Abolitionist Anthropology

Why Abolitionist Anthropology?

Abolition is a commitment to unmaking systems of carceral and police violence in all of their forms. It recognizes that imprisonment is not a natural or necessary response to harm. Rather, carceral logics are themselves harmful, and distract from the possibilities for real, community-based solutions to create collective safety and well-being.

As anthropologists, we participate in movements for abolition in a number of ways. 

• We read and think with the work of theorists and scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Audre Lorde, Mariame Kaba, and Bettina Love.

•  In our research, we study the systemic and structural harms that perpetuate the violence of police states. 

• In our ethnographies, we document the "otherwise"--the alternative forms of community care that already exist in the world beyond prisons. 

• In our classrooms, we develop teaching strategies like ungrading which undermine the taken-for-granted surveillance of carceral pedagogies. 

• Increasingly, we teach anthropology to incarcerated people in prison education programs. 

• In our lives beyond the university, we participate in community organizations and activism. 

All of this is abolitionist anthropology. 

As scholars and practitioners, we are situated in universities and research institutions. In North America especially, these are often located in prison-towns or in close proximity to prisons or detention facilities. Over decades these institutions have contributed towards the gentrification of neighborhoods and perpetuated the displacement of vulnerable and over-policed communities.

Abolitionist anthropology recognizes all of the potential, the responsability, and the contradiction that comes from  being an anthropologist against the carceral state.