🔊 Ep 6 👂 Making Room for Imagination
Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities
It’s only fitting that this series would come to a close in February, right?
It’s Black History Month and white nonsense is at an all time high. If it’s any consolation, today’s drop contains some nuggets of … optimism around what drives our imaginations, what restricts them, and what our movements need to make room for as we move toward abolitionist horizons — so, perhaps it’ll offer something of a salve as we watch Tr*mp disassemble USAID and terrorize immigrants, among other things, this week. In a twisted way, the speed with which these transformations are happening should remind us of how possible transformations are and how quickly they can transpire. Right now they’re moving in a horrifying direction, but what if we imagined otherwise? Can we afford not to?
The thing is, the transformations we’re witnessing today are miserably unimaginative — they’re regressions, nostalgia for a time we thought we were ‘past,’ attempts to make America something it used to be again because what it threatened to become — a multi-racial, queer, femme-led, worker-led nation — scares the shit out of a lot of people.
Listen and view the full transcript on makingroom.online or listen wherever you get your podcasts:
In this final episode, Lauren Williams invites her colleagues, comrades and co-conspirators to bring us home, collectively considering all the questions raised so far and confronting the ones they make possible: If worlds have ended before, why can’t this one? Whose imaginaries do we currently inhabit? What enables and restricts our imaginations? How might we permit ourselves to imagine otherwise?
In this episode, we also share an excerpt from a forthcoming study on safety, accountability and harm initiated by the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network, called “Unraveling Harm, Cultivating Safety: Learnings on Healing, Justice, and Accountability from Metro Detroiters.” Stay tuned for updates about the book documenting this study, to be released in Spring 2025 — I’m grateful to the Network and Angel McKissic, especially, for allowing me to share this preview of the report.
As always, the entire series was lovingly co-produced by Ayinde Jean Baptiste; audio was mastered by Conor Anderson; and our theme music is the instrumentals from Detroit Summer, by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media. This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production and Media. Thank you for listening on makingroom.online or wherever you get your podcasts.
That’s the end of the series, but it’s not the end of this body of work. In this episode, you’ll hear an invitation to help me imagine new dispatches from abolitionist futures: if you want to contribute, visit the Dispatches page of makingroom.online and drop me a line or shoot me an email at williams.lauren.m@gmail.com.
Til next time, remember what’s real 😉