Abolitionists in the university: student activism, institutional change, and the role of alternative media

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Content Abolitionists in the University:
Student Activism, Institutional Change, and the Role of Alternative Media
by
Jessica Hatrick
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)
May 2024
Jessica Lindsay Roan Hatrick

ii
University presidents are academic chiefs of police. This is not an analogy.
—Dylan Rodríguez, Twitter/X, Jan 4th, 2024,
10:57pm

iii
Acknowledgements
Everything worthwhile is done with other people.
–Moussa Kaba
Thank you to my students, who give me a reason to get up each day.
Thank you to those who have helped me survive and build community within and beyond the
carceral place that is USC: Edie Adams, So Yun Ahn, Henry Aoki, Ally Arrieta, Shadee Ashtari, Zahraa
Badr, Lucien Baskien, Jon Beyer, Cooper Brown, Nicole Bush, Jasmine Chang, Emily Chen, Yuxuan
Chen, Suk Young Choi, Courtney Cox, Vanessa Cuevas, Avery Culp, Zaina Dabbous, Isabel DeLano,
Marissa Ding, Jude Dizon, Caitlin Dobson, Avery Everhart, Molly Frizzell, Brooklyne Gipson, Hector
Gomez, Eddie Gonzalez, Yvonne Gonzales, Matt Gray, Khamani Griffin, Rohan Grover, Jordan Harper,
Sofie Haytin, Alfonso Hegde, Kate Herndon, Ana Howe Bukowski, Ana Iwataki, Eugene Jang, Kyooeun
Jang, Ed Kang, Nash King, Teddy Lance, Paulina Lanz, Yvonne Le, Michelle Leccese, Emily Liu,
Mingxuan Liu, Junyi Lv, Joshua Michael, Joan Miller, Deena Naime, Pratik Nyaupane, Will Orr, Brian
Park, Pam Perrimon, Chris Persaud, Colin Petersdorf, Becky Pham, Ashley Phelps, Tyler Quick, Jessica
Ramos, Lorri Rao, Jermaine Richards, Javier Rivera, Christopher Rogers, Alex Rojas, Samah Sadig,
Gabe Schneider, Gabriel Shen, Ishaan Shrestha, Hamsini Sridharan, Jack Tang, Nikki Thomas, Nicole
Thorp, Jannie Wang, Johannes Weiler, Josh Widera, Sarah Wise, Stella Yoo, Charlie Yu, Meiqing Zhang,
Lichen Zhen, Yiqi Zhong, Kedi Zhou, and Sulafa Zidani.
Thank you to all my teachers, who have helped me understand how the world is: François Bar,
Ben Carrington, María Célleri, Dennis Childs, Nik De Dominic, Andrew Dilts, Yến Lê Espiritu, Taj
Frazier, José I. Fusté, Kimberly George, Dayo Gore, Jillian Hernandez, Yessica Garcia Hernandez, Sarah
Holterman, Malathi Iyengar, Henry Jenkins, DJ Johnson, Royel M. Johnson, Kate Levin, Mellissa LintonVillafranco, Jennifer Mogannam, Safiya Noble, Leslie Quintanilla, Amrah Salomón Johnson, Ly Thuy
Nguyen, Mychal Odom, Lila Sharif, Vineeta Singh, Daphne Taylor-García, Alison Trope, Kalindi Vora,
Jackie Wang, Edwina Welch, K. Wayne Yang, Hajar Yazdiha, and Salvador Zarate.

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Thank you to all my loved ones, who have helped me understand what I want the world to be. I
look forward to continuing to build new worlds with you: Sandy Amon, Sierra Bray, Ellie Gills, Olivia
González, Yahya Alami Hafez, Poppy Hatrick, Simogne Hudson, Molly Jones, Pete Kagey, Fidelia Lam,
Gloria Lin, Jody Liu, Rogelio Lopez, Katie Messing, Rachel Moran, Jess Ouyang, Priya Paupamah,
Jennifer Renick, Cerianne Robertson, Sophie Sylla, Ariel Tan, Will Tattersdill, Azsaneé Truss, Yunwen
Wang, Hannah Wolstein, and Grace Zhang.
Thank you to everyone I have organized beside, free and imprisoned. Thank you to everyone who
has organized and will organize for a liberated future.
Thank you to my cat, Tortilla, while I rejected all your suggested edits to the dissertation, keeping
your treat supply stocked has motivated me to keep writing, quite literally through pandemics and
genocides.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph.........................................................................................................................................................ii
Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................................................iii
List of Tables................................................................................................................................................ix
List of Figures................................................................................................................................................x
Abstract........................................................................................................................................................xii
Chapter 1: Introduction..................................................................................................................................1
Chapter 2: Theoretical Frameworks ............................................................................................................12
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................12
Education........................................................................................................................................12
The University ................................................................................................................................18
The Disciplinary Institution............................................................................................................24
Modes of Study...............................................................................................................................30
The Abolitionist University............................................................................................................36
Conclusion......................................................................................................................................42
Chapter 3: Methodologies............................................................................................................................47
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................47
Methodological Frameworks..........................................................................................................48
The Universities..............................................................................................................................51
The People ......................................................................................................................................53
Interviews .......................................................................................................................................56
Media Objects.................................................................................................................................64
Social Media ...................................................................................................................................65
Created Media.................................................................................................................................66
Limitations......................................................................................................................................69
Conclusion......................................................................................................................................71
Chapter 4: The Carceral University.............................................................................................................73
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................73
Defining Carcerality .......................................................................................................................73
The Role of the University .............................................................................................................76
As A Provider of Education ..............................................................................................77
As A Site of Autonomy and Agency.................................................................................78
As A Gatekeeper................................................................................................................78
As Run By The People ......................................................................................................79
As Conditioning People Towards Professionalism...........................................................80
As An Extractive-Exploitative Dynamic...........................................................................81
As A Dream Seller and Debtor..........................................................................................83
For A Good Political Education ........................................................................................84
In Opposition To Alternative Learning Spaces.................................................................85
As A Producer of Individual versus Collective Change....................................................89
For Whose Society?...........................................................................................................89
As A Punishment Structure ...............................................................................................91

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As A Redistributor of Resources.......................................................................................91
As A Redistributor of Power.............................................................................................93
As Getting in the Way of Your Education ........................................................................94
Space, Place, and Location .............................................................................................................95
Expanding Carcerality in Response to COVID-19 ...........................................................96
Practices of Isolation .........................................................................................................97
Turning Safety into a Business..........................................................................................98
Gentrification in/by the University....................................................................................99
Literal Gatekeeping .........................................................................................................101
Concerns for Order, Control, and Restriction of Movement...........................................104
The Over-Policing of People of Color.............................................................................105
Police are the Only Option ..............................................................................................106
Technological Surveillance .............................................................................................108
Property Before People....................................................................................................108
Relations and Pedagogy................................................................................................................109
Police as a Resource ........................................................................................................110
Gendered and Racialized Hierarchies..............................................................................111
Faculty Power Over Students..........................................................................................112
Assumption of a Normative Student ...............................................................................113
Limited Approach to Learning ........................................................................................114
Limited Approach to Knowledge ....................................................................................116
No Real Accountability ...................................................................................................118
Shaped by Funding ..........................................................................................................120
Racialization, Visibility, and Victimization ....................................................................121
Collective Resistance.......................................................................................................124
Interviewee Disagreement ...............................................................................................125
The Focus of the University .........................................................................................................125
It’s The Students’ University, but the Students Don’t Really Have a Say......................126
Less Transparency, Less Accountability, Less Shared Governance ...............................127
A Little More Agency and Flexibility .............................................................................128
A Real World Context and Consequences ......................................................................129
Prioritizing Money Over Knowledge and Learning........................................................131
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................131
Chapter 5: Resisting the Carceral University ............................................................................................134
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................134
A Virtual Walk and Talk Protest.....................................................................................134
Defining Alternative Media.............................................................................................137
Analog vs. Digital Alternative Media .............................................................................140
Heterodox-Creative Logics: Alternative Media Form..................................................................141
Assemblage......................................................................................................................142
Culture Jamming .............................................................................................................147
Participatory Logics: Alternative Media Production....................................................................150
Reprographic Innovations/Adaptions..............................................................................151
Transformation of Social Relations, Roles, and Responsibilities ...................................155
Accessibility ....................................................................................................................155
Transformation of Communication Processes.................................................................156
Logics of (Counter-)Public-Formation and Facilitation: Alternative Media Distribution ...........157
Use of Alternative (non-institutional) Sites for Distribution...........................................158
Clandestine/Invisible Distribution Networks..................................................................159
Anti-Copyright Practices.................................................................................................160

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Transformation of Social Relations, Roles, and Responsibilities ...................................161
Transformation of Communication Processes.................................................................162
Critical-Emancipatory Logics: Alternative Media Content and Goals ........................................162
Resources for a Counter-Hegemonic Project ..................................................................163
Political Education...........................................................................................................168
Changing Campus Discourses............................................................................170
Changing Campus Practices...............................................................................175
Capacity Building............................................................................................................178
Membership Growth...........................................................................................178
Coalition Building ..............................................................................................180
Avoiding Co-option............................................................................................181
New Temporalities ..........................................................................................................183
Counter-Archive.................................................................................................184
Prefiguration.......................................................................................................186
Abolitionist Student Activist Ecologies .......................................................................................190
Media Ecologies..............................................................................................................190
Social Movement Ecologies............................................................................................192
Logics of Success............................................................................................................193
An Ecology of Abolitionist Movement ...........................................................................194
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................197
Chapter 6: The Abolitionist University .....................................................................................................199
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................199
The Student in Abolitionist University Studies............................................................................200
Student as Laborer...........................................................................................................202
Student as Debtor ............................................................................................................206
Student as Reminder........................................................................................................206
Student as Resistant.........................................................................................................208
Student as Laborer/Debtor/Reminder/Resistant..............................................................211
Defining the Abolitionist University ............................................................................................215
Rhetorical Changes.......................................................................................................................220
Getting the Cop Out of Your Head..................................................................................220
Humanizing Criminalized Individuals ............................................................................221
Structural Changes........................................................................................................................226
Changing Who Makes Decisions ....................................................................................226
Erasing Police and Other Carceral Centers.....................................................................227
Divesting from Violence and Investing in Alternatives..................................................229
Financial Investments in Students...................................................................................234
Rematriating Land ...........................................................................................................235
Epistemological/Pedagogical Changes.........................................................................................238
A Greater Commitment to Collective Learning ..............................................................238
Changing Curricula .........................................................................................................240
Classroom Relationality ..................................................................................................244
Re-Evaluating What Counts as Knowledge and who Accesses Knowledge ..................247
Who Gets to Be a Student and Why Are We Students....................................................249
Valuing Creativity ...........................................................................................................251
Community Changes ....................................................................................................................255
Community Surrounding the University .........................................................................256
Community “Back Home” ..............................................................................................259
A Campus Community ....................................................................................................261
Community as Political Commitment .............................................................................262

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Conclusion....................................................................................................................................267
Chapter 7: Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................269
Summary.......................................................................................................................................270
Contribution to the Field...............................................................................................................278
Limitations....................................................................................................................................280
Future Research ............................................................................................................................284
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................287
References..................................................................................................................................................289
Appendices ................................................................................................................................................355
Appendix A: Interview Questions................................................................................................355
Appendix B: Social Media Codes ................................................................................................357

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List of Tables
Table 1. Characteristics of Universities Looked at In This Study...............................................................51
Table 2. Characteristics of Additional Universities Looked at For Their Abolitionist Student Activist
Collectives’ Social Media Content ..............................................................................................................52
Table 3. Students at California College (CC)..............................................................................................54
Table 4. Students at Los Angeles College (LAC) .......................................................................................54
Table 5. Students at Southern California University (SCU)........................................................................54
Table 6. Students at the University of Los Angeles (ULA) ........................................................................55

