Lessons in Liberation: Growing Movements Through Abolitionist Praxis

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session series centers abolition as a necessary framework to guide practices that will ‘cultivate equitable education systems for the 21st century’. Born from sustained organizing, and rooted in Black and women of color feminisms, disability justice, and other movements, abolition calls for an end to our reliance on imprisonment, policing and surveillance, and to imagine a safer future for our communities. As abolitionist educators, organizers, and scholars, we discuss how prison abolitionist praxis moves, manifests, and is challenged across our different educational and community contexts. Panelists will build from their collective, national and local organizing, including national convenings, panels, and our collective work as contributors to Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators (AK Press, 2021).

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Educators for Social Justice

Chair

• Chrissy Hernandez, California State University - Monterey Bay

Papers

• Abolition: One Critical Genealogy - Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University

• We Tryna Get Free on Our Own Terms: A Conversation - Bettina L. Love, Teachers College, Columbia University; David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Toward Pedagogies of Wholeness: Centering Intimacy, Interdependence, and Healing in an Aspiring-Abolitionist English Classroom - Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills

• Cultivating a Culture of Transformative Youth Organizing - Emily Bautista, Independent Scholar

Discussant

• Andrew Greene, Teachers College, Columbia University