Samantha Davis, “Anti-Carcerality, ‘Esoteric Aid’, and the Sacred”
Carceral logic works in many often invisible ways; transcending prisons and policing it operates by severing us from each other, from community, and from the spiritual. Drawing from the Abolition Collective’s anthology Spirituality and Abolition my paper recognizes a diversity of spiritual traditions as foundational to prison abolition understood as a social movement. However, my paper goes further by suggesting that certain practices— for example, the pouring of a libation to honor one’s ancestors— is not just a nod of respect to ancestral traditions, but that it is a pluriversal technology–an actual enactment of, or making of, multidimensional support, what I call “esoteric aid.” I define ‘esoteric aid’ as the traditions, practices, and rituals that draw upon resources from realms beyond the material and argue that they have liberatory effects. I suggest that esoteric aid is an often-overlooked territory of counter-carceral knowledge production that occurs in non-traditional organizing spaces. I inquire how, in particular, ceremonies are used to create pluriverses for emancipation that allow people to embody liberation even for a fleeting moment. Rooted in an ethos of transitoriness, migration, and Pan-Africanism, several of the customs disrupt the boundaries of what is formally accepted as social movement strategy in the West. Moreover, many traditions I engage with rearrange the temporality of crises by centering apocalypse, not as an endpoint, but as an opportunity or portal to these other realms. Overall, I ask how the wisdom of ‘esoteric aid’ can transform modern US prison abolition organizing into a more whole, well, and sustainable movement to build futures in what many see as the end of the “world”. Finally, I seek to hold the tension of understanding the anti-carceral labor that occurs in sacred practice, and the danger in drawing mainstream attention to healing art forms that were born on the margins.
Bella Fiorucci, ""What is Left?": The Imprint of Incarcerated Bodies"
Assata Shakur arose as a poet in response to the prison. As such, her poetry is deeply concerned with exactly what it means for poems to be created from a place of unfreedom. As attention to prison studies develops, we must seek to define a poetics of the carceral. To accomplish this goal, I study the relationship between inmate authors, the space of the prison, and the sensory experiences they reproduce. The most recent direction of my work is in the exploration of accounts of women inmates, with specific attention to their physical beings, disembodied beings, and carcerality. This most directly takes shape in the poetry of Assata Shakur, as her existence proved so dangerous to US political systems that she was forcibly erased from her community. Her exploration of this erasure and the broader systems that imprison her provide a deep understanding of the sensory experience of prison for the reader of her poetry. The attempts to erase Shakur translates to others, as the pursuit of her imprisonment results in the removal of others from their landscapes as well. The legacy of her image and the consequences of its attempted erasure allow us to draw a visual environment created by and through the prison, especially as seen through the lyrics of Tupac Shakur. We best understand the significance of the image Shakur creates when we look at the way she gives voice to the conditions of captivity from a place of exile. Her continued impact, especially in modern social movements like Black Lives Matter, reinforces the importance of analyzing her unbodied presence. Her poetry expands our understanding of how the prison leaves its mark within a poem, as she articulates the prison experience in unique ways, reconstructing and experimenting with sight to push back against a dehumanizing, carceral space.
Monica Ramsy, "From “social workers not cops” to “social workers are cops”: Threading the needle between the welfare state, the carceral state, and an anarchist vision for abolition"
Why turn to anarchism and the welfare state when discussing abolition? When contemporary U.S. progressive movements invoke the language of “abolition,” the term’s often-implied shorthand is for a movement to abolish prisons, jails, and other explicitly carceral institutions. An ideal world within this abolitionist imaginary is one in which the welfare state is left reformed, but intact. This paper calls for the integration of a wider and deeper lens in prevailing abolitionist discourse. In particular, this paper seeks to highlight the intellectual and political purchase of applying anti-state, social anarchist critiques to abolitionist analyses of the U.S. welfare state, generally, and U.S. social work practices, specifically. By looking at social work practices, this paper builds out, clarifies, and deepens arguments that the “caregiving” or “nurturing” parts of the U.S. state–the welfare state, the social work that brings this state to life–are inextricable from the carceral operations of the state. Likewise, in examining social(ist) work, we have an opportunity to examine the gaps, tensions, and cross-hatching of anti-state and statist socialist frameworks, goals, and projects.
These questions point to the urgent and critically important need for deeper discussion around the “caregiving” arms of the state and, in particular, the welfare state. Looking more closely at the welfare state’s operations and history reveals how this “benevolent” face of the state both creates structural violence, itself, and also aids the ascribed “malevolent” (read: explicitly carceral) faces of the state. In examining this carceral-welfare state interrelationship, this paper draws from Beckett and Murakawa’s concept of the “shadow carceral state,” or the “legally hybrid and institutionally variegated ways'' (222) in which U.S. carceral structures operate today, to argue that–contrary to prevailing contemporary abolitionist discourse–the U.S. welfare state is more accurately characterized as part of the shadow carceral state.
Jadelynn Zhang, "Writers Against Cop Cities: Recentering Protesters and Challenging Dominant Narratives as a Cultural Process"
In Atlanta, GA, the Stop Cop City movement emerged on the heels of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests following the police murder of George Floyd. The movement opposes the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, or “Cop City,” due to the multidimensional, intersectional, harms that it would cause to surrounding, predominantly Black communities, including but not limited to environmental racism, over-policing and police brutality, and violations to Indigenous land rights. Throughout the course of the movement, movement writers have documented the diversity of tactics used by protesters and established abolitionist aims for the movement, enabling its expansion to other communities across the United States protesting their own Cop Cities. Defined broadly, movement writers refer to all movement participants who produce literature in service of the movement, including but not limited to organizers, cultural workers, historians, journalists, guerrilla writers, and content creators. This study asks the following questions: How do movement writers challenge dominant narratives of abolition and abolitionist movements? How do they recenter the experiences of movement participants? To study these questions, I utilize a toolkit of mixed qualitative methods of in-depth interviews, qualitative content analysis, and archival methods while also embedding this research in a community-based approach. This analysis provides insight into how movement writers challenge dominant narratives in their written work and organizing and how these are put in conversation with historical lineages of social movements. This sociological inquiry builds upon existing literatures of abolition feminism, social movements, and culture yet challenges long-held perspectives on movement success as defined solely by institutional change.
