Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
Monday Night Lecture Series | Fall 2019

Toward an Abolitionist University Studies

Abigail Boggs • Wesleyan University 

November 4 @ 6 P.M.
Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

What might it mean to take up an abolitionist approach to the university? To what kinds of concerns is such a project a response? And what anxieties might it incite? This talk builds on a collective project to imagine an abolitionist university studies aligned with a Left abolitionism as exemplified historically by the movement to abolish chattel slavery and contemporarily by the movement to abolish prisons. In taking up the language of abolition, the project seeks to reckon with the U.S. university’s enduring complicity with the logics and practices of carcerality, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism while, at the same time, asking what kinds of spaces, relationships, ways of knowing, and even institutions an abolitionist approach to the university could bring into being. Taking up both social critique and a desire to think and build the impossible, the talk will ask the audience to consider what an abolitionist approach to the university would say yes to.

All lectures begin at 6 p.m. and are held in the Daniel Family Commons (located in the Usdan University Center) unless otherwise noted.

Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
View Fall 2019 Lecture List