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List of Figures
Figure 1. ULA Instagram Post from February 5th 2021 ...........................................................................134
Figure 2. Media Items Produced by Abolitionist Student Collectives Grouped by Medium....................140
Figure 3. Front Cover of Zine Produced by a Collective at SCU..............................................................143
Figure 4. Front Cover of Zine Produced by a Collective at SCU..............................................................144
Figure 5. Organizing for Abolition in CA Higher Ed Virtual Gathering Poster .......................................145
Figure 6. Screenshot of a Student Government Campaign Shared on an Abolitionist Student
Collective’s Instagram Page ......................................................................................................................146
Figure 7. Screenshot of an Event Flyer Shared on an Abolitionist Student Collective’s Instagram Page 147
Figure 8. Crest Used in ULA Report.........................................................................................................148
Figure 9. Crest Used in ULA Zine.............................................................................................................148
Figure 10. Culture Jamming Carousel Using “Spotify Wrapped” by One Collective ..............................149
Figure 11. Culture Jamming Carousel Using “Spotify Wrapped” by a Different Collective....................149
Figure 12. Screenshot from ULA Cops Off Campus Abolition Map: a Spatial and Temporal Journey
Towards a Campus and a World Without Cops ........................................................................................152
Figure 13. “Solitary Confinement” by a Member of the Ongoing Project on “Art, Abolition, And the
University”.................................................................................................................................................153
Figure 14. Page 6 of “Coffee Not Cops” Zine...........................................................................................154
Figure 15. Screenshot from Zine by Collectives Affiliated with ULA .....................................................161
Figure 16. Page from a ULA Zine on the Normalization of Policing in The U.S.....................................164
Figure 17. Image from “Policing ULA: ULA PD Arrests (2013-2018): A [Collective Name] Report” ..165
Figure 18. Screenshot from One Collective’s Instagram Account............................................................166
Figure 19. Screenshot from One Collective’s Instagram Account............................................................167
Figure 20. A Prison Readymade Presented in “Art, Abolition, and the University” a Website Created
by Systems-Impacted Scholars/Artists/Activists.......................................................................................168
Figure 21. Instagram Post of a Workshop Held by CC Abolitionist Student Collective in November
2018 ...........................................................................................................................................................172
Figure 22. Example of Political Education from a Collective at LAC’s Instagram..................................173

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Figure 23. Example of Political Education from a Collective at LAC’s Instagram..................................174
Figure 24. Example of Political Education from a Collective at LAC’s Instagram..................................174
Figure 25. Instagram Post of Mutual Aid Request in March 2021............................................................188
Figure 26. A Non-Exhaustive Periodization of U.S. Universities from an Accumulation Perspective
Table from Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation .......................................................................210
Figure 27. Tweet by Mariame Kaba, June 15, 2020..................................................................................217
Figure 28. Zine Page from Media-Making Workshop ..............................................................................222
Figure 29. UCSD Cops Off Campus Logo................................................................................................223
Figure 30. Photo by Anika Chakrabarti/Daily Bruin Staff of Jackie Robinson Stadium in October
2020 After Protestors Hung a Sign Reading “Prisoners Made Here” Below the “Champions Made
Here” Sign Painted Outside the Stadium...................................................................................................223
Figure 31. Am I Truly Free? By Alberto Lule (Left) And a Close-Up of the Remix in a Zine Page
from the Media-Making Workshop (Right) ..............................................................................................224
Figure 32. Zine Page from Media-Making Workshop ..............................................................................225
Figure 33. Mini Zine from Media-Making Workshop ..............................................................................232
Figure 34. Zine Page from Media-Making Workshop ..............................................................................236
Figure 35. Zine Page from Media-Making Workshop ..............................................................................237
Figure 36. Zine Page from Media-Making Workshop ..............................................................................252
Figure 37. Tweets by Noname...................................................................................................................253
Figure 38. Zine Page from Media-Making Workshop ..............................................................................260
Figure 39. Image from the Cops Off Campus Disorientation Guide.........................................................265

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Abstract
The university remains a site of struggle both in terms of being a place where struggles happen and a
place that is struggled over. Rejecting the traditional right-left culture wars framework of studying the
university, this dissertation uses action research methodologies to look at the relationship between
universities and abolitionist student collectives. Analyzing a range of sites of student activist voice—
interviews, media, social media, and media creation—it looks to understand why these collectives have
placed abolition at the center of their moral and ideological vision, and what role they believe universities
can play in an abolitionist movement. Data collection resulted in 17 structured interviews at four
universities in the Los Angeles area from between March 19th, 2022, and July 28th, 2022; 22 media items
from four universities in the Los Angeles area; 804 social media posts from twelve abolitionist student
collectives across the U.S.; and a media-making workshop with eighteen participants in Los Angeles in
January 2023. From this data, I found that abolitionist students do not engage with partisan politics that
present orthodox demands against progressive demands, they instead propose a far more radical
alternative: the creation of “life-affirming institutions” (MPD 150, 2020). Abolitionist student activists
argue that “no one is disposable,” and ultimately, they want to see learning spaces that support that.
Abolitionist student collectives understand the university as (re)producing carceral ideologies coconstituted by white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems that reproduce
domination and control. I argue that in working towards the “knowing degeneration, disorganization and
disequilibrium” of the carceral university and thus our carceral society, abolitionist student activists offer
practical solutions to decarcerate both the university and prefigurative visions for both the future of what
study can look like and the enactment of that study now.

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Chapter 1. Introduction
Since the mid 1950s, we’ve seen a rise in the U.S. right arguing against higher education,
proclaiming it promotes “progressive worldviews at the expense of conservative orthodoxy” (Broćić &
Miles, 2021, p. 856). This can be seen most recently in the University of Austin’s (UATX) founding
statement where it declares they will “champion the pursuit of truth, scientific inquiry, freedom of
conscience, and civil discourse, that is independent of government, party, religious denomination and
business interest in all matters” (UATX, 2021, p. 1). However, it goes back much further. In 1959,
traditionalist conservative academic Russell Kirk argued that college students were being “defrauded by
social indoctrination in the guise of scholarship” (1959, p. 428). In 1987, philosopher and Professor at the
University of Chicago Allan Bloom claimed higher education had “failed democracy and impoverished
the souls of today’s students” (1987, p. 1). In 2000, art critic Roger Kimball wrote that the use of popular
culture in the academy was an attempt to remain relevant but that “the ‘relevance’ in question always
seems to mean ‘relevance according to the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy’” (Kimball, 2000, p. 80). In
2018, Jason Hill, a professor at DePaul University, argued that “the gravest internal threat” to the U.S.
was “leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this
country” (McKie, 2018, n.p.). In late 2023, president-elect of Colorado Christian College Eric Hogue
argued that U.S. “elite universities have lost all claim to moral leadership” as “much of higher education
has been captured and reprogrammed by socialists, Marxism and liberal ideologies” (Hogue, 2023, n.p.),
and former U.S. Senator and current president of the University of Florida Ben Sasse argued the
“religious cult” of intersectionality has “dominated higher education for nearly a decade with the shallow
but certain idea that power structures are everything” (Sasse, 2023, n.p.). This assumed leftist ideology of
the university is contrasted against an assumed possible neutral politics represented by conservative
scholars that does not “express opinions on religious, political, or social issues, modify its corporate
activities to foster political or social change, or take collective action” (UATX, 2021, p. 7). However,
rather than maintaining a neutral politics, refusal to engage with political or social change works to

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reproduce the status quo (Eastman, 1951; Mayer & Font-Guzmán, 2022), a status quo that, as will be
discussed throughout this dissertation, reproduces ongoing systems of domination and control.
These arguments are often framed as part of the ongoing “culture war” between “the progressive
and the orthodox” (Hunter, 1991, p. 41), which ultimately is boiled down to “differing moral visions”
(Broćić & Miles, 2021, p. 856). Whether or not higher education should provide moral guidance has long
been debated, as has what that moral guidance consists of (Kiss & Euben, 2010). For example, many U.S.
universities were founded as Christian institutions with ties to a single church (Reuben, 1996), then in the
1880s “reformers promoted “freedom” as the defining value of the “true” university” (Reuben, 2010, p.
33), this slowly resulted in a turn towards scientific truth as a source of moral guidance (Reuben, 2010).
Leading to an investment in an “objective” and “value-free” education that university reformers believed
would “encourage responsibility” among students (Reuben, 2010, p. 36). When this promotion of
freedom appeared to cause representations of university students as preoccupied with “sexual
experimentation, excessive drinking, immature pranks, and improving their position in the hierarchical
campus social structure” universities re-intervened (Reuben, 2010, p. 37). By the early 20th century
universities had turned to using extracurricular activities as a source of moral guidance, taking over
control of these activities, housing, and the size of incoming classes—including via implementing ethnic
quotas on Jewish students (Reuben, 2010). By the 1940s, there was a growing belief that universities were
responsible for citizenship education as part of their general education requirements (Reuben, 2010).
Proponents for general education fell into three camps: (1) those who argued for a revival in religious
education, (2) those who pushed for progressive education associated with the work of John Dewey,
where the education would be “relevant to students’ lives and the political problems of the contemporary
world” (Reuben, 2010, p. 40), and (3) those inspired by the work of “the Great Books movement” to
focus on “the training of students’ intellect rather than their character” (Reuben, 2010, p. 41). Julie
Reuben shows that while initially general education mostly followed the second camp, as the impact of
the Cold War grew, the “focus on adjustment and measurable outcomes” was labelled indoctrination and
associated with Soviet political education—ultimately tying to the broader trend of academic

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McCarthyistic repression and persecution of left-leaning academics (Deery, 2010; Feffer, 2019; Hartman,
2008). This investment in intellect over character, meant that by 1997 John Mearsheimer argued major
universities were “remarkably amoral institution[s]” during his address to the University of Chicago’s
incoming first-year class (1998, p. 149).
Despite Mearsheimer’s statement, the long debate over whether education should provide moral
guidance, and if so what moral guidance continues. Most people do agree that education does perform
some kind of moral and ideological instruction (Althusser et al., 2014; Backer, 2022; Broćić & Miles,
2021; Kiss & Euben, 2010; McLean, 2015). Leif Weatherby has argued the idea that this instruction is
leftist is false, as universities have “flaunt[ed] radical rhetoric while acting in conformity with the
rightward swing of our society over the last half century” (Weatherby, 2024, n.p.). This was made
particularly visible in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the subsequent riots and protests
that spread around the globe. Questions around this moral education began to center critiques of police
and prisons, with universities releasing “toothless” statements (England & Purcell, 2020, n.p.), and
abolitionist student organizations emerging across the country (Rogers et al., 2023). Calls for abolishing
police and prisons left radical organizing spaces and entered the mainstream (Craig & Reid, 2022;
Mortensen, 2022; Schneider, 2022). While some students at universities had been involved in police and
prison abolitionist organizing before this global call for change in 2020 (Davis, 2003b; Dizon & Davis,
2024; Thuma, 2019; Williams, 2016), the movement resulted in dozens of new abolitionist campus
collectives–or previously existing collectives taking on abolitionist stances–and the emergence of a North
American-wide coalition–the Cops Off Campus Coalition (COCC)–who refer to themselves as an
“abolition network to get cops off campus and cops off the planet” (Cops Off Campus Coalition n.d.).
The COCC website lists sixty campus organizations as part of the coalition. In my research, I have found
at least another twenty that exist in Canada and the U.S., where the abolitionist movement, grounding
both itself and policing in the legacy of enslavement, has been most visible. With over eighty abolitionist
organizations active on campuses across Canada and the U.S., this dissertation looks to understand why

