World-making in the Carceral Classroom: Centering Abolition Feminism as an Analytic Lens

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium brings together five scholars whose research lies at the intersection of education, carcerality, and abolition. Each study examines the carceral classroom as a contested space with its own layered and conflicting histories of gendered violence. We collectively draw upon the analytic lens of abolition feminism to guide our thinking, analysis and sharing of research. Concerned with ending gender violence in all its forms, an abolitionist feminist framework for prison education research calls into question the ways incarceration functions as a gendered system of state violence. As a collective, we examine prison classrooms as sites for world-making where people’s liberation is centered and gender no longer functions as a categorical analytic for which populations are targets of state violence.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 5: Inquiry, Transformation, and Communities

Chair

• Julissa O. Muñiz, University of California - Los Angeles

Papers

• “Babe, I finally feel proud of myself:” Formerly Incarcerated Latinas and their Postsecondary Educational Pursuits - Julissa O. Muñiz, University of California - Los Angeles

• Dear Higher Education In Prison: Letters to an Abolitionist Feminist future for higher education in prison - Cydney Y. Caradonna, University of Utah

• Borrowing Freedom: Formerly Incarcerated Women and the Gender Violence of the Post-Secondary Education Reimbursement Fund - Armando Lizarraga, University of Texas at Austin

• An Abolitionist Feminist Analysis of the Racialized Gendering of Carcerality for Realizing Liberatory Futures - Casey Philip Wong, Georgia State University

Session Organizer

• Julissa O. Muñiz, University of California - Los Angeles

Discussant

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University