative options are reflected in Black and Indigenous feminist literature.