This week, just after International Prisoners’ Justice Day, we take this opportunity to introduce a series that will be coming out over the course of the 2024–2025 academic year. The series, “Abolitionist Pedagogies,” invites continuing conversation around abolitionist pedagogies in anthropology. Our starting point is that we as anthropologists and educators have a responsibility to use our specific forms of power to work toward transformative social justice. Rather than separating scholarship, pedagogy, and activism, we ask how to strategically entangle these parts of our working lives in impactful ways, and how we might put them toward the liberation of incarcerated people of all kinds. The series draws on contributors’ various experiences of research, teaching, and activism to point toward strategies for bringing abolitionist work into our anthropology classrooms. For us, this is not a primarily theoretical endeavor. The contributors over the course of this year will offer some real practices and ideas for the role that anthropology instructors might play in the larger movement toward the abolishment of carceral institutions. We acknowledge that this is a far-from-finished project. Developing abolitionist pedagogies for our field is a task that is fraught with barriers and incommensurabilities that we cannot fully overcome, and a task that demands large-scale collaboration. We hope to contribute to more open spaces and conversations around what we can do in our classrooms to create just abolitionist futures. Together, we ask: what role can we as educators in anthropology play in a larger movement against carceral violence?

Why Abolition?

Though varied in definition, in general, abolitionist movements aim to replace punitive systems that expel or abject certain people from society to instead build more inclusive systems of care and support. Abolitionist frameworks recognize that capitalism, racism, and colonialism are the driving forces of carcerality; they highlight the ways that policing, prisons, and other modes of detention use state violence to disproportionately target and exploit marginalized populations. In the United States especially, the Prison Industrial Complex is a set of relations that naturalizes racialized, gendered, ableist, and classist forms of punishment. Carcerality assumes taken-for-granted links between crime, punishment, and justice, falsely claiming that state-sanctioned violence is the only way to reduce crime. Abolitionist thinkers, however, recognize that justice and safety do not—and indeed cannot—come from the material conditions of policing or prisons. Therefore, abolition cannot be a movement for reform, but rather a total reimagining from the ground up. Abolition, then, is fundamentally a politics of optimism; it maintains that alternatives to policing and prisons are not only possible, but necessary for the attainment of actual justice. This is underpinned by an understanding that interpersonal violence does not naturally demand carceral punishment, but rather can be addressed through forms of transformative justice that target the systems of oppression that create the conditions for harm. Abolitionist solutions focus on demilitarization rather than violence, care rather than punishment, reparation rather than vengeance, and reconciliation rather than exclusion.

For some foundational books on abolitionist thought, see:

• Davis, Angela Y., Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie. 2022. Abolition. Feminism. Now. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
• Davis, Angela Y. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press.
• Kaba, Mariame. 2021. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
• Ritchie, Andrea J. 2023. Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies. Chico, Calif.: AK Press.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Forthcoming. Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

See also the Abolitionist Futures Reading List 2022 for further resources.

Why Abolitionist Pedagogy?

While abolition literally aims to abolish prisons, detention centers, and policing, it is not only focused on these institutions. Abolitionists recognize that carceral logics insidiously spread beyond the discrete spaces of punishment and detention. Abolitionist theorists including bell hooks (1994) and Bettina Love (2019) specifically emphasize the ways in which the system of education reinforces structures of carcerality. After all, schools and prisons are operating through the power of the same state; it is important to ask where and how their practices intersect. For example, in classrooms, Black and Brown students are more heavily surveilled and disciplined, contributing to what is often termed the school-to-prison pipeline or school-prison nexus. Meanwhile, all students are expected to accept power dynamics of passive obedience and a hierarchy of authority. These structures render certain logics of control as common sense, including “zero tolerance” policies, surveillance, and punitive discipline. And further, the threat of student expulsion from classrooms sends the message that some students are “unfit” or disposable. These are logics that also reverberate through institutions of imprisonment. Their presence in education makes it harder to imagine a future that is otherwise.

To center abolition in the pedagogical choices that we make is a political act. But we have to recognize that all teaching is political; educators are always either disrupting or reinforcing systems of oppression. Our classrooms are not bubbles. They do not exist in a universe beyond Ferguson, beyond Palestine, beyond detention camps on the United States-Mexico border. We share our campus classrooms with students who are arrested while protesting genocide, students who have been incarcerated, students who are undocumented, and students who are unfairly targeted by police violence. An abolitionist pedagogy asks how we can build a curriculum that prioritizes these students’ learning and liberation. How can we learn from their experiences, and imagine a future in which all students are free? Many of us are doing this work within universities which are, at their core, neoliberal spaces. This means that they are part of a larger cultural shift toward policing and detainment.[i] They are not designed for abolitionist work, and in fact actively work against it. As instructors who work within neoliberal universities, then, how can we find ways of resisting? What are the specific limitations? Many of us are also increasingly teaching in prison classrooms, in inside-out programs, and in other carceral spaces for education. How can we teach from a standpoint of abolition to incarcerated people within a literally carceral space? An abolitionist pedagogy must not only try to operate within these oppressive systems, but simultaneously work to upend them by imagining new paradigms for learning, knowledge, and teaching.

For some foundational reading on abolitionist pedagogies, see:

• bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge.
• Love, Bettina L. 2019. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press.
• The Education for Liberation Network & Critical Resistance Editorial Collective. 2021. Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators. Chico, Calif.: AK Press.