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these collectives have placed abolition at the center of their moral and ideological vision, and what role
they believe universities can play in an abolitionist future.
The role of student activism in the university has gone undertheorized (della Porta et al., 2020). In
my experience as a student activist and studying student activism, I have seen that student activists are
quick to understand and work toward universities as microcosms that could offer experimentation with
alternative ways of being, ones that reject carcerality and instead explore “otherwise relations” (Crawley,
2020). In particular, I have seen how abolitionist student activists in Los Angeles engage both digital and
analog alternative media to do the political education work they find the university failing to do in hopes
of producing a future they desire to live in. This project thus follows Eli Meyerhoff’s argument that
formal education, such as K-12 and university schooling, is “just one possible mode of study among
many alternatives” (2019a, p. 4), and looks to the alternatives. Modes of study, he argues, are “bound up
with different modes of world-making” and that education is a mode of study that “supplements modes of
world-making that are associated with modernist, colonial, capitalist, statist, white-supremacist,
heteropatriarchal norms” (2019a, p. 4).
The mode of study perpetuated by the university in 2024 can be defined through its relationship
to carcerality and disposability. The U.S. academy is founded on carceral structures of violence that
render people disposable (Giroux, 2014). When using “the university” and “the academy” in this project, I
follow Jeffrey Williams’ definition to mean a “field of reference, which includes the discourse of ‘the
idea of the university’ as well as the actual practices and diverse institutions of contemporary higher
education” (2012 n.p.). While there are differences between individual universities in the U.S., their
commitment to education as the primary “mode of study” reflects a commitment to hierarchy,
objectification, and control (Meyerhoff, 2019a). Scholars have shown that Historically Black Colleges
and Universities (Kendi, 2012; Mobley et al., 2021), community colleges (Gardner et al., 2023), for-profit
universities (McMillan Cottom, 2017), land-grant universities (Lee & Ahtone, 2020; Rodríguez, 2012b;
Yang, 2017), private universities (Gonzalez & Meyerhoff, 2021; Viswanathan, 1993; Wilder, 2013), and
public universities (Brim, 2020; Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Newfield, 2008; Patel, 2021; Trask, 1999), are

5
all sites that reproduce systems of domination and maintain hegemonic power structures via debt,
gatekeeping, conditioning students towards professionalism, and refusing student autonomy and agency.
When referring to the carceral logics of the university, I follow Colleen Hackett and Ben Turk’s
adaption of Michel Foucault to define the carceral as “an institution, a system, or a body of knowledge
that renders people as objects and exercises control over and through them” (2018, p. 24). Requiring a
structure of objectification and control, carcerality, as it functions today, is co-constituted by white
supremacy1
, capitalism2
, ableism3
, cisheteropatriachy4
, and other systems that reproduce domination.
Thus, the carceral logics of the university refer to how the university uses structures of objectification and
control to enable white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems that
reproduce domination.
When discussing the mutual aid organizing that arose in Minneapolis after the murder of George
Floyd in May 2020, Charmaine Chua highlighted the role COVID-19 played in response to Floyd’s
murder, arguing that it “prompted a global revelation: capitalism, which has never sustainably provided
for our collective needs, was laid bare as a system that distributes not daily needs, but uneven life
chances” (2020, p. 128). The specificity of the violence of white supremacist capitalism that the societal
responses to COVID-19 revealed resulted in Floyd’s death, catalyzing approximately 15 to 26 million
people to protest in the U.S. (Buchanan et al., 2020). Most universities’ responses to 2020 reflect the need
to study the effects of these carceral logics within institutions. As shown by Thurka Sangaramoorthy and
Joseph B. Richardson Jr. in their article “‘Black Lives Matter’ Without Black People?” for Inside Higher
Ed, the performative responses to the series of uprisings responding to the ongoing systemic murder of
Black people in the U.S. reveal the university’s ongoing complacency in response to these systemic
1 An ideology “through which people of European descent are positioned as both the norm and ideal of human life, a position
against which others can be measured and found lacking” (Bebout, 2020, p. 250). 2 Both a system “of generalized commodity production driven by the pursuit of profit and based on free wage labor” (Coates,
2015, p. 4) reliant on “combined but uneven development” (Coates, 2015, p. 11) and an ideology (Althusser et al., 2014). 3 An ideology that “renders disability as abject, invisible, disposable, less than human, while able-bodiedness is represented as at
once ideal, normal, and the mean or default” (Dolmage, 2017, p. 7). 4 “An ideological system that naturalizes normative views of what it means to ‘look’ and ‘act’ like a ‘straight’ man and
marginalizes women, femininity, and all gender non-conforming bodies that challenge the gender binary; it is a system based on
the exploitation and oppression of women and sexual minorities” (Alim et al., 2020, p. 292).

6
murders (October 16, 2020). The vast majority of universities have done nothing to change their structural
relationships with local and national police and prisons, nor have they taken steps to reckon with the antiBlackness within the university itself (Johnson & Dizon, 2021; Sangaramoorthy & Richardson Jr., 2020).
The university’s commitment to maintaining hegemonic systems of violence can be looked at
through three related forms of violence: administrative, material, and epistemological. The administrative
violence of the university can be seen in the violence that comes from the “careful planning, designing
proper technology and technical equipment, budgeting, calculating and mobilizing necessary resources:
indeed, the matter of dull bureaucratic routine” (Bauman, 2000, pp. 16-17). A key site of racialized
administrative violence is the long history of segregation within the academy. Some U.S. universities
remained legally segregated in the U.S. well into the 1960s (Civil Rights Digital Library, 2021). There is
also administrative violence in the practice of naming within the university (Viswanathan, 1993;
Watanabe & Mier, 2020) or through the co-option of the labor of students, faculty, and staff of color for
the university’s public relations (Ahmed, 2012; Ferguson, 2012; Kelley, 1996). To understand the
material violence perpetrated by universities in the U.S., we can first look at their role in perpetuating
settler colonialism, which, as argued by K. Wayne Yang (under the pseudonym la paperson), functions as
a set of technologies that “paves the way for capitalist accumulation” (2017, p. 1). Yang highlights the
role of land-grant universities in the production of settler colonialism, which Robert Lee and Tristan
Ahtone have reframed as “land-grab universities” in their research for the High Country News (2020).
Land-grab institutions were granted land stolen from Indigenous populations through the 1862 Morrill
Act, and this land has been used both to build upon and create capital through development and
agribusiness. These land-grab institutions were then charged with producing research that would further
justify settler colonialism.
The second critical material relationship between universities and capitalism is that U.S.
universities are founded via slavery—and plantation slavery in particular. Craig Steven Wilder details the
relationships between U.S. universities and plantation slavery in his book Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery,
and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. In it, Wilder identifies the academy as standing

7
“beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage” (2013, p. 11). This
accumulation continues in the 21st century through the production of student debt, which functions as a
structure of unfreedom (Burton, 2021), is well-documented for reproducing white supremacy through the
racialization of wealth and debt (Calazans, 2021; Murakami, 2021), and plays a crucial role in reinforcing
an imperial regime over land and labor through the reproduction of historical forms of racialized
capitalism. A final material space in which we can see universities materially reproduce carceral violence
is through the creation of campus-community divides. Historically referred to as the “town-gown divide”
given the ongoing deep racial segregation of people’s homes and workplaces in the U.S. (Kimball, 2021,
n.p.), universities are generally either in majority-white communities—wherein students of color are often
isolated—or in a majority non-white community—wherein that community is often criminalized and
viewed as a threat to the institution (Baldwin, 2021). This divide is also globalized, with universities’
vision and mission statements focused on improving their nation-states; in the West, this often means
partaking in the neo-imperial practice of brain drain/gain (Baptiste, 2014).
When looking at epistemological violence, we should start with the fact that the modern
university is the primary institution of knowledge production in the U.S. The university was created under
Medieval European Christendom; it was not until around 1500—with the production of difference
systemized by colonial modernity—that institutions of knowledge (re)production became tools “to
manage and control knowing and understanding in other civilizations” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 137).
Additionally, during this time, the university was transplanted around the world, including to the “New
World,” as can be seen through the founding of four institutions modeled after European universities in
the 1500s (in Spain, México, Peru, and the Dominican Republic) and the founding of Harvard University
in Massachusetts shortly after in 1636 (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 184). The production and
reproduction of knowledge have always been central to carceral violence. This centrality can also be seen
in Edward Said’s Orientalism. He shows how the production of the Orient via the academy and the
university’s development via Orientalism reflect the co-constitution of globalized carceral violence and
the university (2003). As will be discussed in Chapter 2, Henry Giroux (2014) connects globalized

8
neoliberalism to an investment in disposability politics that can be seen through the increasing
incarceration of young people, the modeling of public schools after prisons, state violence waged against
peaceful student protesters, and state policies that bail out investment bankers but leave the middle and
working classes in a state of poverty, despair, and insecurity. This investment in globalized neoliberalism
can also be seen in the growth of For-Profit Colleges, which, as Tressie McMillan Cottom shows has tied
the rapid expansion of for-profit degrees to increasing classed and racialized inequality in the U.S.
creating an industry built on exploiting the pain, desperation, and aspirations of the poor and working
class. Ben Wildavsky (2010) shows this neoliberal effective exploitation is spreading globally. The
epistemological relationship between the university, globalization, and neo-imperial warcraft is central to
the ongoing violence of carceral logics produced by and within the academy. In The Imperial University:
Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira name the academicMPIC (military-prison-industrial complex) as a primary force in maintaining contemporary statecraft. The
academic-MPIC is both rooted in and a key force in maintaining structures of carcerality (Chatterjee &
Maira, 2014).
As I will later discuss in Chapter 2, Critical University Studies (CUS) emerged around the mid to
late 1990s as an inter/cross/anti-disciplinary response to the structural violence of the long
neoliberalization of the university. Unsurprisingly, the critiques CUS has offered have yet to be taken up
by those in positions of power at universities. Abolitionist University Studies (AUS) takes the work of
CUS further, understanding universities as both founded in violence and central to the reproduction of
violence long before neoliberalization. AUS does not take the continued existence of universities as a
given, asking if, instead, as a site of violence, they should be abolished, destroyed and something new
built in their wake.
The primary aim of this dissertation is to understand why these collectives have placed abolition
at the center of their moral and ideological vision, and what role they believe universities can play in an
abolitionist movement. It asks these questions to think through more significant questions around the role
of voluntary education in producing social change. I understand voluntary education to mean any

9
education outside of compulsory education, including continuing/further and higher education, political
education, and other forms of education individuals may “opt-in” to outside of traditional educational
spaces. By “voluntary education,” I am referring to the education we receive that, while it may involve
the state, as in the case of state-funded programs/universities, the state’s presence is not required, nor does
the state explicitly define the curriculum. I am adapting Berg and Edquist’s definition of “voluntary
educational activities,” which they define as education “generally aimed at the mass of adolescents and
adults, organized by non-profit and non-governmental associations, outside compulsory and/or regular
educational institutions (such as public-sector schools and universities)” (2017, p. 1). By including
universities in my definition of voluntary education, I refocus the definition of voluntary on the
compulsory rather than the regular in Berg and Edquist’s definition. I do so because, given this research’s
engagement with carceral studies, I believe that the state’s power to punish individuals or their guardians
for lack of attendance or behavioral issues reveals compulsory education as an inherently carceral space.
Thus, the lack of state compulsion raises the question of whether voluntary education can also function as
a carceral space.
Using this definition, I have chosen universities as my site of study because they are arguably the
primary mode of voluntary education engaged within the twenty-first century in the U.S. By focusing on
abolitionist critiques of and alternatives to the university, this dissertation looks at what the university is
and what it does for educating populations towards a better society. Following Stefano Harney and Fred
Moten’s definition of abolition in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study that the object
of abolition requires “[n]ot so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have
prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination
of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (2013, p. 42), as discussed further in Chapter
2, this project understands universities, alongside compulsory education, as complicit in reproducing a
society that could have prisons, slavery, and the wage. It then looks into the possible roles of the
university in Harney and Moten’s suggested “founding of a new society” (2013, p. 42). This dissertation
thus starts with the question: How do abolitionist student activists understand the university within their

