Geography’s abolitionist turn: Notes on freedom, property, and the state

Abstract

Recent years have seen a burgeoning of scholarship in abolition geography. But what does it mean to theorize abolition in geography and what do geographers bring to abolition? This paper seeks to theorize geography’s abolitionist turn, tracing its roots from Du Bois’ ideas of abolition democracy through to contemporary iterations and variations. In doing so, it offers property and the state as key analytics: property insofar as it undergirds carcerality, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism alike, and the state insofar as it comprises both a site from which to make demands and a perpetrator of carceral and racial violence.

Captive bodies, prison geographies, and the somatic carceral condition

“…In addition to the academic and abolitionist work that continues to scale out and challenge manifestations of the carceral across institutions, environments, and practices in otherwise "free society" (Boyce, 2021;Gilmore, 2007Gilmore, , 2022Gilmore, , 2023Hamlin, 2023;Jefferson, 2020;Ybarra, 2021), carceral geography would be strengthened by looking even closer at the bodies that carry the carceral inside of them and across space at the scale of the somatic. This adjustment in scalar approach necessitates the inclusion of formerly imprisoned bodies into a discipline that has hitherto theorized them secondhand and from afar.…”