Also see a short introductory piece on abolitionist pedagogy written by our own contributor, Talisa Feliciano, here.

The Specificity of Anthropology and Abolition

This series for “Teaching Tools” aims to draw on the insights of abolitionist pedagogies broadly speaking, but it also specifically centers anthropology classes. We suggest that anthropologists might need to more specifically think about what abolition means in our own discipline for a few reasons. First, anthropologists among us research within prisons, in detention centers, and in over-policed neighborhoods. Some of us study how carceral logics settle in other spaces in culturally and historically specific ways. How can these ethnographic relationships and insights inform our pedagogy on our campuses? How can ethnography help us to unsettle carceral conditioning in our schools? Second, anthropology course offerings often attract Black, migrant, Queer, and otherwise over-policed students. Anthropology classes can potentially offer a rare academic space within which their lived experiences can be seen as valid sources of knowledge. But without an active effort to center those students’ experiences, or teach in a way that promotes their freedom, we instead risk doing these students a further injustice. After all, anthropology is (still) a “white public space” that is not by default equally inclusive for students and scholars of color (Brodkin, Morgen, and Hutchinson 2011). It inherits histories of racist dispossession as well as colonial oppression. We must consider how to more proactively imagine futures in the wake of these histories—futures imagined with and for all of our students.

For more on abolition in/and anthropology see:

• Cox, Aimee. 2022. “An Anthropology of Abolition/Liberation with Aimee M. Cox and Panelists.” Yale University Endeavors Seminar Series, the Department of African American Studies, April 6.
• Shange, Savannah. 2022. “Abolition in the Clutch: Shifting through the Gears with Anthropology.” Feminist Anthropology 3, no. 2: 187–97.
• St. Tellien, Alexandra. 2024. “Abolition as Process.” Anthropology News, April 4.

The Aims of this Series

This series is an experiment following an open discussion at the 2023 American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Toronto. It aims to shape the teaching of anthropology in general—not only seminars on prisons, policing, and the carceral state, but all courses. Can we, for example, teach an introduction to anthropological theory as abolitionist? Abolitionist ethnographic methods? Abolitionist anthropology of the environment? In this series, we encourage collective work alongside other shifts and movements within the discipline, including de/anticolonial, feminist, queer, and other liberatory, radical anthropologies. But we want to add more specificity into this as a literal movement to end policing, prisons, and detention. We resist the urge to over-theorize or water down, but instead to think very concretely about what we as educators can do. We aim to share concrete “how-to” strategies for abolitionist teaching (an aim that aligns with Jason Scott’s 2022 review piece). We aim to recognize and state openly the impossibilities and incommensurabilities—not to ignore them, but to “stay with the trouble” of teaching toward abolitionist futures in a complicated present (Haraway 2016).

In the months that come, we will release a piece once every few weeks. Each piece will take up personal observations, often including ethnography, and will include a concrete “teaching tool” that contributes to an abolitionist pedagogy. The focus is largely in North America, as this is where we primarily teach. However, we welcome further discussion about how these discussions could contribute to abolition more globally. We hope that these pieces further an open conversation, to be continued on social media and elsewhere, that will help us collectively bring anthropology teaching into the work of an abolitionist future.

We conclude this introduction with the six questions that we started with when we first conceptualized our roundtable in 2023. We invite you to think about them in your own work, and bring your own answers to this conversation:

1. What do we really mean by the phrase “abolitionist pedagogy?” What are carceral impulses or logics of carcerality that inflect traditional practices of education, which make it necessary to build an abolitionist approach in response?
2. Very practically speaking, what are some of your own ways of designing concrete classroom policies, learning activities, syllabi, mentorship strategies, or other forms of teaching that we could consider aligned with abolitionist aims?
3. Several of us work beyond classroom spaces in collaborative community partnerships. However, often spaces of community work have historically been under-resourced, under-compensated, or otherwise inequitable. How can an abolitionist pedagogy build more equitable collaborations for learning that reflect an ethos of justice and accountability?
4. We have to acknowledge that universities are neoliberal spaces, and not actively abolitionist. As academics and educators, we work within these institutions, and therefore have certain demands placed on us that may or may not always be in line with abolitionist politics. How do we balance these conflicting demands in a way that both fulfills practical requirements and enacts real political change?
5. In recent years, there are more and more programs for education in spaces of incarceration whether in prisons, jails, detention centers, or migrant detention facilities. However, these programs are designed, controlled, and regulated in order to benefit only a small section of the incarcerated population (a population which has historically been denied the opportunities to build and shape their own education). Is it possible to develop abolitionist practices and strategies while teaching in such spaces? Are there any lessons here to take beyond prisons?
6. Communities most affected by carceral regimes and policing are the least represented, and the least compensated, on university campuses (both on faculty and among students). How can we build a pedagogical approach that accounts for this disparity, and/or think about abolitionist pedagogy as integrated with larger movements for inclusivity, diversity, and equitable labor in universities? Can we think about an abolitionist approach that supports faculty and students most affected by over policing and carceral power?

Footnotes

[i] For more on the relationship between neoliberalism and carcerality, see:

De Lissovoy, Noah. 2012. “Conceptualizing the Carceral Turn: Neoliberalism, Racism, and Violation." Critical Sociology 39, no. 5: 739–55.

Jefferson, Brian Jordan. 2015. “From Prisons to Hyperpolicing: Neoliberalism, Carcerality, and Regulative Geographies.” In Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past, edited by Karin Morin and Dominique Moran, 185–204. London: Routledge.