The Knotted Line: Towards an Abolition Pedagogy

• In Event: Freedom’s Movements, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Rock the Prison Empire

Abstract

The Knotted Line is an online laboratory that traces the shifting nature of freedom in U.S. history over five hundred years. The project examines mechanisms of carcerality, violence and exclusion as they are currently and historically substantiated through rhetorics of freedom. Simultaneously, The Knotted Line emphasizes transhistorical liberation struggles that are pushing against, or dancing ahead of the shifting nature of oppressive institutions, placing the context of the current struggle for the abolition of the prison industrial complex within a much longer lineage that ultimately stretches into the future.

While working with middle, high and college classrooms using The Knotted Line, a curriculum and pedagogical approach to rethinking history developed. The projects center around a transhistorical analysis of the ways that oppression and liberation move and shift throughout time with an eye to understanding the present and a nod to imagining new futures. The Knotted line builds off of the ‘abolition pedagogy’ posited by Dylan Rodríguez where, “The horizon of the possible is only constrained by one’s pedagogical willingness to locate a particular political struggle (here, prison abolition) within the long and living history of liberation movements. In this context, “prison abolition” can be understood as one important strain within a continuously unfurling fabric of liberationist political horizons...” (Rodríguez, 2010).

Author

• Evan Bissell, University of California, Berkeley (CA)