Special Issue CFP: Abolitionist Literacies: A Call for Critical Resistance in Writing and Literacy

2024-09-23

Abolitionist Literacies: A Call for Critical Resistance in Writing and Literacy

Special Issue for Literacy in Composition Studies

 

Co-Editors: Alexandra Cavallaro, Erin Green, Logan Middleton, and Marco Navarro

 

While 2020 uprisings for Black Lives in the U.S. may have been many’s entryway into prison-industrial complex abolition, the movement has been ongoing for decades. Angela Davis’s (2003) Are Prisons Obsolete? is considered a foundational text in the abolitionist movement to understand the oppressive structures of the prison-industrial complex and the Movement for Black Lives brought together a coalition of advocacy groups working towards Black political power and socioeconomic justice. 

As defined by Critical Resistance (2024), an abolitionist organization developed by scholar-activists Angela Davis, Rose Braz, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolition can be understood as “a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” In addition to eradicating the current system “and its foundations of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cis-hetero-patriarchy,” abolitionist praxis seeks “to create new systems in its place that focus on meeting people’s needs, preventing and transforming harm, and building true community safety and well being” (Hayes and Kaba 2023). 

Importantly, Black, Indigenous, queer, and/or disabled communities have long strived to build life otherwise: through refusing manifold forms of state violence (Kaba 2021; Purnell 2022; Stanley and Smith 2011); building life-affirming systems for addressing harm (Maynard and Simpson 2022; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018); and enacting thick solidarity between communities (Shange and Liu 2018). These histories—many of which emerge from the inside organizing of incarcerated people as well as the labor and ingenuity of Black communities—continue to reverberate through the present. In 2024, we continue to see the rise in global movements to close prisons, defund the police, divest from imperialism and wars abroad, and end border violence. 

Many writing studies scholars have written about issues that abolitionists are also considering, whether in classroom settings or beyond:

  • The need to dismantle the interconnected anti-Black racism in classrooms and society (Baker-Bell 2020); 
  • How queer, abolitionist literacy frameworks help us rethink citizenship (Cavallaro 2019)
  • The ways that citizen journalism—and community literacy at large—draw upon abolitionist and disability justice frameworks (Fitzsimmons 2022)
  • The alignment of our literacy pedagogies and teaching with racial justice movements (Johnson 2018);
  • The coalitional practices necessary for resisting the university’s corporate and militaristic hegemonies (Kannan, Kuebrich, & Rodríguez 2016);
  • The radical potential of literacy among incarcerated people in prisons, jails, and detention centers (Berry 2018, Cavallaro 2019, Hutchinson 2021, Lewis 2019, Jacobi 2016)
  • The power of counterstory and critical race theory in writing studies (Martinez 2020); 
  • The possibilities of mutual aid in composition classrooms (Middleton 2023)
  • Restorative practices in writing program administration (Mwenja 2023); 
  • The language and literacy practices of activist movements (Richardson and Ragland 2018);
  • Praxes of divestment that aid us in drawing power away from racist, xenophobic, imperialistic, and raciolinguistic structures (Zeemont 2021)

Though the above list is not exhaustive, it is clear that those working in and around literacy studies have centered the demands and practices for abolition in their scholarship. With the construction of Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia; ongoing Palestinian genocide in Gaza; the banning of AP African American Studies in Florida because the curriculum mentions abolition; and the fact that “[U.S.] police killed more people in 2023 than any year in more than a decade” (Mapping Police Violence 2024), we argue the time for literacy and writing scholars to critically address abolition in all its forms is long past (formerly: now). 

Thus, we implore the fields of literacy and writing studies to continue addressing these death-making crises through the lens of abolition—especially as many of us keep studying and teaching these movements, collaborating with on-the-ground community activists, and reading student work about these struggles. This special issue, then, provides scholars, practitioners, activists, organizers, and artists the opportunity to join and/or continue the work of abolition movements. We invite writing that not only foundationally considers inclusive citation practices (Sano-Franchini et al. 2022) but also builds upon Chávez’s (2013) theorization of coalition as building power across communities, subjectivities, and people in order to counter hegemonic power.

