Credit: Tim Gregory, Asylum Seekers Searched on Christmas Island (2014), Cotton on linen, 60x60cm.
What is abolition a call for? And how does it relate to the question of infrastructure? Abolition moves beyond calls to simply reform prisons and policing, positing that an end to structural racism and state violence requires upending the political, economic, and social conditions that produce them. A crucial part of the revolutionary agenda of abolition is to intervene in the reproduction of existing inequalities and to build material infrastructures and networks of care that support people’s needs before they find themselves in precarious situations. Abolition seeks the transformation of the world, but it is not content to wait for a world-historical revolutionary rupture. It is also a set of practices that intervene in existing inequalities by building and organising alternative social infrastructures that facilitate and gesture to ways of living outside the racial capital relation.
This public program, facilitated by Infrastructural Inequalities, follows the publication of the Infrastructural Inequalities Journal: Policing, Crisis, Abolition, a special issue focused on carceral infrastructures and the struggle to abolish them. Bringing together speakers whose research, activism, and creative practice converge on the problem of carcerality and the hopefulness of abolition, the program will comprise two panels. The first will focus on abolition as a critical practice and as a mode of organizing; the second will focus on resistant media and the possibilities of storytelling. Both panels will be livestreamed on YouTube.
1. Critiquing the Carceral State, Organising Abolitionist Futures
Friday May 14
11:30 – 13:00am (AEST)
Streaming live through YouTube
Featuring: Tabitha Lean, Debbie Kilroy, Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian
2. Resistant Media and Abolitionist Storytelling
Monday May 17
10:00 – 11:30am (AEST)
Streaming live through YouTube
Featuring: Alison Whittaker with Astrid Lorange; Johanna Bell and Rocket Bretherton with Liam Grealy
Register here