Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of How to Survive the End of the World

So begins the refrain of the podcast, How to Survive the End of the World (HSEW) hosted by queer Black sisters, adrienne maree and Autumn Brown. The hosts, who share the identities of being writers, healing justice practitioners and organizers, decided to begin their podcast in November 2017, to center what must be known and practiced for living, existing, and resisting interlocking forms of social oppression. The hosts argue that they and the larger world are living through apocalyptic moments such as climate change, racial terror, queer and trans antagonism, and the violences of capitalism. HSEW would grow to have over 100,000 unique listeners. Their podcast is a significant site for my exploration of embodied abolition because of their sociopolitical commitments to abolition, social change, and healing. Carceral abolition is a political project to end policing and imprisonment by cultivating a society that challenges carcerality, which include systems of imprisonment, surveillance, and criminalization that construct a punitive culture that affects one’s embodiment in a carceral state. Embodied abolition links carceral abolition with healing justice, the work of centering individual and collective healing in movements for social change. I believe embodiment is deeply linked F O R U M