Survived and Punished, Project NIA, and Other Ongoing Collaborations
Building on this political and intellectual engagement with the criminalization of Black women, especially queer and trans women and sex workers, BCRW hosted the Invisible No More conference organized by BCRW Researcher in Residence Andrea Ritchie 2017. Activists and scholars including Barbara Smith, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Tourmaline, Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, and Elle Hearns hosted workshops and spoke on panels during a two-day conference exploring and building on the themes, trends, and organizing strategies outlined in Ritchie’s book Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. This conference was the first in a series of events taking place across the US to explore the themes of Invisible No More and ongoing resistance to police violence against Black women and women of color. Two years later, in 2019, S&F Online published Unraveling Criminalizing Webs, guest-edited by Andrea Ritchie and Levi Craske ‘18, a former BCRW Research Assistant. Tami Navarro, Associate director of BCRW, described how Unraveling Criminalizing Webs “features contributions that engage with both the past and the future: both historicizing the deep linkages between gender and state violence and pushing readers to imagine a different future—one that is free from not only police violence, but also from broader structures of harm that are rooted in a framework of criminalization.” The issue features many genres including creative writing, visual art, and scholarly articles. Some of the featured writers and artists include Cara Page, Dorothy Roberts, Mariame Kaba, and Simone John.
The 2018 Scholar and Feminist Conference, “Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence,” was another key moment in BCRW’s engagement with abolition. At the conference, notable abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore spoke at the panel “Normalizing the In/Security State: Police and Prisons.” Gilmore spoke about her understanding of prison abolition, which she notes is about “presence, not absence,” and requires that “we change one thing, which is everything.” For Gilmore, abolition is about building the future from the work that is already being done through what she and many abolitionists call “non-reformist reform”—that is, changes that chip away at the Prison Industrial Complex, rather than “reforms” that give more funding and power to the PIC. After Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, prison abolitionist organizer, teacher, and co-founder of Survived and Punished, Chicago Freedom School, and founder and director of Project NIA, spoke on the state and the experience of daily, mundane surveillance. Kaba noted that in our current system, the root causes of violence are masked by the state, and liberation is made to be unthinkable. But for Kaba, imagining liberation under oppression can begin to address the root causes of suffering, as well as attend to grievances people have in their day to day lives.
Researchers in Residence at BCRW, Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie, together with Woods Ervin founded the project Interrupting Criminalization, housed in the Social Justice Institute. The project aims to interrupt and end the growing criminalization and incarceration of women and LGBTQ people of color for criminalized acts related to public order, poverty, child welfare, drug use, survival, and self-defense, including criminalization and incarceration of survivors of violence. One recent project organized within Interrupting Criminalization was the Coronavirus Postcard Project, which had a goal to spark conversations about how we can support each other in staying safe, who the credible messengers for public health messaging and contact tracing are in our communities, what communities need in order to survive the pandemic, and why criminalization is never the answer when it comes to protecting our communities. Over 15,000 postcards were distributed to organizers. Interrupting Criminalization also released a #DefundPolice toolkit and a guide for major steps required to successfully launch a new paradigm for real safety. Both documents have been shared widely throughout social media, and this project continues into the present.
The Building Accountable Communities Project is an ongoing collaboration between Project NIA and BCRW that began in 2018 to promote non-punitive responses to harm by developing resources for transformative justice practitioners and organizing convenings and workshops that educate the public. In a series of videos created by Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, and Hope Dector as part of the project, transformative and restorative justice practitioners explore topics like accountability, transformative justice, and non-punitive responses to harm. Questions like “what is accountability?” and “what is self-accountability?” led the early conversations, and soon led to deeper engagements with transformative justice, what justice looks like for survivors, the intersections between disability justice and transformative justice, and transformative justice in the time of #DefundPolice. Groups of these videos have been released as preparatory materials for a series of online events featuring speakers including Mimi Kim, Shira Hassan, Elliott Fukui, Stas Schmiedt, Lea Roth, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. The continuation of Building Accountable Communities, alongside the critical work of Interrupting Criminalization, indicate BCRW’s ongoing commitment to working towards Abolition Feminism.