10
larger goal of abolition? I focus on abolitionist student activists, following Altbach’s argument that
“student activists frequently serve as a social and political barometer for their societies” (1989, p. 105).
To understand the relationship between voluntary education and abolitionist politics, I attempt to answer
the following questions:
1. Do abolitionist student activists draw connections between carceral logics and the university? If
so, what connections do abolitionist student activists draw between carceral logics and the
university? And how do they draw connections?
2. Do universities use carceral logics to enable their “mode of study” (Meyerhoff, 2019a)? If so,
why?
3. How can carceral logics limit study?
4. What role do abolitionist student activists see university education playing in producing social
change?
5. Do abolitionist student activists use alternative media in their activism? If so, how do abolitionist
student activists use alternative media toward decarcerating the university?
6. Do abolitionist student activists believe the university can be decarcerated?
7. What practices do abolitionist student activists believe a university can enact to decarcerate?
8. What role do abolitionist student activists believe student activism can play in developing and
practicing an abolitionist university?
9. What alternative modes of study do abolitionist student activists envision both outside and within
the university?
10. How do universities enable or disable learning toward enacting social change?
The dissertation is broken up into three empirical chapters to answer these questions. Chapter 4:
The Carceral University examines how abolitionist student activists understand the relationship between
the university and carcerality to answer questions 1-4. Chapter 5: Resisting the Carceral University,
focuses on question 5 and analyzes media and social media usage by abolitionist student activists to
understand how media is used to resist and push back against the institution. Finally, Chapter 6: The

11
Abolitionist University uses interviews, textual analysis, and media creation and analysis to answer
questions 6-10 and understand what alternative institutions and educational spaces abolitionist educators
and students envision for our futures. I end with a discussion of the possible futures of this work.
Ultimately, this dissertation rejects the orthodox versus progressive binary presented by
mainstream narratives of a culture war, finding that both orthodox and progressive moral visions
reproduce carceral logics that alienate us from learning and render people disposable. An abolitionist
approach to higher education suggests methods “to appropriate, invent, direct, and control the multiple
layers of power and politics” inside higher education through a commitment to experimentation (Giroux,
2007, p. 37). It also emphasizes students as creators rather than recipients of abolition and abolitionist
spaces of education. In understanding education as it currently functions, student resistance to it, and
creative alternatives for the future, this dissertation argues that the resources of higher education still have
a potential role in imagining our collective futures. In the next chapter I outline the various theoretical
frameworks grounding this dissertation, including the sociology of education, the sociology of higher
education, critical university studies, and analyses of education as disciplinary institutions. I then look at
alternative modes of study via Abolitionist University Studies and abolitionist theory.

12
Chapter 2. Theoretical Frameworks
Introduction
In this chapter, I outline the various theoretical frameworks grounding this dissertation. I start by
looking at the role of education in today’s society, defining education, and discussing the sociology of
education and the sociology of higher education alongside the role of student activism. I then look at how
the university is understood, defining it, and exploring its historical and contemporary purpose of
maintaining elitism before discussing the field of Critical University Studies and how it has engaged with
the concept of the university. Next, I look at how a carceral analysis, particularly one that engages with
the university as a disciplinary institution, allows us to understand the ideological work done by the
university in maintaining not only elitism but white supremacy (Cabrera, 2014; Chun & Feagin, 2022),
capitalism (Bourdieu, 1996; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Dewey, 1916; Freire, 2000), ableism (Dolmage,
2017), cisheteropatriachy (Duran et al., 2022; Hearn, 2017), and U.S. imperialism (Chatterjee & Maira,
2014; Viswanathan, 1993). I turn to what scholars have theorized as the college-prison nexus to
understand the explicit and implicit connections between the two. I then look at Eli Meyerhoff’s work on
modes of study and his argument that education-based modes of study reinforce these disciplinary
institutions that treat individuals as disposable. By focusing first on four alternative modes of study–
political education, social movement learning, free universities, and the undercommons–I offer education
alternatives and then tie these alternatives to Abolitionist University Studies. Looking at its origins in
school abolition, alongside the study of universities as sites of violence via colonialism and slavery, I end
the chapter with an exploration of abolition as a theory.
Education
In his 2019 book Beyond Education: radical studying for another world, Eli Meyerhoff offers a
critical genealogy of the term “education,” noting that its first recorded use was in 1527 to mean
“bringing up a child” (2019a, p. 138), a good education at the time brought up “children of the gentry and
nobility in the service of the commonwealth” (2019a, p. 147). As Meyerhoff notes, by the mid-17th

13
century, Thomas Hobbes was calling “for education to instill poor people with fear of the state of nature,
and with fear and love of the sovereign and the civil laws” (2019a, p. 152), thus education became a term
to signify a social contract of a system to maintain the status quo. By the end of the 1600s, John Locke
had begun advocating for legally mandated “working schools” for the poor, which would “double as
wool-spinning factories that both increase capital for their owners and discipline the poor” (Meyerhoff,
2019a, p. 157). However, for the gentry, he believed education should exist “in the form of a childcentered pedagogy of emotional management” (Meyerhoff, 2019a, p. 157). Despite these classed
ideological origins and usages of education, there has remained a cultural belief in the liberatory
possibility of education.
In particular, the belief in education as a public good developed throughout the 19th century, with
Massachusetts being the first U.S. state to introduce compulsory education in 1852. The argument for
understanding higher education as a public good has been repeatedly made (Marginson, 2011; McLean &
Walker, 2012; Solbrekke & Sugrue, 2020; Tilak, 2018), but as scholars, such as Nikki Luke and Nik
Heynen or Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial have made clear, the idea that
higher education has ever been a public good needs to be questioned. Luke and Heynen note that while
many U.S. public institutions may promise “education to all students,” in reality, they only educate “those
who meet admissions requirements and can afford to attend” (2021, p. 405), historically and presently
excluding many of “the landless, women, Indigenous peoples, and people of color” (2021, p. 405). Thus,
the notion of education as a public good is reliant on a notion of a classed, raced, and gendered public.
Alternatively, we can understand this as Roderick Ferguson argues, as excluding “the heterogeneous
publics whose due has never been received, whose dreams have never been fully activated, and whose
histories and identities are rarely acknowledged as part of our ‘public’” (2017, p. 5).
The role of education, and mainly, the understanding of education as a public good, has been
explored throughout the sociology of education. Burton Clark argues that the field developed throughout
the 1950s, and a “serious” subfield of the sociology of higher education emerged in the 1960s (1973, p.
5). The sociology of education is generally understood as concerning itself “with what schools are

14
actually like, with why schools are the way they are, and with the consequences of what happens in
schools” as compared to the philosophy of education, which looks at “how education ought to be
organized and the ends that it ought to serve” (Brint, 2017, p. 1). Mehta and Davies place the unfolding of
a sociology of education in the U.S. with the Coleman Report (1966), which emerged out of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 to address the “availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by
reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions at all levels” in the U.S.
Mehta and Davies argue that the report went on to shape both the quantitative methodological focus of the
field and the development of five different “sociologies of education.” These focuses, they note, have
shaped the field’s identity but have done so “at the expense of other topics and approaches, reifying a
small number of theories, questions, and research methods as central to the sociology of education
enterprise” (2018, p. 17).
The first of these five sociologies of education, according to Mehta and Davies, is the status
attainment and social reproduction tradition: “primarily quantitative, primarily focused on K–12
education, and primarily interested in explaining the factors that predict educational attainment and
achievement,” it has explored structural inequality and more proximate factors (2018, p. 19). They argue
that the second sociology of education is an efficacy-centered, organizationally oriented sociology
focused on school and policy improvement. Third, they name a critical sociology of education–arguably
the thread from which Critical University Studies (CUS) emerges. Grounded in the Marxist theorizing of
Paulo Freire (2010, [1968]), Bowles and Gintis (1976), and Paul Willis (1977), it looks to understand
“schooling in the rule of capitalism, identifying it as a producer of ideological hegemony, docile workers,
and unequal outcomes” (Mehta & Davies, 2018, p. 23). Notably, both Freire and Willis put resistance and
liberation at the center of their analysis, a theme I argue CUS has failed to center adequately. Notably,
while the field expanded throughout the 1980s (e.g., Apple, 1979; Giroux, 1981; Giroux & McLaren,
1989), Mehta and Davies argue that it is now rarely cited by mainstream sociologists and instead found
most frequently in post-discipline “studies units” such as “media studies, cultural studies, women’s
studies, and African-American studies” (2018, p. 24), this argument can be seen in the disciplinary

15
placements of many of the key CUS authors: Davarian Baldwin in American Studies, Nick Mitchell in
Ethnic Studies, Christopher Newfield is in an English department, Bill Readings was in a Comparative
Literature department before his early death, Lawrence C. Soley in a Journalism program, and Jeffrey
Williams is in a Cultural Studies department.
The fourth sociology of education argued by Mehta and Davies is the sociology of higher
education. They note that the sociology of higher education emerges mirroring the status attainment and
social reproduction traditions and an efficacy-centered organizationally oriented sociology focused on the
policy improvement of the sociology of education as a whole. The work focuses on “how colleges
perpetuate and reproduce inequalities of social background” (2018, p. 28) and what policies can be
instituted to address these inequalities. As I will go into below, this work often understands higher
education through three transformative eras: massification, vocationalization, and marketization.
According to Mehta and Davies, the fifth and final sociology of education is a “new institutionalist” view
initially developed by John Meyer and Brian Rowan (1977). This perspective argues that “the formal
structures of many organizations in postindustrial society,” including schools, “reflect the myths of their
institutional environments instead of the demands of their work activities” (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p.
341).
Mehta and Davies argue that there has broadly been a “neglect of questions related to culture,
institutions, politics, knowledge, comparative education, and values, which are critical to understanding
education in all its manifestations in the twenty-first century” (2018, p. 2), and go on to list three
examples of neglect: “the sociology of organizations, sociological study of the politics of education, and
cultural sociology and education” (2018, p. 34). Relevant to this dissertation, they highlight two other
gaps; firstly, the Sociology of Education must also account for changes in the past seventy years of
research, for example, by answering the question why is it that despite seventy years of research and the
“acceptance of diversity” as the new normal “old inequalities persist in this new environment” (p. 40).
Secondly, “the educational sociology of inequality, race, and stratification, as practiced in sociology
departments, is depressing” (p. 41). This dissertation attempts to address some of these gaps by offering a

