Notes on Abolitionist Pedagogy from Philadelphia

Abstract

Abstract:Rooted in Arundhati Roy's insistence that "the pandemic is a portal" through which to imagine a world beyond the current crises of racial capitalism, this essay reflects on what abolitionist pedagogy might mean by offering an account of the author's own institutional location and of her students' engagements with activists, artists, and community members who draw crucial connections between the University of Pennsylvania's material relation to the city of Philadelphia and the ongoing reality of racialized criminalization that is a legacy of the eighteenth century. Building on this situated example of abolitionist pedagogy, the essay offers a broader model for how the intellectual, social, and material practice of eighteenth-century studies might be more actively engaged with local social-justice struggles, which are not separate from the eighteenth-century histories we study. The essay attends to the material locations of academic work, from the hotels that host our conferences to the universities that employ (or don't employ) us as scholars.