🔊 Ep 2 👂🏾Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities

Disappearance

Today, we drop Episode 2, Part 2 of Safety & Interdependence, where we explore themes of disappearance. Listen and view the full transcript on makingroom.online (or listen wherever you get your podcasts):

Something sinister ties the pristine to the policed: landscapes, bodies, and the neighborhoods born from their mingling. In this second meditation on safety & interdependence, thoroughly cited from both academy & community, Williams draws our focus to disappearance as an evolving method. Put another way, employing violence workers to delete the native, the trafficked, the poor is American as cherry pie, and the attendant systems of prison and policing may actually be working just as designed.

What would our world look like if we reconstituted safety as connectedness, freedom as togetherness? Will there even be a world if we don’t?

Monica Lewis-Patrick, wearing a purple blazer, orange-blue-and green zebra striped scarf, black glasses and a printed face mask, holding a copy of a (speculative) 2047 Detroit Free Press, visits the Making Room for Abolition exhibit in 2021, photographed by Giizhigad Bieber.

I’m especially thrilled that you’ll get to hear from a few more voices who’ve been part of this project: Nick Buckingham of Michigan Liberation, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic of the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network, Nate Mullen, and Monica Lewis- Patrick of We the People Detroit. Monica, especially, helps us connect the dots between the commodification and privatization of public resources like water, schools, and the city more broadly.

As always, the entire series was lovingly co-produced by Ayinde Jean Baptiste; audio was mastered by Conor Andrerson; and our theme music is the instrumentals from Detroit Summer, by Invincible and Wajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

Thank you for listening on makingroom.online or wherever you get your podcasts. Like! Subscribe! Share, share, share!