Creative Collaboration Across Differences: Ensemble Work for Abolition

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Towards A Politics of Multiplicity: Reimagining the Future of “Ensemble” in Art and Education

Abstract

This project explores storytelling and music as tools for healing, identity transformation, and decarceration through an ensemble framework. It centers a critical collaborative ethnography between myself—a white, system-impacted poet-researcher—and Joe Garcia, a mixed-race, formerly incarcerated writer on parole. Our partnership grew from my initial hesitation to work with Joe into a shared inquiry: How can creative collaboration across differences model alternatives to carceral logics? How might ensemble storytelling disrupt dominant narratives of criminality and punishment? By foregrounding interdependence, vulnerability, and shared authorship, this project positions artistic collaboration as a method of relational justice and collective imagination.

Following Mignolo (2011), knowledge is treated as co-produced across differences, not extracted or owned. Grounded in critical race theory (CRT) and abolitionist thought, this project examines how racialized power operates through carceral systems—and how creative expression resists and reimagines them. CRT’s emphasis on counter-narratives informs our exploration of incarceration’s effects on identity and racial perception (Bell, 1995; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Abolitionist thinkers such as Davis, Gilmore, and Kaba frame abolition as critique and imaginative practice (Davis et al., 2022; Gilmore, 2007; Kaba, 2021). Our ensemble inquiry is a fluid, relational method grounded in lived experience, co-authorship, and emotional truth.

Building on Thomas (1993) and Leavy (2020), we merge critical ethnography with arts-based inquiry, engaging storytelling as a co-created, improvisational method. Structured interviews, voice memos, musical exchange, and co-writing evolve into relational texts that honor multiple ways of knowing (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). For example, when Joe shared anger toward witnesses in his case, I recalled my own role as a witness. However, his radical acceptance of having caused harm gave me hope for transformation and accountability in who I witnessed and received harm from. Ensemble methods resist extractive research norms by centering shared authorship (Lassiter, 2004), emotional truth, and care—enacting abolition as both method and practice (Tuck & Yang, 2014).

Our work draws from a shared archive of materials. Joe’s published writing—including his New Yorker piece (Garcia, 2023)—sparked the collaboration. Recorded interviews, voice memos, and exchanged musical timelines form a living archive that resists single narrative authority. Reflexive writings and conversations help shape an evolving, ensemble-based understanding rooted in multiplicity and co-authorship. The academic report is being coauthored by Joe and I.

This project contributes to abolitionist scholarship (Davis et al., 2022; Gilmore, 2007; Kaba, 2021) by modeling critical collaborative ethnography as a decarceral, imaginative practice. Storytelling, music, and co-authorship serve not only as expression but as acts of justice and solidarity. They redistribute interpretive authority, resist carceral logics of social death (Patterson, 1982), and reclaim narrative space for those most impacted. By refusing extractive paradigms (Fine, 1994) and centering relational trust, emotional truth, and shared vulnerability (Tuck & Yang, 2014), this work enacts abolitionist principles in real time. Rooted in counter-storytelling, our co-authorship reclaims identity beyond dehumanizing scripts and invites cross-racial solidarity.In rhythm and relationship, collaborative ethnography, an ensemble framework, becomes abolitionist method and medicine—creative, situated, and liberatory.

Author

• Cassidy L. Martin, University of Southern California