Writers against Cop Cities: Recentering Protesters and Challenging Dominant Narratives as a Cultural Process

• In Event: 41014 - Cop Cities and Abolition: Law and Order Backlash Politics and Urban Resistance

Abstract

In Atlanta, GA, the Stop Cop City movement emerged on the heels of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests following the police murder of George Floyd. The movement opposes the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, or “Cop City,” due to the multidimensional, intersectional, harms that it would cause to surrounding, predominantly Black communities, including but not limited to environmental racism, over-policing and police brutality, and violations to Indigenous land rights. Though Cop City has since been built and opened, the struggle against Cop City continues in Atlanta. The struggle against Cop Nation has only just begun. Throughout the course of the movement, movement writers have documented the diversity of tactics used by protesters and established abolitionist aims for the movement, enabling its expansion to other communities across the United States protesting their own Cop Cities. Defined broadly, movement writers refer to all movement participants who produce literature in service of the movement, including but not limited to organizers, cultural workers, historians, journalists, guerrilla writers, and content creators. This study asks the following questions: How do movement writers attempt to shift cultural perceptions of abolition and abolitionist movements in their writing on the Stop Cop City/Cop Nation movement? To study this question, I utilize a toolkit of mixed qualitative methods of in-depth interviews, qualitative content analysis, and critical geography while also embedding this research in a community-based approach. This analysis provides insight into how movement writers challenge dominant narratives in their written work and organizing and how these are put in conversation with historical lineages of social movements. This sociological inquiry builds upon existing literatures of abolition feminism, social movements, and culture yet challenges long-held perspectives on movement success as defined solely by institutional change.

Author

• Jadelynn Zhang, Emory University