At a glance
This project, led by the Q Center, aims to create a learning experience for students to deconstruct the systems of knowledge… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2021-2022
- Mini
- Awarded
- $2,500
- Funding partners
-
- UW Resilience Lab (UWRL)
This project, led by the Q Center, aims to create a learning experience for students to deconstruct the systems of knowledge that support carceral structures, and to facilitate discussion about the role of intersectional identities in this work. In the process, sessions will explore antidotes to incarceration, including mutual aid, community care, and self-concept/esteem. “We hope to create an imaginative and planning space in hopes of manifesting new futures”, write Nico and Schweigert.
In addition to facilitated discussions, the Embodying Abolition project will include workshops for student projects, community volunteering opportunities, and a nature-centered retreat for participants.
The embodying abolition program we at the Q Center hope to create is a learning experience that gives students space and support to deconstruct and obliterate carceral, disposability and dispossession (Alexander, 2010, p.183) epistemologies and ontologies from their mind and their being in regard to race, gender, sexuality, ability, documentation status, nationality, accountability, and spatial resource and geographical environments. We plan to pursue this goal by creating facilitated discussion and planning groups, inviting speakers, participating in community excursions/retreats, and including liberating somatic approaches and activities. We have heard from our campus communities that imagining otherwise (Bell & Desai, 2011), is what will propel us into creating realities of inclusion, mutual aid, community care, self-concept, as well as self-love. We also recognize that abolition approaches hold these practices at the core of its existence. Therefore, we have decided to pursue a project that focuses on embodying the concept and principles thereof built on the foundation of queerness as a political ideology (Rosenberg & Villarejo, 2012).
We recognize through our work that society superimposes white dominant and supremacist heteropatriarchy in our lives relentlessly. Due to the impact of capitalism and all of its byproducts, we rarely have time to recenter ourselves to understand and deconstruct what harms we are perpetuating , where our innovation lives, what oppression logic has seeped into our minds and bodies (and how to release this logic holistically), or what new realities exist. We hope to create an imaginative and planning space in hopes of manifesting new futures in our bodies, our lives, communities, institutions we are a part of, our ways of being and our ways of knowing. We hope to create a subaltern fugitive space in the “undercommons” (Harney & Moten, 2013) where we practice and plan liberation, a liberating heterotopia ( Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986) that creates safety from the inside of space while disrupting the external by its sheer existence.
Our discussion and planning groups will be facilitated and managed by our wellness graduate assistant and three field track social work students (graduate and undergraduate).Not only will this give the students an opportunity to engrain abolition in their future work through practice, this will also give the student audience an opportunity for peer learning experience that includes more than the academic and leans into cultural practices of marginalized identities rather than “traditional” scopes of building community and reconceptualizing what freedom in body, mind and spirit can look like.
The project will consist of theoretical imagining/discussion spaces of what it means and what it looks like to embody abolition principles in different contexts and environments. These discussion groups will be facilitated by paid interns and our graduate assistant. Additionally, we will host “planning new futures” workshops where students will have the opportunity to plan a project that will operationalize what was imagined within the weekly discussion groups. The workshops will occur quarterly (subject to change). We additionally will create opportunities for students to go on at least one excursion to a community organization to assist and volunteer with their work with a focus on immersion and varying roles of abolition movements in a meta sense (to focus on abolition work, while practicing from a position of embodied abolition metacognitively, spiritually, and physically). Lastly, we will host a retreat where students will have the opportunity to be off campus in a nature space that allows them to recenter themselves without distraction. This retreat will consist of speakers and somatic facilitators, though we hope to bring in speakers at least twice a year beyond the retreat.
At the conclusion of each year- we want to give students the opportunity to showcase the implementation of their planning for the embodiment of abolition and want to invite the larger UW community to participate as audience members.
Sustainable Development
In reference to the 17 UN goals of sustainable development, we feel that this program aligns to the following:
Goal 3: Ensure Healthy Lives and Promote Wellbeing at All Ages
At the Q Center, all of our work is done from an intersectional justice & culture shift. In this project, our DNA remains the same. We hope that through embodying abolition, we not only gain knowledge, but practice what it means to promote and ensure the health of the community, but also the health of ourselves. We know that traditional oppressive practices impact health and wellbeing significantly due to lack of resources, lack of community support and environmental stressors. Through this project we hope to have students feel and shift themselves holistically rather than compartmentally. We feel this approach to liberation is one that will be helpful for not only our students but the communities they are a part of and advocate with.
Goal 4: Quality Education- Ensure inclusive and quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Education in formal space is not enough. We have to ensure that through our programs, non-formal education is at the forefront of our work. We still value how formal education can inform our programming now that publication is more inclusive, but the things that these architects bring to the table are approaches born within the community. We believe that this project exudes a quality of not only education, but care that ensures students recognize the value of their and their peers' narrative as being just as valuable and educational as the formal. We are normalizing the importance of learning and evolving throughout our lifetime for the sake of wellbeing in its entirety rather than oppressive in/tangibles focused on the gain and weaponization of social and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986)
Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities
We believe that this project has the ability to reduce inequalities by creating space for imagination, somatic centering/awareness (Somatics, 2014), planning , education and manifestation. When we do this work from the foundation of abolition, we inherently articulate that its intention is to reduce inequalities for communities oppressed by manufactured carceral logic that disproportionately impacts marginalized communities and increases the powers of the privileged through socio-economic/political incentivization by way of biopolitics (Lemke, 2011).
Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
The Embodying Abolition program, through its planning projects, will promote participants to reimagine futures in the spaces they inhabit to ensure that peace and justice is not only built, but sustained. In this project, we will work with participants to challenge themselves on building the architecture of imagined futures while making sure that their structures have the muscle to shift as needed and to ensure that work is built upon and not unraveled by the divisive tactics of oppression and carceral approaches.
Tahtzee Nico
Project lead
- tnh334@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Staff
- Affiliated groups
- Q Center
Val Schweigert
Team member
- qval@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Staff
- Affiliated groups
- Q Center
Request amount and budget
Measure the impacts
We hope to not focus so much on staple methodologies of evaluation, but rather gain student voice of effectiveness for those who are interested in sharing through photovoice and fishbowl roundtable discussions/listening sessions at the conclusion of the annual iteration of the project. Though we are open to qualitative synthesis from student and facilitator feedback as well as quantitative data reports focusing on attendance, demographics, retention and attrition. At the Q Center, we aren’t as concerned about how many people show up, because we know we want to focus on how those who do attend are being meaningfully engaged with. We also recognize that assessment of outreach effectiveness is important- we want to evaluate our efficiency in recruitment as well. We hope to gain evaluation data from all parties involved - students, staff, facilitators and speakers. We hope to reconceptualize what “success” has traditionally been and lean deeper into the stories of those within this immersion process to determine areas of effectiveness and areas for growth/improvement for each reiteration, understanding that as climates go through transformation and flux, the needs of the participants and the communities they are a part of will shift as well. We intend to take note of that and continue to build sustainable futures with each piece of new information and feedback that we receive.