Abolition, Everywhere?
A National Convening

The Antiracist Research & Policy Center
American University, Washington, DC
April 4-5, 2025

Call for papers open now through January 5.

Abolition Everywhere? brings together scholars and practitioners working to abolish the prison industrial complex with those who engage abolition as a praxis to dismantle other systems and structures of unfreedom.

The conjoined crises of 2020 intensified mainstream attention to abolitionist movements and demands, accelerating the incorporation and appropriation of the language of abolition by academic and philanthropic institutions. These gestures toward abolition coincided with a widespread flurry of liberal reforms that both bolstered existing carceral institutions and provoked intensified revanchism to these modes of nominal remedy. Meanwhile, as the carceral logics of militarism, surveillance, and punishment increasingly infiltrate all aspects of social life, scholars and activists across fields and social movements such as immigration, reproductive justice, climate justice, education, anti-militarism, and labor are articulating how their work for transformative change necessitates an integrated approach that centers the theory and praxis of abolition. For some, the turn to abolition is relatively new; others emerge out of (queer, feminist, Indigenous) organizing traditions in which decriminalization and decarceration have always been essential for the creation of new modes of communal liberation and collective lifemaking. In turn, these movements and traditions expand and complicate how we understand the workings of carceral power across different sites and scales.

We start from a shared understanding of US carcerality as inextricable from the history of Black chattel slavery and the transatlantic trade in captive Africans. We trace contemporary abolition’s political genealogy through multigenerational radical rejection of the systems of commodification, containment, and dispossession inherent to chattel slavery and its carceral afterlife. In the “wake” of chattel slavery, its infrastructures of racialized and gendered surveillance, containment, isolation, and punishment were reanimated not only through the modern penal system, but in schools and factories, in welfare offices and community clinics, on borders and reservations, and in US militarized zones across the globe. In the contemporary afterlife of slavery, amid ongoing settler colonialism, heteropatriarchal racial capitalism, and endless war, these carceral logics and systems continue to infiltrate and organize social life.

In this moment of possibility and danger, we invite scholars and practitioners of abolition to join us to share their work, analysis, and insight for future directions in the field and for our movements. Our convening will be guided by the following questions:

1. In this moment of racial revanchism and white nationalist backlash, how might abolition offer a shared framework that allows us to produce conditions for freedom capable of connecting us across political geographies and movements?
2. What opportunities and risks come with the operationalization of abolitionist theories and movements “everywhere”—across places, disciplines, organizations, and practices?
3. Where do the theoretical frameworks, organizing methods, or political strategies of these diverse abolitionist movements and traditions converge, diverge, or come into conflict with each other?
4. What new possibilities for study and practice emerge when we probe the connections and the disconnections among these contemporary abolitionist frameworks and movements?

Possible topics include but are not exclusive to:

• Abolishing the schooling industrial complex
• Abolition and anti-militarization campaigns
• Abolition as reproductive justice
• Abolition feminism
• Abolitionist approaches to food and land justice
• Carcerality and security
• Climate abolition
• Cultural production as abolitionist praxis
• Gentrification as racialized dispossession
• Labor and carcerality
• Movement work as performance and praxis
• Mutual aid and other forms of collective lifebuilding
• The abolition of borders
• The abolition of gender (and sex)
• The relationship between abolition and decolonization
• Transnational decriminalization and decarceration

Call for Papers

We are seeking proposals for individual or jointly authored papers/presentations. Please submit an abstract (< 500 words), a short bio (< 150 words), and a 1-page CV/Resume/or list of relevant experience via this portal by January 5, 2025. Applicants will be notified by the end of January. For further questions, please contact the Abolition Everywhere? Program Committee at the Antiracist Research and Policy Center (AbolitionEverywhere@gmail.com).

Attending the Convening

If you are interested in attending the convening but not presenting, please check back in the new year for registration information, or reach out to AbolitionEverywhere@gmail.com.