Organizing to Abolish Campus Police and Growing a Movement

• In Event: Division J Vice Presidential Session: Dismantling Injustice in Campus Policing and Reimagining Safety

Abstract

This presentation extends upon previous research on organizing pedagogies transgressing perceived campus-movement boundaries (Rogers et.al, 2023) by reflecting upon the author’s contribution to the development of a new movement popular education platform that centers abolitionist praxis in the Greater Philadelphia area. The W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction is a political education program for aspiring revolutionaries and movement leaders from those communities most impacted by poverty, policing, and mass incarceration. Through participatory and collective study of political economy, the history of global resistance movements, and the theoretical and practical aspects of social change, the movement school project aims to teach a new generation of organic intellectuals not only how to understand the world, but more importantly, how to change it. In this presentation, an organizational leader will share about their journey through the campus abolitionist experiment Police Free Penn which called for the abolition of University of Pennsylvania campus police to furthering abolitionist worldmaking through the current Movement School project. The outcome of the presentation seeks to expose the links between campus policing, urban policing, and global militarism as key sites of reproducing subjugation and oppression.

Author

• Christopher R. Rogers, Haverford College