We urge our field to recognize abolition as a global movement, as carcerality impacts communities across the globe and in non-Western and non-U.S. contexts (Davis 2015). This issue seeks submissions from authors wanting to address the internationality of abolition—from the impact of the United States’ carceral foreign policies on other countries, to political incarceration, to global state violence around borders, bombs, and war (Acheson 2022). Global solidarity in abolition is a critical practice our field in writing and literacy must interrogate.

In this call, we are excited to field proposals that take up explorations of abolitionist literacies as well as others that investigate literacy as emancipatory and/or abolitionist. While we do not believe that literacy itself inherently possesses liberatory qualities, we are open to submissions that consider either—or none—of these framings. For this issue, then, we solicit and encourage multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and anti-disciplinary work, the likes of which does not confine itself to the silos of single fields or disciplines. So too do we invite allies and co-conspirators to contribute projects that speak to how we might expand theories, methodologies, and pedagogies of abolitionist literacies, in the writing classroom, community spaces, and in other non-academic spaces. If there’s any question about the viability of a project, we encourage prospective contributors to reach out to the editors for guidance, insight, and support. 

We invite proposals to consider (but are not limited to) the following topics:

  • The scholarship, community-engaged work, activism, literacy practices, pedagogies, and writing of abolitionist thinkers and activists 
  • Literacy’s role in carceral settings (though we do not see prison literacies work and abolition as synonymous)
  • Literacy’s role in contributing to and resisting cultures of surveillance
  • Restorative and transformative justice in composition studies, classrooms, and community spaces 
  • Student and community activist literacies
  • Global literacy efforts in international abolitionist movements 
  • The influence of the prison-industrial complex in schools and universities 

We also invite potential contributors to respond to the following questions:

  • How are you—as a literacy educator, scholar, practitioner, artist, and/or activist—upending racial capitalism in your own research, organizing, or teaching? How are you confronting settler colonialism and cisheteropatriarchy in your own context?
  • In what ways are you—as a literacy educator, scholar, practitioner, artist, and/or activist—“dreaming disability justice,” to borrow a term from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018), as a means of overturning racial capitalism?
  • How do you see abolition as entwined with and/or activating queer liberation, and what new avenues and possibilities do these futures enable for literacy?
  • How are you putting your literacies to use in order to meet community needs outside of the classroom?
  • What does “building new worlds” look like in our fields of study? What role do abolitionist literacies have to play in teaching, scholarship, and service?
  • What new systems can those working with literacy create from the machinery or wreckage of the university to draw from la paperson’s (2017)  A Third University is Possible?
  • How do you actively work against the co-optation of abolition for DEI purposes as well as universities and administrators appropriating the language of abolition to describe neoliberal, non-reformist reforms?

The editors encourage prospective authors to think broadly and creatively about the best genre for their proposed submissions. In accordance with LiCS’ current editorial standards, we welcome both traditional, print-based manuscripts and multimedia or multimodal projects (e.g., scholarly monographs, podcasts, interviews, and zines, to name but a few). We ask that authors provide a brief rationale for their chosen format. Please submit an abstract of approximately 250-500 words. 

Below is an anticipated timeline for authors:

  • Proposals Due: October 8th, 2024 to LICSabolition@gmail.com
  • Proposal Decisions Sent Out / Invitations for Full Manuscripts: November 15, 2024
  • Full Manuscripts Due: March 1, 2025
  • Revision Feedback Sent to Authors: June 1, 2025
  • Revisions Due: August 15, 2025
  • Expected Special Issue Publication: January 2026 

 

Finally, we recognize that abolitionist theories, practices, and histories have largely been cultivated by Black, Brown, and/or Indigenous communities. To these ends, we both expect prospective contributors to be well-versed in the work of individuals from these communities and to cite their intellectual labor accordingly in their proposals and manuscripts. We encourage prospective contributors to consider citation justice as a practice in their submissions as communicated in Sano-Franchini et al.’s (2022) Position Statement on Citation Justice. In addition, we recognize that abolition—as movement and praxes—has been and continues to be co-opted by academics, who seek to repurpose it for the (neo)liberal aims of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. To these ends, we encourage potential contributors to engage with and cite the work of those thinkers, writers, artists, and organizers outside of the academy. Without the contributions of these people, who have worked tirelessly to imagine and enact abolitionist futures, there would be no such movement today.

