Abolitionist Visions and Intersections: Centering Human Relationships and Building Institutional Connections for Social Justice

Date & Time: Tuesday, March 19, 2024, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Central Time. Online, via Zoom

Free and open to the public!

Submit a Proposal to Speak

If you are interested in speaking or organizing a panel, please submit your proposal no later than Monday, February 15 using this form. Read on for details!

Register: Registration will open mid-February.

Summit Description
Abolitionism is a positive, proactive, cross-sector project that redirects resources to ameliorate harms; promotes new forms of and investments in community health and well-being; centers the voices, experiences, and concerns of impacted individuals and communities; and addresses systemic, structural, and institutional injustice and deprivation. In both concept and practice, it opens up dimensions of activism, solidarity, and opportunity that expand upon the possible to illuminate the potential. Abolitionist-aligned campaigns and collectives around the world showcase the diversity and breadth of this critical work, demonstrating that there is no one vision of what this looks like—it is and will be the reality created by those committed to upending current systems of oppression and bringing something new into the world. Libraries preserve, document, protect, exhibit, archive, and disseminate information about the range of human experience. They also robustly resource their communities and seek to highlight and understand the impact of information access in people’s lives. In many ways, the library and the prison are diametrically opposed public institutions. Whereas libraries strive to embrace and promote shared humanity, equal access, critical literacy, social belonging, civic engagement, personal growth, and free circulation of information, the prison—a space defined by confinement and restriction—dehumanizes, isolates, withholds, and silences by nature and design. And yet, in practice, libraries and prisons have long been intertwined, and their complex relationship spans over two hundred years in this country.

Call for Papers
This summit is intended to probe the fertile crossroads between librarianship and abolitionism and to coincide with the American Library Association’s release of the new Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated and Detained. It is also part of SRRT’s Programming Committee’s broader effort to encourage expansive, cross-disciplinary conversations that center intersectional issues and struggles. We invite provocative and engaging explorations of the convergences, tensions, and disjunctions between abolitionism and library work as well as the many other areas of action and inquiry that abolitionism as practice and philosophy suggests. We expect that many presentations will discuss the work of libraries and librarians, but we also hope that, in the vein of knowledge justice (i.e., What counts as knowledge? Who defines knowledge and how it is expressed, used, and understood? Whose knowledge is valued, uplifted, and preserved?), we spotlight issues, experiences, and voices that deepen our understanding of how information is of use and put to use in carceral settings, as seen through the lens and in the voices of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people themselves. We will compensate all people with lived experience expertise for their participation in these proceedings.

For more information, please contact Rachel Rosekind: [email protected]

Submit a Proposal to Speak
If you are interested in speaking or organizing a panel, please submit your proposal no later than Monday, February 12 using this form. The call is open to all! Speakers do not need to be ALA members or librarians to apply.

Register: Registration will open mid-February. It is free and open to the public.