16
political and cultural analysis of contemporary higher education and looking to understand the
maintenance of structures of power through understanding carcerality before turning to the solutions
offered by university student activists.
As noted, the sociology of higher education has generally understood the development of U.S.
universities via three transformations: (1) massification: the expansion of universities “from mainly small
and selective institutions through the addition of mass institutions with multiple missions and universal
access for students with diverse abilities and motivations”; (2) vocationalization: the shift of universities
from “a primarily liberal arts curriculum to a more varied, vocationally based training model”; and (3)
marketization: the move from a “private guild-like, internally referenced logic of self-governance to a
system based on a rationalized, means-end logic increasingly dictated by governments adopting a
neoliberal ideology” (Pickard & Côté, 2022, p. 2). Many scholars also note the “deprofessionalization of
higher education” that has functioned alongside the marketization of higher education, which has led to
the adjunctification of the labor force, a growth of nonfaculty administration, and an “erosion of faculty
power” (Mehta & Davies, 2018, p. 29). Massification is sometimes broken down even further into three
stages: elite higher education–where approximately 0-15% of youth have access to higher education, mass
higher education–where approximately 16-50% of youth have access to higher education; and universal
higher education–where over 50% of youth have access to higher education (Fallis, 2022, p. 16). This
universalizing of higher education has led to what Pickard & Côté describe as students who want “to be
trained for a job by exerting a minimum amount of energy and attention” (2022, p. 3).
In his books What Are Universities For? (2012) and Speaking of Universities (2017), Stefan
Collini argues that throughout the 1800s and first half of the 20th century, universities were understood to
represent “an alternative ethic or antidote to the commercial world” (2017, p. 16) rather than that of job
training. Collini argues that this follows the Humboldtian ideal of “the pursuit and transmission of
knowledge and its elaboration into Wissenschaft: the professional autonomy of the scholar” (2017, p. 17).
The Humboldtian model of higher education relies on the central concepts of both Wissenschaft
(academic freedom) and Weltbürgertum (cosmopolitanship/world citizenship). Collini thus argues that the

17
goal of the university is to provide “partly protected spaces in which the extension and deepening of
human understanding has priority over any more immediate practical purpose, no matter how politically
or economically desirable such practical purposes may be” (2017, pp. 58-9). While many of my
interviewees disagree with Collini on the university’s goal, pushing instead for a commitment to social
change, it is essential to note that Collini’s argument is grounded in historical writings that do not reflect
the reality of the university today. As I go into in the next section, when it comes to higher education,
understanding the rhetorical idea of the university as “one of the vital repositories of the common learning
of communities” (Bhambra et al., 2020, p. 139) allows us to hold the reality of education against its
rhetorical ideals. This rhetoric remains central to higher education narratives because, as noted by Dizon
et al., higher education institutions “continue to face immense pressure to be humane organizations with
the public interest at [their] core” (2022, p. 2).
As noted earlier, the philosophy of education is understood as looking at “how education ought to
be organized and the ends that it ought to serve” (Brint, 2017, p. 1). It is generally broken down into
either: schools of thought, individual thinkers, types of educational inquiry, key concepts, or
conceptualizations of education (Enslin, 2010). For example, schools of thought may mean a Marxist
approach to education, a pragmatic approach to education, or a post-structuralist approach. Focusing on
individual thinkers might mean looking at Plato, Immanuel Kant, or John Dewey’s work on education.
Educational inquiries generally mean looking at first and second-order questions and discourses. Firstorder discourse “could comprise everyday talk concerning classroom practice, or policy discussion with
regard to educational situations and issues” (Enslin, 2010, p. 4). In contrast, the second-order discourse
would look at “complex, related concepts–to scrutinize assumptions and arguments concerning them, and
to develop sound arguments about the issues they raise” (Enslin, 2010, p. 4). Key concepts may start by
looking at what we mean when we say “education,” “indoctrination,” “reason,” or “teaching.” In contrast,
conceptualizations of education look at the connections drawn between philosophy and education, such as
via bildung (the German tradition of self-cultivation), hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of
interpretation), or phenomenology (the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience).

18
Ultimately these commitments to educational discourse are rooted in (mis)understandings of the purpose
of education, and the expectations education should be held to.
Much of the pressure to hold universities to a particular standard comes from those within the
university, faculty, staff, and student alike. The long history of student activism within higher education
provides a counternarrative to what students want from higher education. However, as Donatella della
Porta et al. note, social movement studies need to pay more attention to student movements (2020). With
the brief exception of Youth & Society in the 1970s, very little has been published on student activism
within critical sociology of education journals. Historically, academia has treated student activists much
like they treat social movements in general, as irrational (Le Bon, 1996 [1895]) and experiencing “protest
psychosis” (Bromberg & Simon, 1968, p. 155). Recent texts have looked at student activism as
“disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and
frames in today’s corporate academia” (Delgado & Ross, 2016, p. 143). The analysis in this dissertation
follows a long history of former student activists drawing connections between the university and the
maintenance of capitalism. For example, in their 1969 analysis of student movements in the U.S. and
Europe, Barbara and John Ehrenreich write that “Italian students tend to use the words “capitalism” and
“authoritarianism” interchangeably, just as Americans slip between “capitalism” and “imperialism.” To
attack the university, then, is to challenge the class structure of society–it is to attack capitalism itself, in
its ultimate form” (1969, p. 64).
The University
To address this neglect of student activism within the field, this dissertation focuses on student
activism within four universities in Los Angeles. While voluntary education and higher education exist
expansively outside of the university, this dissertation looks at the university specifically and responds to
both CUS and Abolitionist University Studies (AUS). While this project looks specifically at universities
in Los Angeles, I argue that the theorizing it does around “the idea of the university” can be applied, with
addendums, outside of Los Angeles. In The Reorder of Things, Roderick Ferguson defines the university
as “not just a structural institution but a psychic and hermeneutic one as well, a social formation that

19
constitutes subjectivity and interpretation, an entity that is both a material and psychic mode of power”
(2012, p. 200). This power is tied to the university’s implicit and explicit promises of class mobility and
stability, where, as critiqued by John Holmwood, “the traditional idea of the university” serves “an elite
status order” (2011, p. 14).
In 1956, C.W. Mills’ The Power Elite theorized “the elite” in opposition to Marx’s ideas of a
ruling class, arguing that the elite emerged as a consequence of the centralization of the twentieth century,
Mills claimed that while the U.S. in the 1800s was a society made up mostly of small enterprises, the
emergence of large corporations at the end of the century, alongside the expansion of the government and
the military made these small enterprises less relevant in the governing of U.S. society. Mills was
primarily critiqued for his lack of empirical evidence in the book (Bell, 1968; Dahl, 1968; Wrong, 1968),
however, his work continues to be relevant in the field, and has been expanded on most recently by Aeron
Davis (2012, 2014), Bill Domhoff (2013), Mark Mizruchi (2013, 2017), and Shamus Khan (2012, 2021).
Ralph Miliband responded to Mills’ critiques of Marxism, arguing that those who are a part of the power
elite must almost always first be a part of the upper class and thus are “subject to the same socialization
patterns as business elites” (Gill, 2018, p. 502). Both Mills and Miliband argue that this shared
socioeconomic background becomes particularly important when looking at their educational
experiences, with Mills noting that members of the power elite
attended the same or similar private and exclusive schools, preferably one of the Episcopal
boarding schools of New England. Their men have been to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or, if local
pride could not be overcome, to a locally esteemed college to which their families have
contributed. And now they frequent the clubs of these schools, as well as leading clubs in their
city, and as often as not, also a club or two in other metropolitan centers (1956, p. 58).
“Clubs” here refers to social or final clubs at Harvard because “roughly ten of the most patrician clubs
once formed the top rung of a social ladder that began with the Institute of 1770. From an assortment of
“waiting” clubs at the next level, the final clubs would select a dozen or so initiates in each year’s junior
class” (Bethell et al., 2009, p. 132). These clubs are of particular import to Mills, because as he notes “the
point is not Harvard, but which Harvard?” (1956, p. 146). Scholars have argued for the ongoing
importance of studying the elite (Barbera et al., 2016; Gill, 2018; Mizruchi, 2017), and in particular, in

20
recent years, the relationship between elitism and education has been expanded on (Bourdieu, 1996;
Gunter et al., 2017; Holmqvist, 2021; Kenway et al., 2017; Liu, 2020; Maxwell & Aggleton, 2016;
Palfreyman & Tapper, 2009).
As noted by Olúfẹ́
mi Táíwò, being a member of the elite today is often tied to “your level of
education, wealth, or social prestige” (2022, p. 22). Elitism thus functions within the university not only
in the university’s role in maintaining which individuals get understood as part of the elite and hold power
over a larger group but also in a small elite group of individual universities getting to decide how
universities as a whole are understood. Brian Rosenberg argues that this elitism is partly because higher
education serves as a “credence good.” A credence good or service is “difficult or impossible to evaluate
even after you have experienced them” generally because the individual “lacks the technical expertise or
information to judge the quality of the good or service” (Rosenberg 2022, n.p.). In the case of higher
education, this is because the vast majority of individuals will only ever “buy” one university experience,
thus lacking the information needed to compare it to others. Meaning universities themselves, often
relying on rankings of colleges and universities, determine whether a university is or is not good quality.
Determining a “good” or “bad” quality of the university requires us to understand the university’s
purpose. The university, as argued by Walter Mignolo, is a distinctly Western medieval invention. In On
Decoloniality, he notes that while “every great civilizational complex” have had some form of
institutionalized learning, the university as we understand it, emerged out of the Italian University of
Bologna in 1088 (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 198). Historically the university has been understood as a
sacred utopian place where “collective learning and the development of knowledge occur” (Said, 1999, p.
27). Ideally, universities hold academic freedom, meaning they center the intellectual processes of
research and learning (Russell, 1993). John Henry Cardinal Newman, when founding the institution that
is now University College, Dublin, defines a university as holding the following mission: “It contemplates
neither moral impression nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in
duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its work when it has
done as much as this. It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth and

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to grasp it” (Newman et al., 1996, p. 92). Said and Newman’s perspectives match–to a degree–the
Humboldtian model. As shown by Julie A. Reuben in her chapter “The Changing Contours of Moral
Education in American Colleges and Universities,” for as long as universities have existed in the U.S.,
they have held morality central to their missions. So, while universities may primarily exist for the elite to
explore ideas of truth and knowledge, they have also always played a role in producing the morality of the
elite and, thus, the political economy of the masses. In The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of
Schooling, W. Norton Grubb, and Marvin Lazerson show that by the twentieth century, the aspiration to
attend university had moved away from one invested in developing moral leadership towards “a way to
increase individual status and income” (2004, p. 15). This goal has expanded into the 21st century, where
the rhetoric of college as promising individual status and income remains, but this promise does not hold
(Newfield, 2022). Instead, universities reproduce “racialized economic inequalities” and legitimize “the
managerial and antidemocratic aspects of state and national politics” (Newfield, 2022, p. 94).
This ongoing investment in maintaining elite structures via the university’s massification,
vocationalization, and marketization has resulted in a growing field of Critical University Studies, which
has expanded on the ideas rooted in a Critical Sociology of Education to look at the university in
particular. Jeffrey Williams suggested the term “Critical University Studies” in 2012 to refer to the
emerging field of analysis around critiques of higher education. With a focus on “academic capitalism,”
Williams notes the field’s origins were in “its organic connections to graduate student unionization and
adjunct labor movements” (2012, n.p.). Williams argues for two possible lineages of CUS. The first is
rooted in a long tradition going back to at least the 19th century in the U.S., offering a broader critique of
universities and including the work of Upton Sinclair and the League for Industrial Democracy. Sinclair’s
book The Goose-Step: A Study of American Higher Education (1923) investigated the role of universities
in upholding capitalism; he researched 32 institutions in the U.S. and interviewed hundreds of educators
and students to understand the “pitiful proletarians in America” that take on the role of the “underpaid,
overworked, and contemptuously ignored rank-and-file college teacher” (p. 390). The League for
Industrial Democracy was a successor to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society–co-founded by Sinclair,

