The Prison Classroom as a Locus of Abolitionist Struggle

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:45 pm - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Work in Hard Times: Challenging Carcerality in Schools

Abstract

Abolitionist struggle was never merely an academic project – it was born from the resistance of enslaved and imprisoned Black people (Robinson, 2000). Abolitionist resistance has long transformed sites of captivity into spaces of radical thought and political organizing. Incarcerated people have always been central to theorizing, practicing, and fighting for abolition. Yet today, abolitionist discourse is often dominated by scholars and institutions on the outside, eclipsing the embodied knowledge and political agency of imprisoned thinkers (Gramsci, 1992; James, 2023; Kelley, 2022).
This paper argues for a return to the incarcerated as the locus of abolitionist struggle and leadership. Drawing from my experience teaching and learning from incarcerated students, I explore how the prison classroom is a site of abolitionist possibility, despite its location within the heart of the carceral regime.

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the bedrock of the classroom. Each new student who joins the class is invited to read the text by their peers, not only as an entry point but as a shared foundation. Freire’s concept of critical consciousness (conscientização) – the process of identifying and acting against oppressive systems – shapes both the course content and the classroom’s relational dynamics (Freire, 2000).

My work is shaped by reflexive journaling after class sessions and analysis of student dialogue and interaction. In fall 2025, I plan to co-develop a Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) process with the students based on their own priorities and visions for the work. I aim to prioritize relational, accountable abolitionist pedagogy that centers the intellectual leadership, needs, and desires of the incarcerated students (Fine, 2021). Through collective study and dialogue, we examine the contradictions of carceral logic, name the structures of racial capitalism that uphold it, and strengthen our abolitionist praxis.

This paper centers incarcerated students as abolitionist intellectuals whose presence destabilizes the prison’s aims. Their engagement resists the carceral use of education as social control and insists instead on education as liberation (hooks, 1994).

Ultimately, I argue that the prison classroom, while shaped by and complicit in carceral structures, also holds abolitionist potential. When incarcerated people theorize their own liberation and challenge the conditions of their captivity, they remind us that they are, and have always been, the architects of abolition.

Author

• Ruth Boyajian, Georgia State University