Beyond the Capitalist, Colonial, Carceral and White Supremacist University: Radical Abolitionist Imaginings and Activism

Abstract

This article takes up the idea of collective organizing as a way to create learning and teaching spaces as liberatory. It engages the radical abolitionist work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore that insists we organize collectively as scholars and teachers in the university, to imagine that which engenders freedom. This paper also engages the writings of Black Studies Scholar Rinaldo Walcott and Indigenous Scholar Sandy Grande to reveal how the university with its compensatory individualism and politics of recognition work to maintain anti-blackness and white settler colonial practices. It ends with some examples of refusal and abolitionist practices aimed at creating and imagining spaces of learning and living.