Projects on Carcerality, Material Antiracisms, and Abolition Geography

Carceral Capitalism is projected developed by  Aly Jarocki, Gillian Edgelow, Krystle Simon, Mariana Matthews, and Robert Hold by focusing on the third week of the SSSJ Summer 2021 Program.  The third week interrogates questions such as how the category of the racialized debtor created and maintained? What does it mean, as Harney and Moten insist, to be in bad debt? Can “the debtor” be a political category? How has upward wealth redistribution created the category of "good debt”? Further, this week turns to collective of thinkers operationalizing debt within a mode of resistant politics, such as the Hannah Appel et. al. stretch Marxian paradigms to look beyond the category of “worker” as the condition of possibility for organizing, Jackie Wang’s work, Carceral Capitalism, which identifies how gendered and racialized debt creates an undeserving pathologized class of “irresponsible” Others, while corporate debt is cast as “the cost of doing business’ in a “free” and “fair” market. Carceral Capitalism infographic.

"Abolition Geography" is a final presentation prepared by Jasmine Valenzuela, Nancy Donovan, Tabea Mastel, and Vanessa Lujan, which is based on the lecture and readings of the second week of the Summer 2021 SSSJ Program. Week two asked participants to think about the processes of dispossession that operate along multiple axes of space, race, and the political economy. The readings focused on Ruth Wilson Gilmore whose work pushes beyond overly reductive analyses of race (reducing all carcerality to slavery) and of capital accumulation (reducing all carcerality to profit and corporate interest), and instead focuses on envisioning the building of already existing coalitions, those yet to be developed coalitions, and the material practices of politics and world making. Abolition Geography infographic.