22
among others–which performed research campaigns under the guiding principle of education for “a New
Social Order Based on Production for Public Use and Not for Private Profit” (The New York Times,
1922, p. 23). After various name changes, the League for Industrial Democracy eventually changed to the
now more well-known Students for a Democratic Society.
The second lineage of CUS, which Williams favors given its “presentist orientation” (2012, n.p.),
is that which emerged in the late 1990s, responding to the privatization of higher education and including
texts such as Lawrence C. Soley’s Leasing the ivory tower, Bill Readings’ The university in ruins, Sheila
Slaughter’s Academic capitalism and the new economy, and Larry L. Leslie’s The economic value of
higher education. The field Williams thus identifies as Critical University Studies is focused on critiquing
the neoliberal university that developed in the West, particularly in the U.S. after the Second World War.
Wendy Brown defines neoliberalism as “a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence
in economic terms” (2015, p. 17), transforming people into “economized beings” (Berg et al., 2016, p. 4).
According to Berg et al., in the university this has resulted in (1) reinforced competition between
academics, departments, institutions, and disciplines; (2) the transformation of the academic subject into
human capital; (3) prioritization of market valuation of scholarship; (4) prioritization of short-termism;
(5) an audit culture; (6) expansive “fast policy-transfers”; and (7) the production of new understandings of
scales of knowledge production (2016, p.5). Williams highlighted that the field centered on the
corporatization of the university and argued that this focus would have to extend to the role of
globalization in universities, which he notes is “promoted as altruistic but is often actually a profitseeking endeavor through which American or European universities sell their brands and services” (2012,
n.p.)
Under neoliberalism, young people “chase credentials” (Furlong & Cartmel, 1997, p. 19) to gain
financial security via future education or work. This means, as Robert Sternberg argued, that education
under neoliberalism “is seen more as an access route... not so much toward the enhancement of... learning
and thinking as towards obtaining through education the best possible credentials for individual
socioeconomic advancement. Education is seen not so much as a means of helping society but as helping

23
one obtain the best that society has to offer socially, economically, and culturally” (1999, p. 62).
Sternberg thus reveals what Tressie McMillan Cottom highlights in her book Lower Ed: that in its
construction of individualized economized beings, neoliberalism and the end of the Welfare State has
shifted the burden of educating and training workers from the employer/state to the employee–the student.
This can be seen most clearly in the relationship between the student and debt that has developed since
the decline in state support for public higher education that began in the late 1980s (Tandberg, 2010).
Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle
Class (2008) is understood as central to Williams’ definition of the field. In it, Newfield connects the
decline of funding for public universities with the fall of the U.S. middle class starting in the late 1970s.
Newfield argues that this decline is tied to increased jobs and racial diversity within the middle class after
World War II. Key to Newfield’s argument is the belief that university work should be “labor-intensive,
craft-based creation, and teaching is noncapitalist” (2008, p. 273). As I will return to, the idea of the
university as a noncapitalist rather than an anti-capitalist space serves as a point of distinction between
Critical University Studies and Abolitionist University Studies. In 2016, Robert Samuels published a brief
history of Critical University Studies; where he asserts that there is an ongoing battle of equality versus
hierarchy within the university. This battle, he argues, has been made invisible through the presumption
of the university as a liberal institution. Samuels states that the goal of a CUS approach is to “look at how
society and history affect institutions of higher education, and how these same institutions affect society”
(2016, p. 2).
The focus on universities in the sociology of education remains on what can be understood as
“elite institutions.” Elite institutions generally maintain an individual in the socioeconomic class they
were born into (Bloch et al., 2018; Zimmerman, 2016). In her book Lower Ed Tressie McMillan Cottom
argues that the rapid expansion of for-profit degrees in the 21st century is tied to increasing classed and
racialized inequality in the U.S., an inequality she reveals is built on exploiting the pain, desperation, and
aspirations of the poor and working class. McMillan Cottom defines “Lower Ed” as “the credential
expansion created by structural changes in how we work, unequal group access to favorable higher

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education schemes, and the risk shift of job training” (2017, p. 11). She then argues that Lower Ed can
only exist because Higher Ed does. She writes, “The latter legitimizes the education gospel while the
former absorbs all manner of vulnerable groups who believe in it” (2017, p. 11). Significantly for the
field, McMillan Cottom also clarifies that debt is a relative experience “to how far below nothing you
were when you took the debt on and how close to breaking even you are when it is time to repay it”
(2017, p. 93). So, while debt must be understood as a collective experience, the decision to take it on and
the ability to repay it is structured by class and race. Thus, debt serves a disciplinary role in maintaining
classed and racialized structures of domination.
The Disciplinary Institution
Henry Giroux first theorized a politics of disposability in his book Stormy Weather, where he
argued that the response to Hurricane Katrina revealed a politics “in which entire populations are now
considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves”
(2006, p. 10). Ruth Wilson Gilmore has also theorized on the idea of disposable populations in her book
Golden Gulag, where she argues that the overaccumulation of surplus financial capital, surplus land,
surplus state capacity, and “relative surplus population” (2007, p. 70) resulted in the growth of prison
building throughout the state of California. Though as pointed out by Jackie Wang (2018), the Black
Panther Party–namely Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and George Jackson–had already predicted the
prison as a solution to a surplus population in their discussion of technology’s lumpenproletarianization
of the working class (Wang, 2018, pp. 56-64). In his 2014 book Neoliberalism’s War on Higher
Education, Giroux posits that this politics of disposability as a new social order has led to:
The increasing incarceration of young people, the modeling of public schools after prisons, state
violence waged against peaceful student protesters, and state policies that bail out investment
bankers but leave the middle and working classes in a state of poverty, despair, and insecurity. (p.
3)
The key to this social order, Giroux argues, is the move away from viewing higher education as a
public good towards it being understood as a consumer privilege. Consumers (students) are rendered
disposable even within the neoliberal model through the social/civil death produced by student debt.

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Similar to McMillan Cottom, Curtis Marez has argued that debt obligates citizens to capital, leading
student debt to control a graduate’s labor. Though of important note here is that debt impacts both college
graduates and college dropouts–approximately 32.9% of undergraduates–who then make an average of
32.6% less income than bachelor’s degree holders and are 19.6% more likely to be unemployed than any
degree holder (Hanson, 2022). In making this argument, Marez is expanding Jeffrey J. Williams’
argument that debt is “a mode of pedagogy,” which teaches us that “higher education is a consumer
service” (2006, n.p.). Despite this focus on education as a consumer service, Giroux’s text has been
critiqued by Pietkiewicz for its failure to look into “what students really want from higher education” and
whether neoliberal universities are, in fact, representative of those wants (2016, p. 302). This critique
ignores that Giroux’s work argues what education should do alongside what it is doing.
Marez argues that racial capitalism is being reproduced by student debt, matching what
McMillan Cottom, the Debt Collective, and Mustaffa & Davis have found, Black borrowers are “among
those most negatively affected by student loans” (Mustaffa & Davis, 2021, p. 3). “Racial capitalism” is
generally rooted in the theorization of Cedric Robinson’s 1983 text Black Marxism: The Making of the
Black Radical Tradition. While, as noted by Ralph and Singhal, the literature on racial capitalism “rarely
clarifies what scholars mean by ‘race’ or ‘capitalism’” (2019, p. 851), it is generally taken to understand
how racialization merged with capitalism throughout the evolution and production of a capitalist system
(Bhattacharyya, 2018; Gilmore, 2017; Hudson, 2017; Kelley, 2017; Melamed, 2015; Robinson, 2000
[1983]). Marez argues that student debt confines people to the existing conditions of racial capitalism “by
colonizing the future, tying present activities to plans for servicing its imperatives and limiting time for
reflection, experimentation, protest, or any other unprofitable endeavors” (2014, p. 265). Upheld by the
threat of violence (Graeber, 2011), debt is thus increasingly coming to “shape and limit how we imagine
the future” (Marez, 2014, p. 265). Debt thus confines students to a utilitarian framework of higher
education via “the notion that the only conceivable purpose of going to university is to get the right sort of
corporate job” (Bailey & Freedman, 2011, p. 20).

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Disposability politics reveal that while capitalism–and racial capitalism in particular– show us
why institutions function as they do, alone, they cannot explain how institutions in our society function as
they do. To understand that carcerality, via Michel Foucault’s theorizing of the disciplinary institution,
offers guidance. Colleen Hackett and Ben Turk adapt Foucault to define carceral as “an institution, a
system, or a body of knowledge that renders people as objects and exercises control over and through
them” (2018, p. 24). As discussed, requiring a structure of objectification and control, carcerality, as it
functions today, is co-constituted by white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other
systems that reproduce domination. Foucault’s work looked at the role of discipline as a system within the
historical construction of punishment that produces people as both objects and subjects (1995 [1975]).
Foucault argues that penal systems have a long past within human society but that the more recent
histories reflect a fiscal penal system during the Medieval period and a carceral penal system coming to
prominence under modernity. He specifies that carcerality “has an ‘anti-seditious’ social function” to
maintain current structures of power (2019, p. 139). The disciplinary power of the carceral system relies
not on “imposing its mark on its subjects” but instead holds “them in a mechanism of objectification”
(1995, p. 187). This discipline, Foucault argues, has expanded outside the courts, creating a carceral
network, using “systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, [and] observation” to form a “normalizing
power” (1995, p. 304). This normative power relies on a structure of “coercive individualization, by the
termination of any relation that is not supervised by authority or arranged according to hierarchy” (1995,
p. 247), including, I have argued, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and cisheteropatriachy. Thus, the
expansion of “carceral continuity” gives legitimacy to the disciplinary power used by an institution (1995,
p. 310).
Foucault clarifies that “the carceral” structures the relationship between the prison and the
development of capitalism, arguing in a 1973 lecture that “capitalism utilized coercion in setting up its
specific forms of political power” (2015, p.111). As Angela Davis shows in her chapter “Racialized
Punishment and Prison Abolition,” Foucault fails to address the relationship between the carceral, gender,
and race (2003a, p. 360). She argues that a carceral genealogy addressing race would include “at least

27
four great systems of incarceration: the reservation system, slavery, the mission system, and the
internment camps of World War II” (2003a, p. 361). Here we can also see the difference between
incarceration and the carceral; white supremacy reveals a carceral system that relies on rendering people
of color objects and uses ideological confinement to maintain material benefits, whereas incarceration is a
practice of this carceral structure. In the U.S., carcerality as a system depends on its historical and
ongoing relationship to slavery and anti-Blackness. Dennis Childs has argued that we must understand
“today’s legally perpetrated and socially accepted terror system of penal neoslavery as a continuance
rather than a break from America’s centuries-long history of chattelized imprisonment and white
supremacist genocide” (2015, p. 172). The 13th amendment, which made slavery illegal “except as a
punishment for crime,” is often at the center of the argument drawing a line from the enslavement of
African people to mass incarceration. Childs, however, also highlights the middle passage, plantations,
and chain gangs, as carceral models defining Black unfreedom, which, he argues, function as paradigms
“of racial capitalist internment and violence...central to the Euro-American imperialist project” (2015, p.
28). Childs argues that Blackness is so central to incarceration systems that the construct of crime works
to expand Blackness, placing “the ‘whiteness’ of the English commoner in relative jeopardy through the
stigmata of criminality” (2015, p. 73).
The centrality of anti-Blackness within the U.S. prison means, as Angela Davis argues in Are
Prisons Obsolete?, that the prison is an inherently racist institution (Gilmore, 2007; Wacquant, 2009a;
Wacquant, 2009b). Subsequently, she argues, we cannot end racism without abolishing prisons. The
abolition of prisons is not an easy task, Davis argues, because “the prison is considered an inevitable and
permanent feature of our social lives” (2003b, p. 9). This normalization renders the prison both a constant
presence and absence in our lives and “[t]o think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin
to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings”
(2003b, p. 15). The ideological work of the prison, Davis states, is that which the normalization of
carcerality relies on, and can be seen in how the prison is constructed into “an abstract site into which
undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting

