Writing, Righting, and Rioting Against Colonial-Carceral Machineries: School Abolition in Real Life, Time, and Context

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium continues important intergenerational and epistemic dialogue with abolition in mainstream education research that directly interrogates the arrangement, function, and utility of colonially based ‘school’ and schooling in the United States. It urges us to pause the reformist tendency to provide ‘quick fixes’ to longstanding structural conditions that reproduce the violence, confinement, and punishment by and through the edifice of U.S. schooling. Centering robust engagement, study, and practice of abolition by burgeoning scholars, this symposium lays out the landscape of ‘school abolition’ for current and future educational research, while simultaneously promoting broader epistemological affordances it provides to right historical harms and wrongs. Ultimately, it invites further interrogation and conceptualizations for alternative pedagogical possibilities housed within longstanding decolonial abolitionist thought.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Anti-Colonial Studies in Education

Chair

• Brian Cabral, University of Texas at Austin

Papers

• Building Abolitionist Futures of Education with NYC Black, Latine, and Working-Class Community Organizers of Color - Sohini Das, New York University

• “We Demand Total Control of Our Schools!”: 1960s Community Control Movement as Black Abolitionist World-Building - Imani C. Wilson, New York University

• Imagining Alternatives: Young Black Voices on Discipline, Value, and Community in Education - Alexandrea R. Henry, Stanford University

• Prison Break: Black-male-centered Educational Spaces, Gender Abolition, and Gender Self-determination - Gene F. McAdoo, University of California - Los Angeles

Session Organizer

• Brian Cabral, University of Texas at Austin

Discussant

• David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago