Please register for this virtual event here
Thursday May 22nd from 6-8p ET
Common Notions YouTube
Abolition and Reconstruction: An Emergent Guide for Collective Study is the outcome of an unfinished rebellion. The study guide emerges out of the first years of our work at the Du Bois Movement School, which was itself the product of a particular time and place. We came together amid the long wake of the 2020 rebellions, which mobilized hundreds of thousands nationwide and pushed abolitionist narratives into the mainstream. This raised pressing questions for abolitionists across the country and the world, and more than any other, the question was this: what do we mean when we say abolition?
The system had two answers to this question: co-optation and repression, watering down abolition while seeking to destroy its radical core. We experienced both in Philly. In this context, we realized that we need to study our world if we want to change it. We offer this study guide as a contribution to clarifying what abolition means to us. Abolition is far bigger than the police and prisons—targeting white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Abolition is anticolonial, anti-imperial, and global. Abolition is fundamentally revolutionary. And abolition must always be reconstruction as well: the building of a radically new world.
Join a panel of organizers from The W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School and other leading abolitionist organizers and thinkers in reflecting back on the lessons of the rebellion five years ago, and what collective study and struggles means in our present moment.
SPEAKERS
The W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction is a political education program for aspiring revolutionaries and movement leaders from those communities most impacted by poverty, policing, and mass incarceration.
Melissa Ferrer Civil (she/they) is a poet, educator, and organizer living on Kaw, Kickapoo, Oceti Sakowin and Kansa lands (Kansas City, MO). Melissa received their M. Ed in Urban Education from Park University and their M.F.A. in Poetry from Randolph College. They are the founder and director of an abolitionist arts and organizing event series called A Nation In Exile, the first poet laureate of Kansas City, MO, and the Director of B-REAL Academy (Black, Radical Education for Abolition and Liberation) through the Kansas City Defender. You can find out more about their creative work on their website: melissaferrerand.com or you can follow them on their instagram @melissaferrerand.
Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College, is the author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)life of Erica Garner. Her recent titles include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love and Beyond Cop City. James’s numerous political theory articles on policing, prisons, abolitions, feminisms; and anti-Black racism include “The Womb of Western Theory,” an exploration of the Captive Maternal.
Dylan Rodriguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Dylan Rodríguez can be reached by email at dylanrodriguez.collaborate@gmail.com as well as on Twitter (@dylanrodriguez ), Instagram (dylanrodriguez73 ), and Facebook (www.facebook.com/dylanrodriguez73 ).
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