Abolition and a Black Sense of Space

3:00 PM, Room 304

This panel discusses abolition, how it is a tradition of radicalism in the United States and elsewhere, that seeks to end the violent effects of colonial and capitalist development that play out through the site of the prison, jail, practices of surveillance, electronic monitoring, and physical and virtual borders. The panel traces abolition, its impact on questions of urbanism, and centers the abolitionist futures people create as a form of spatial practice. These practices, always cooperative, communal, horizontal, fugitive, gutter, and feminist, have made space in the urban landscape irrespective of planning departments, not for profit organizations, allyship, and the backing of the powerful. This panel focuses on how alternative place making practices by marginalized people inherently abolishes forms of violence in the concrete.

Abolition: Text

Panel organizers

Kazembe Balagun

Kazembe Balagun is a cultural historian, activist, writer, youngest son of Ben and Millie, and originally from Harlem, New York. From 2008 to 2013, he served as Director of Outreach and Education at the Brecht Forum in New York, where he helped bring together performance art, LGBT history, film, and jazz with Marxism and the Black Radical Tradition. He is a frequent contributor to the Indypendent, where he published the last interview of Octavia Butler (included in Consuela Francis’ Conversations with Octavia Butler, University Press of Mississippi). Most recently, Finally Got the News: The Printed Legacy of the Radical Left (Common Notions) published Balagun’s essay on art and people of color communist collectives. He was a member of the Red Channels Film Collective and has presented at Metrograph, Brooklyn Academy of Art, Brooklyn Public Library, Woodbine, and Maysles Cinema. He serves as a project manager with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung—New York and is working on a project looking at uncovering the history of the Black Commune.

Mia White

Mia Charlene White is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies in the Environmental Studies Program at The New School for Public Engagement, with a co-teaching appointment at the Milano School for International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy. She is a faculty-affiliate of the Tishman Environment and Design Center (TedC), as well as with the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. She has a bachelors degree in Anthropology and Political Science from the State University of NY at Stonybrook, a Master of International Affairs (Environmental Policy) from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and a Ph.D in Urban Studies and Planning (Housing and Environment) from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Abolition: List