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those communities...especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism” (2003b, p.
16). This follows Foucault’s argument that the “prison-form is much more than the architectural form; it
is a social form” (2015, p. 227), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore argument that it is “a set of relationships that
undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere” (2007, p. 242). Central to this social form,
and the carceral continuity, is the notion that some people are disposable.
In the Abolition Journal, Michael Sutcliffe argues that incarceration cannot be “simply a product
of legislation” but depends on a carceral culture. He writes, “[c]hurches, families, schools, media, and
more make us complicit in the propagation of criminality” that asserts incarceration “as a simple, natural
reaction to threats and deviance” (2018, p. 184). Shannon Winnubst, in her chapter in Active Intolerance,
refers to this as “a general carceral logic” which includes “[t]he educational, medical, and penal
systems...[as] part of a general economy that constitutes a society of confinement” (2016, p. 191). While
educational scholars have centered capitalism over carcerality, carceral scholars have understood
education as part of a carceral culture. These carceral relationships produce a haunting “by the presence
of suspended death,” Stanley, Spade, and Queer (In)Justice argue (2012, p. 122). Thus, suspended death
and the threat of violence are at the center of carceral ideology. This presence, they claim, can be seen in
the structural overcrowding, deficient health care, food and nutrition shortages, and “widespread physical
and sexual assault” of the prison-industrial complex (2012, p. 122). To paraphrase Ruth Wilson Gilmore,
the carceral functions through its co-constitution with systems of domination as “the state-sanctioned
and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death”
(2007, p. 247).
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault argues that “discipline produces
subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (p. 138); thus, a disciplinary institution, including “the
school building” (p. 172), “compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it
normalizes” (p. 183). Education plays a crucial role in normalizing, and in particular, normalizing notions
of success under the carceral nexus of white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and cisheteropatriachy (see
also Annamma, 2016; Shedd, 2015). Meyerhoff also makes the connections between prisons and

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universities in Beyond Education, arguing that they are both “institutions for producing obedient,
governable subjects— shaped in a mode of accounting with incarceration for ‘debts to society’ and
education for ‘credits’” (2019a, p. 205). Universities reflect one part of a system that renders people as
disposable objects; debt mechanisms leave students as replaceable under carceral capitalism as it leaves
prisoners (Giroux, 2014). Supporting this, Savannah Shange shows that education and prisons “both
function as enclosures of Black social, political, and cultural life” (2019, p.55). She argues that Black
children are first engaged by carceral structures not when arrested “but upon enrollment into an
educational system designed to depoliticize Black rage and criminalize Black joy” (2019, p. 55).
We can look at how universities hold structural relationships with systems of incarceration. For
example, Janet Napolitano became the twentieth president of the University of California system after
four years of serving as the U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, and Alan Bersin served as
superintendent of San Diego public schools from 1998 to 2005 after three years of running U.S. Mexican
border law enforcement (Yang, 2017). We can also examine how university administrations have used
police and incarceration against student activists. For example, the murders of students at Kent and
Jackson State in 1970 (Ferguson, 2017; Kendi, 2012); the pepper-spraying of UC Davis students in 2011
(Rodríguez, 2012a); and the firing of rubber bullets at students attending the University of the
Witwatersrand in March of 2021 resulting in the death of a bystander (Nkanjeni, 2021). Ibram Kendi,
when documenting the largest mass arrest in higher education history—of 896 Mississippi Valley State
student activists—writes that, while the College President did not file criminal charges, “he did expel the
students—close to a third of the student body—and required them to sign a statement pledging to not take
part in protests in order to reenroll” (2012, p. 143). In these examples, we can see how the university
“positions itself as the unique, meaningful, and necessary answer to the pressing question of the day: the
prison” while at the same time violently policing student and community dissent (Maldonado & Meiners,
2021, p. 71).
The carcerality of schooling has been explored in more depth since the early 2000s, with an
influx of research on “the school-to-prison pipeline.” Scholars have also critiqued this rhetoric, arguing

30
that it presents a dichotomy between education and incarceration, masking “how schools, universities, and
spaces of confinement are linked and mutually reinforcing” (Oparah, 2014, p. 109). Scholars have instead
proposed a “school-prison-nexus” (Annamma, 2018; Gardner et al., 2023; Goldman & Rodriguez, 2022;
Krueger, 2010; Stovall, 2018), a “college-prison-nexus” (Johnson & Dizon, 2021), “school disciplinary
superstructure” (Shedd, 2015), or “educational carcerality” (Cabral, 2023a; Cabral, 2023b). The schoolprison-nexus is “the complex web of policies, practices, and ideologies that symbiotically link schooling
and prison regimes” (Goldman & Rodriguez, 2022, p. 272), thus presenting the two as holding an
institutional relationship within the carceral state rather than in opposition to one another. As argued by
Johnson and Dizon, the college-prison nexus refers to the similarly structured “symbiotic relationship
between postsecondary education institutions and the penal system” (2021, p. 4). Specifically, they write
that it shows “the ways in which campus structures, policies, and practices coalesce in the surveillance,
control, punishment, and criminalization of minoritized and socially and economically disenfranchised
populations” (p. 4). Johnson and Dizon go on to argue that the college-prison nexus has three defining
characteristics: (1) “The adoption of policies and practices that penalize, relegate, and enclose minoritized
populations, especially those who lie at the intersection of multiply marginalized identities, thus,
enhancing carceral state power”; (2) “Strategic financial investments, for example, prison labor
companies and partnerships with carceral agencies, for example, law enforcement, and immigration and
customs enforcement agencies, that surveil, punish, and foster pathways to punishment and incarceration
for black, indigenous, Latinx, and other marginalized populations”; and (3) “The usage of discourses
about safety, risk, and liability to rationalize and justify carceral practices” (2021, p. 7). The nexus
framework, they show, reveals both the ideological and structural carceral commitments universities
partake in. A framework that Meyerhoff claims reveals how education is tied to modes of world-making.
Modes of Study
In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff argues that formal education, such as K-12 and university
schooling, is “just one possible mode of study among many alternatives” (2019a, p. 4). Modes of study,
he argues, are “bound up with different modes of world-making” and education is a mode of study that

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“supplements modes of world-making that are associated with modernist, colonial, capitalist, statist,
white-supremacist, hetero-patriarchal norms” (2019a, p. 4). Arguably then, given our definition of
carcerality, education serves as a carceral mode of study that upholds a carceral mode of world-making.
Carceral world-making maintains systems of objectification and control through the co-constitution of
white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems that reproduce domination.
Meyerhoff describes modes of study as “similar to the Marxist concept of modes of production” (2019a,
p. 20), i.e., made up of “means” of production/study and “relations” of production/study. Though,
Meyerhoff notes, while Marxists “envision “natural progress” through changing modes of production,”
there is no similar theory of progression within modes of study. The means of study, he argues, consist of
“the various actors involved in any activity of studying” (2019a, p. 13). These include the individuals
studying and “the tools, objects, and techniques with which they study” (2019a, p. 13). Meyerhoff offers
meso, micro, and macro scales for the relations of production. The meso, he notes, includes “the relations
between people involved in studying practices…and the relations with their tools for studying” (2019a, p.
14). The micro includes “affective, imaginative, and evaluative practices and processes” (2019a, p. 14),
and the macro “might include transportation of students between their homes and schools, funding and
accreditation of schools by local, state, and federal governments, and rankings of schools and
universities” (2019a, p. 14).
Meyerhoff argues that education-based modes of study have seven main features:
• A vertical imaginary — students rise up the levels of schooling.
• A romantic narrative — students face obstacles and heroically overcome them along their journey
up education levels.
• Relations of separation between students as producers and the means of studying.
• Techniques of governance — students learn to submit to and obey the teacher’s authority as an
expert.
• A zero-point epistemology — the teacher’s expert knowledge is seen as universally valid from a
“zero-point” position floating above the world.
• An effective pedagogical economy of credit and debt, honor and shame, often taking the form of
grades on exams.
• Binary figures of educational value and waste — (e.g., the success vs. the failure, the graduate vs.
the dropout). (2019b, p. 319)

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Meyerhoff also notes that the institutionalization of schooling across Europe through “the colonial
dispossession of land, plundering of colonized people’s labor and resources, and patriarchal repression of
rebellious women” played a role in “the creation of the preconditions for capitalism” (2019a, p. 29). Thus
U.S. universities as a mode of study are built upon: colonial dispossession of land (Bhambra et al., 2018;
Grande, 2018; Lee & Ahtone, 2020; Patel, 2021; Yang, 2017), the gentrification of poor and low-income
communities (Baldwin, 2021), histories of enslaved labor (Stein, 2016; Wilder, 2013; Williams et al.,
2021), the exploited labor of service workers, staff, students, and adjunct faculty (Ahmed, 2012; Brim,
2020; Dyke et al., 2018; Kelley, 1996), the dismantling of public funding for higher education (Newfield
2008) indebted undergraduate and graduate students (Marez, 2014; Mir & Toor, 2021), ableism
(Dolmage, 2017; McCann, 2022), a power imbalance between students and teachers/professors (Blum &
Kohn, 2020; Dyke et al., 2018; Love, 2019; Shor, 1996), normalization of sexual abuse and assault
(Ahmed, 2021; Doyle, 2015), exploitation of migrant and immigrant students (Boggs, 2020), academic
repression (Boggs, 2020; Chatterjee & Maira, 2014), and the devaluation of Black individuals as
labor/property and the institutionalization of Black suffering (Dancy et al., 2018, Ferguson, 2012; Kendi,
2012; Williams et al., 2021).
Meyerhoff later argues that alternative modes of studying have always attempted to exist “within,
against, and beyond the dominant university” (2019b, p. 317). While Meyerhoff briefly touches on
indigenous modes of study and blues epistemology as examples of non-education-based modes of study,
as noted by Kathy Ferguson, he fails to give detailed examples of alternative modes of study and worldmaking. Similar alternatives within, against, and beyond the university have been theorized around ideas
of “political education,” “social movement learning,” “free universities,” and “the undercommons.”
Rachel Herzing defines political education as “the practice of studying the history and analysis of
struggles for social, political, geographic, and economic power with the explicit purpose of strengthening
political organizations and movements for social change” (2020, n.p.). In 1976, Daniel Joseph Willis
defined political education as a strategy that “allows people the time and foresight to view themselves in a
more significant role” within activist spaces (p. 6). Willis goes on to note that “there is a stress on people

