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2024 ARPC Faculty Research Collaboratory: Abolition Everywhere

The Antiracist Research & Policy Center is excited to announce the launch of its 2024 faculty research collaboratory, “Abolition Everywhere.” This interdisciplinary research cluster brings AU scholars of policing and the carceral state together with AU scholars deploying abolitionist frameworks to stage critical interventions on a range of racial justice issues, including education, climate justice, urban gentrification, and reproductive justice. Their collaboration will be guided by two related questions:

  1. The insights, principles, and practices of 20th and 21st century abolition have become critical tools for scholars and organizers in diverse areas of racial, gender, and economic justice work—from education to agriculture, reproductive politics, to the environment. How do these multi-sited and multidisciplinary models of abolition enrich, challenge, and inform each other? What generative possibilities for study and practice emerge when we probe the connections and the disconnections among these contemporary abolitionist frameworks and movements?
  2. Abolitionist practice is not just about the critical undoing of state monopolies on power, violence, and discipline; more significantly, it is about creating modes of freedom and systems of shared accountability that supplant dominant state systems of control. Given this, what does it mean to approach ostensibly reform-based scholarship and advocacy through the lens of abolition? How might policy intervention, curricular change, or legal advocacy be envisioned as forms of abolitionist practice?

Over 2024’s spring and fall semesters, the members of “Abolition Everywhere” will share their individual scholarship, engage chosen resources to develop a shared language and framework, and draft a proposal for a future project to be carried out collectively.

Group Members

Orisanmi Burton Assistant Professor CAS | Anthropology

As a social anthropologist working in the United States, my research examines the imbrication of grassroots resistance and state repression. Within this broad area of inquiry, my present work explores…

  oburton@american.edu

  (202) 885-6792

TaLisa Carter Associate Professor SPA | Justice, Law & Criminology

TaLisa J. Carter, Ph.D. is a native of Long Island, New York, dedicated to understanding the interactions of deviance, social organizations, and race. Dr. Carter is an Assistant Professor in the Depar…

  carter@american.edu

  (202) 885-3021

Garrett Graddy-Lovelace Provost Associate Professor SIS | Environment, Development & Health

Garrett Graddy-Lovelace researches and teaches agricultural policy and agrarian geography. Her work focuses on domestic and international contexts and impacts of US food and farm policy--from subsidiz…

  graddy@american.edu

Manissa Maharawal Assistant Professor CAS | Anthropology

I am a cultural anthropologist and critical geographer whose work focuses on eviction, race, displacement and the spatial and temporal dynamics of contemporary urban social movements from Occupy Wall …

  manissam@american.edu

  (202) 885-6641

Jane Palmer Associate Professor SPA | Justice, Law & Criminology

Dr. Jane Palmer is an Associate Professor with a primary focus on community-based participatory research, help-seeking, community-based responses to harm, and ending gender-based violence.

Sh…

  jpalmer@american.edu

  (202) 885-3118

Malini Ranganathan Associate Professor SIS | Environment, Development & Health

Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University, and a political ecologist and geographer by training. She is a faculty affiliate of three un…

  malini@american.edu

Brenda Smith Professor WCL | General Academics & Research

Brenda V. Smith is professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law and Director of the Community Economic Development Law Clinic. From 2018-2020, Smith served as Senior Associ…

  bvsmith@american.edu

  (202) 274-4261