We conclude this call by noting that we want to honor the anti-racist practices of LiCS by striving to push beyond representational approaches to anti-racism. We believe that considerations of citation are important. At the same time, we find that citing minoritized and multiply minoritized authors alone does not enact anti-racist praxes. We encourage prospective authors to consult Cagle et al.’s (2021) “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors” as a guide for pushing back against the racist, classist, and ableist mechanisms of publication in academia at large. 

 

References

 

Acheson, R. (2022). Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages. Haymarket Books.

 

Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge.

 

Berry, P. (2018). Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison. Southern Illinois University Press.

 

Cagle, L. E., Eble, M. F., Gonzales, L., Johnson, M. A., Johnson, N. R., Jones, N. N., Lane, L., Mckoy, T., Moore, K. R., Reynoso, R., Rose, E. J., Patterson, G., Sánchez, F., Shivers-McNair, A., Simmons, M., Stone, E. M., Tham, J., Walton, R., and Williams, M. F. (2021). Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors. https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic.

 

Cavallaro, A. (2019). Making Citizens Behind Bars (and The Stories We Tell About It): Queering Approaches to Prison Literacy Programs. Literacy in Composition Studies, 7(1), 1-21.

 

Chávez, K. R. (2013). Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities. University of Illinois Press.

 

Critical Resistance (2024). What is the PIC? What is Abolition? https://criticalresistance.org/mission-vision/not-so-common-language/

 

Davis, A. (2003) Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press.

 

Davis, A. (2015). Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books.

 

Fitzsimmons, B. (2022). Storying Access: Citizen Journalism, Disability Justice, and the Kansas City Homeless Union. Community Literacy Journal, 17(1), 26-40.

 

Johnson, L. L. (2018). Where Do We Go from Here? Toward a Critical Race English Education. Research in the Teaching of English, 53(2), 102-124.

 

Kaba, M. (2021). We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice. Haymarket Books.

 

​​Hayes, K., & Kaba, M. (2023). Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Haymarket Books.

 

Hutchinson, G. (2021). Detention / Writing Center Campaigns for Freedom. Community Literacy Journal, 15(1), 7-27.

 

Jacobi, T. (2016). Against Infrastructure: Curating Community Literacy in a Jail Writing Program. Community Literacy Journal, 11(1), 64-75.

 

Kaba, M., & Ritchie, A. J. (2022). No More Police: A Case for Abolition. The New Press.

 

Kannan, V., Kuebrich, B., & Rodríguez, Y. (2016). Unmasking Corporate-Military Infrastructure: Four Theses. Community Literacy Journal, 11(1), 76-93.

 

Lewis, R. (2019). (Anti-)Prison Literacy: Abolition and Queer Community Writing. Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, 19(1), 192-211.

 

Mapping Police Violence. (2024).  https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/.

 

Martinez, A. (2020). Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. NCTE.

 

Maynard, R., & Simpson, B. (2022). Rehearsals for Living. Haymarket Books.

 

Middleton, L. (2023). Teaching Mutual Aid in First-Year Writing. Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, 23(1). https://reflectionsjournal.net/2023/12/teaching-mutual-aid-in-first-year-writing/

 

Mwenja, C. D. (2023). Interlocking Circles. In Toward More Sustainable Metaphors of Writing Program Administration (pp. 157-174). Utah State University Press.

 

paperson, l. (2017). A Third University is Possible. University of Minnesota Press.

 

Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.

 

Purnell, D. (2022). Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. Astra House.

 

Richardson, E., & Ragland, A. (2018). #StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement. Community Literacy Journal, 12(2), 27-56.

 

Sano-Franchini, J., Carter-Tod, S., Gruwell, L., Ihara, R., Hidalgo, A., and Ostergaard, L. (2022). Position Statement on Citation Justice in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies. Conference on College Composition and Communication. https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/citation-justice.

 

Shange, S., & Liu, R. (2018). Toward Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice Movements. Radical History Review, 131, 189-198.

 

Stanley, E., & Smith, N. (2011). Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. AK Press.

 

Zeemont, A. (2021). Beyond “Literacy Crusading”: Neocolonialism, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and Possibilities of Divestment. Community Literacy Journal, 15(1), 70-91.