This Fall and Spring, AAS Professor Naomi Paik and GWS Professor Toby Beauchamp are spearheading the Abolition initiative in CAS, involving a series of talks in the fall and a graduate seminar course in the spring. From the CAS Initiatives page:
Abolition examines the interconnected power dynamics across prisons, police, immigration, gendered and sexual violence, environmental justice, disability justice, and more, in order to propose an abolitionist democratic present and future.
Professors Toby Beauchamp (Gender and Women’s Studies) and Naomi Paik (Asian American Studies) have been appointed CAS Resident Associates for AY2019-20 in charge of this initiative which includes a public events series and a seminar in Spring 2020 among other activities.
The final talk in the series will take place on Tuesday, November 19, and is entitled "Cripping TJ: Survivors as Organizers, Vicarious Trauma and Disability Justice in Transformative Justice." More information about the talk can be found here.
Graduate students who are interested in participating in the Spring seminar will find it listed under CAS 587.
Focused on the theories and practices of abolition, this interdisciplinary graduate seminar examines the radical, yet realizable, possibilities of abolition in its many forms. We will consider the dense web of relationships that extend far beyond the prison as a material structure, tracing the many different sites and effects of the prison industrial complex as well as the multiple efforts to dismantle it. At the same time, we will follow what W.E.B. Dubois and Angela Davis call "abolition democracy," which positions abolition as a process of creation rather than simply of dismantlement. Accordingly, the course looks closely at practices that redirect resources away from systems of oppression and toward imagining and building new conditions where all can survive and thrive.