It’s me again! Told you it was the season of drops: this time, it’s an audio essay series (not a podcast! kidding, kind of) called Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, about making room for abolition. If you’ve poked around the website I shared last week, you may have already heard the trailer and/or seen the transcript. If not, there are many ways to listen, basically wherever you get your podcasts:
On makingroom.online, with complete transcripts
On Spotify
On Amazon Music
Audio can be downloaded from the RSS feed, too
This six part series will drop a new episode every two weeks, starting today. It’s about connecting the dots between the speculative worlds proposed on Making Room for Abolition and the everyday practices of abolition underway in Detroit. Both of these—the speculations and the practices—are about making abolition mundane, making it believable, and making it real, because too often, the carceral conditioning around us convinces us it’s impossible. What you’ll hear in the series is reflections on conversations with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to abolition of police and prisons; people working toward food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice, and Black liberation more broadly.
You’ll hear the voices of folks like Nate Mullen—the most quotable man alive, apparently—Myrtle Thompson-Curtis (Feedom Freedom Growers), Angel McKissic (Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network and Detroit Justice Center), Sirrita Darby (Detroit Heals Detroit), Kim Sherrobi (Birwood House), Monique Thompson (Feedom Freedom Growers), Curtis Renee (Detroit Safety Team), Nick Buckingham (Michigan Liberation), Monica Lewis Patrick (We the People Detroit), and Kyle Whyte (George Willis Pack Professor at UM). And, last but not least, you’ll hear the voice of PG Watkins, one of my favorite humans and also the smoothest facilitator you’ve ever met, another extremely quotable human being. These are all people whose work today is abolitionist, who remind us that—even though this work is about speculating—abolition isn’t some far off future destination, but a daily practice that many of us are stumbling toward as persistently as possible. In each episode, we look closely at the kinds of carceral fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons, and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, we’ll propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.
Alienation from Ourselves, Each Other, and Our Needs
Listen to Episode 1 and view the full transcript, here or on Spotify, Apple, or Amazon:
In this first episode — part one of a two part episode on safety & interdependence — we invite you to consider roadmaps to futures we hope for, through a focus on the everyday & the contradictions of neoliberal philosophy. Should everything really be for sale, will the market protect the worthy?
First, a foundation: How do our ways of working separate us from our power and possibility? What exactly is neoliberalism, how did it become the dominant social and economic logic of U.S. civil society? What does any of this have to do with abolition?
To answer that last question first, it comes down to criminalization and control. Detroit’s 2013 Bankruptcy and civic fights about water access serve as examples of how accepting a logic of separation weakens our ability to challenge social problems that affect people in very connected ways.
We illuminate the short path from privatization to deprivation, before limning the difference between the state’s compulsion to watch & the human need to be seen.
Listen on makingroom.online or wherever you get your podcasts. Like! Subscribe! Share, share, share!
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You
A few extremely important thank you’s are in order:
The entire series was lovingly co-produced by Ayinde Jean Baptiste; I couldn’t have pulled this off without him, if you follow @makingroom.online on Insta, you’ll see a mushy post about him and all the ways he made this better, soon.
Audio was mastered by the ever-so-talented sound engineer who also was our in-booth engineer for recording at Red Bull all the way back in 2021, Conor Anderson.
Website was designed by Em Woudenberg of Strike Design Studio.
Artifacts on makingroom.online were photographed by Na Forest Lim of Radical Play.
The theme music for Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities is the instrumentals from Detroit Summer, by Invincible and Wajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.
I’d also like to thank the nonprofit industrial complex (kidding, not kidding) for supporting the various instantiations of this work over the years. And, my employer, the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, for funding this work.
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