Challenging Convictions

This essay, with accompanying lesson plan, explores how race-radical Black and Indigenous feminists theorize and resist the carceral state violence of White settler nations of Canada and the United States. It focuses on the theoretical interventions driven by Indigenous and Black race-radical feminists and how this has placed these activists at the forefront of anti-violence movement-building. Such an intervention specifically upholds the tensions within and refuses to collapse political approaches of Indigenous movements for sovereignty and Black race-radical traditions. Its transnational, comparative focus helps us to not only identify but to create multiple strategies that dismantle the carceral state and the racialized gendered violence that it mobilizes and sustains. Proceeding from the argument that both prison abolitionist praxis and race-radical feminist praxis are inherently and primarily pedagogical, the lesson plan explores the ways we learn, teach, and organize in a manner that teaches against the grain of carceral common sense.