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actively listening, carrying on a dialogue, and learning from each other and then translating suggestions
into meaningful action” (1976, p. 6). Willis connects political education with Paulo Freire’s work on
conscientização (critical consciousness). Willis speaks to how Freire understood political education
through consciousness-raising “as a social intervention strategy, as a way of enabling poor and
disenfranchised people to work constructively toward the social change” (Willis, 1976, p. 34). Thus,
political education within activist spaces can be understood as a mode of study that raises one’s
consciousness through listening and dialogue, intending to put what one has learned into action. Other
examples of political education include study groups in the Marxist-Leninist tradition (Fanon, 2004;
Pulido, 2006; Kelley, 2016), the origins of Cultural Studies in adult education (Carrington, 2001;
Dworkin, 1997; Thompson, 1964), and, as discussed in the social movement learning literature: protests
themselves.
Social movement learning as a theory emerged from Canadian adult education spaces. It refers to
either the “learning by persons who are part of any social movement” or “learning by persons outside of a
social movement as a result of the actions taken or simply by the existence of social movements” (Hall,
2006, p. 3). Hall offers “leaflets, handbills, and speeches” as the dominant tools of social movement
learning (2006, p. 9) and argues that social movement learning may have “a more powerful impact on
society than does all of the learning which takes place in schools” (2006, p. 8). Jessica Taft offers an
essential addition to the kinds of learning that can happen in social movements, noting in her 2010 book
Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas that traditional forms of social
movement learning via leaflets, handbills, and speeches “tend to rely on a few well-known speakers
addressing the rest of the crowd” (p. 117). Youth protests on the other hand often prioritize creating a
space “where the participants talk to each other in a learning-community” (Taft, 2010, p. 117). She notes
that the political education practices used by girl activists, in particular, “consistently emphasize learning
new feelings, emotions, and desires in addition to facts, analysis, and knowledge” (2010, p. 101). Thus,
political education and social movement learning offer an approach to modes of study that, while they

34
sometimes replicate some elements of education-based modes of study, drastically differ in their means
and relations of study.
One alternative mode of study to “higher education” has been theorized through “Free
Universities,” Free Universities were established throughout the mid-1960s, often offering “noncredit
courses free of charge to the general public” (Fleischer-Black, 2013, p. 285). Tied to the growth of
activism among college students at the time (Meyerhoff & Thompsett, 2017), they attempted to offer
courses on current events and countercultures while “undermin[ing] the regimentation of traditional
universities” (Fleischer-Black, 2013, p. 285). Most did this through the beliefs that “anyone could teach,
anyone could learn, and classes should be held on any topic of interest to students” and being “run by a
cooperative of volunteers” (Fleischer-Black, 2013, p. 285). While many emerged from within existing
universities, they often were “headquartered” and held classes off campus to engage non-university
students. Many were inspired by the Freedom Schools of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee and Paul Goodman’s The Community of Scholars—discussed more in Chapter 6—which
offers a history of intellectuals leaving higher education.
Meyerhoff and Thompsett provide a contemporary definition of “free universities” in their article
“Decolonizing Study: Free Universities in More-Than-Humanist Accompliceships with Indigenous
Movements.” They argue that free universities are “projects of collective study” that:
• are open to anyone and free to attend;
• avoid state affiliation;
• do not offer accreditation;
• gather in physical spaces (i.e., offline); and
• include a goal of liberation, however, defined. (Meyerhoff & Thompsett 2017, p. 235)
They highlight that free universities are critiquing traditional education and offering methods of reimagining study to prefigure a better university and world.
One of the first free universities to emerge was the “Free University of New York,” founded by
professors who had been fired for protesting U.S. militarism in Cuba and Vietnam; they “offered classes
on Marxist geography, the theory, and practice of radical social movements, black ghetto radicalism, and
Vietnamese liberation literature” (Fleischer-Black, 2013, p. 286). Shortly after, the Free University of

35
Berkeley developed on the West Coast, and by the end of 1967, there were fifty Free Universities across
the U.S. (Fleischer-Black, 2013, p. 286). Notably, while most free universities focused on working with
surrounding communities, a few, such as the Free University for Chinatown Kids, Unincorporated,
organized by the Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action combined with other collectives in the Third
World Liberation Front to form the Experimental College at San Francisco State College changed their
mission toward reforming the university itself (Umemoto, 1989). By 1969, there were over 250 Free
Universities in the U.S., with approximately 75,000 students enrolled in their courses (Fleischer-Black,
2013, p. 286). Through a combination of co-option, strategic waiting, and discrediting, many had folded
by the early 1970s.
These free universities were not only found in the U.S. There was the Sydney Free University in
Australia from 1967 to 1972 (Thompsett, 2017), the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in
Cuernavaca, Mexico from 1966-1976 (Bartlett & Schugurensky, 2020), Berlin’s Critical University in
1967 (Ehrenreich & Ehrenreich, 1969), and the University of Essex’s Free University in 1968 (Triesman,
1968). The concept of the Free University can fit within Harney and Moten’s concept of the
“undercommons,” which expands on Mario Tronti’s argument to “work within and against the
institution” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 147), adding that we must also work “beyond the university”
(Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 37). The undercommons have since been theorized as the “networks of
rebellious solidarity that interlace within, against, and beyond dominant institutions and power structures”
(Undercommoning Collective 2016, n.p.). Recent examples of the Undercommons include the
Antiuniversity Now, Asylum University at Radboud University, the Brisbane Free University (BFU), the
Communiversity NYC, the Experimental Community Education (EXCO) at the University of Minnesota,
the Free Black University in the U.K., the Free Skool Santa Cruz, the Freedom University in Georgia,
Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu in Hawai’i, the Really Open University in Leeds, the UCLA undercommons,
and the Universidad de la Tierra (Oaxaca). These are sites of study invested in new means of worldmaking.

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The Abolitionist University
David Stovall (2018) looks at the applicability of prison abolition to schools as an exploration of
current world-making, naming that he saw a difference between “schools” and “education,” a difference
more in line with that named between “education” (as schools) and “learning” in previous paragraphs.
School abolition, he argues, “seeks to eliminate the order, compliance, and dehumanization that happens
in said buildings while allowing for the capacity to imagine and enact a radical imaginary” (p. 51).
Making a similar argument to Foucault before him, this is because he finds the school often “operates as a
jail” (Stovall, 2018, p. 55). Bettina Love takes up a similar analysis in her 2019 book We Want to Do
More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, where she argues for
“abolitionist teaching” in K-12 education, where abolitionist teachers work to form:
New ideas, new forms of social interactions, new ways to be inclusive, new ways to discuss
inequality and distribute wealth and resources, new ways to resist, new ways to agitate, new ways
to maintain order and safety that abolishes prisons, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
and mass incarceration, new ways to reach children trying to recover from the educational
survival complex, new ways to show dark children they are loved in this world and new ways to
establish an educational system that works for everyone, especially those who are put at the edges
of the classroom and society. (p. 89)
Love goes on to provide the example of abolitionist teaching outside of school, highlighting the work of
Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi. She notes that as part of the Provisional Government of the
Republic of New Afrika (PGRNA), he has been “pursuing freedom by building new democratic
institutions that place power in the hands of the people” (2019, p. 114). Love roots this work in the
concept of abolition democracy, first introduced by W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction. Abolition
democracy refers to the “short-lived period of time in the years following the Civil War in which
abolishing chattel slavery included both the ‘negative’ emancipation of Black people from bondage and
the ‘positive’ building of institutions, practices, and resources necessary for Black freedom” (Dilts, 2020,
p. 232). Angela Davis expanded the concept into an “approach” (2005, p. 92), one that understands the
prison-industrial-complex as “a result of the failure to enact abolition democracy” (2005, p. 91), and thus,
she argues, abolition democracy must be understood as still “to come” (2005, p. 14). It will require the
creation and availability of “new institutions and resources” to eliminate prisons (2005, p. 93), and works

37
as “an ongoing, dialectical, and fugitive project of mutual liberation,” theorizing “what might become
possible” (Dilts, 2020, p. 237).
Around the same time as Love and Stovall’s work, a similar call for “Abolitionist University
Studies” arose among those doing Critical University Studies. The phrase’ Abolitionist University
Studies’ (AUS) was first published in Meyerhoff’s Beyond Education, where he called for “going beyond
critical university studies” toward “not only an abolitionist university studies but also an abolition
university, one that aligns itself with modes of study in abolitionist movements within, against, and
beyond the university as we know it” (2019a, p. 31). The phrase itself was mutually coined by Meyerhoff,
Abigail Boggs, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein (Meyerhoff, personal communication,
September 21st, 2021). Meyerhoff, Boggs, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein then expanded on his call
for AUS in their publicly published piece “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation” and the
associated conference “Whose Crisis? Whose University? Abolitionist Study in and Beyond Global
Higher Education” in October 2019.
In the invitation, they note how the nostalgic narrative of the mass university “neglects the ways
this expansion was underwritten by militarized funding priorities, nationalist agendas, and an
incorporative project of counterinsurgency” (Boggs et al. 2019, n.p.). While CUS relies on narratives of a
singular point leading to the corporatization of the university and thus the loss of the university’s
academic freedom and radical potential, AUS understands the U.S. university as originating through
corporatization and its relationship to violent structures of capital production (Riccio, 2019). This
difference means that while the field of CUS places its origin point of studying the university after the
Second World War, AUS analysis of U.S. universities originates with the colonization of the Americas
and the enslavement of African people by Western powers.
CUS is defined through the university’s relationship to neoliberalism, while AUS examines the
academy’s relationship to capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and carcerality. AUS makes an
argument of “accumulation-by-education,” meaning that “there is no history of the university that is not
also a history of capital accumulation and capital expropriation” (Boggs & Mitchell, 2018, p. 452).

38
Accumulation-by-education shows us the difference between the utopian university as noncapitalist under
CUS (Newfield, 2008) and anti-capitalist under AUS. Or, as Ashok Kumar asks in his chapter in The
Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance, if, as CUS argues, universities function “as
preparation for a life of wage-labor and therefore as a system that reproduces existing inequalities” (2011,
p. 132), why are we defending them? Abolitionist University Studies believes the university to be
indefensible.
Some of the earlier work on capital accumulation in higher education through structures of
violence includes Gauri Viswanathan’s chapter “The Naming of Yale College” (1993). In it, Viswanathan
looks at the naming of Yale after Elihu Yale, a beneficiary who gained his wealth through initially
working for the East India Trading Company and then became the first president of Fort St. George,
where he oversaw the city’s slave trade. Yale’s ability to partake in private trade in India, his unusually
high taxation of the indigenous population, and his exploitation through his private justice system led to
his accumulation of enough wealth to become a substantial benefactor to Yale University. Robert Lee and
Tristan Ahtone have also pointed to accumulation in their 2020 article for High County News. They
explore the ongoing legacy of the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, which redistributed almost 11
million acres of stolen land to 52 institutions. Lee and Ahtone note that “the grants, when adjusted for
inflation, were worth about half a billion dollars” (2020, p. 34). The project located more than 99% of all
Morrill Act acres, identified their original Indigenous inhabitants and caretakers, and researched the
principal raised from their sale in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The authors argued that “there
would be no higher education as we know it in the United States without the original and ongoing
colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands” (Sharon Stein, 2020, quoted on p. 39 of Lee & Ahtone).
Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nisancıolu show that the centrality of colonialism to higher education is not
exclusive to the U.S. In both British colonies and the metropole, “universities were founded and financed
through the spoils of colonial plunder, enslavement, and dispossession” and played a foundational role in
the “infrastructure of empire” (2018, p. 5).

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In their follow-up article “Decolonising the university in 2020,” Bhambra, Nişancıoğlu, and
Gebrial offer a critique of the university as an inherently colonial institution, arguing that “there have
been institutions of higher learning across much of the world prior to the advent of European institutions
and despite European colonization” (2020, p. 510). Notably, Bhambra has specified her disagreement
with abolitionist framing (Ahmed, Bhambra, and Lambert, 2023), as she believes there is a need for
institutions of higher learning, and we should not reduce these possible institutions to their colonial and
carceral contemporaries. An ongoing relationship between the academy and imperialism can be
understood through what Chatterjee and Maira call an imperial “knowledge-complex” that is fed by
militarism, incarceration, and war using the “the colonizing tactics of indoctrinating Western ‘civility’”
(2014, p. 189). They term this the “academic-MPIC (military-prison-industrial complex)” (2014, p. 19)
and argue that it reflects the university’s ongoing role in racial statecraft and warcraft. They show that
privileging academic freedom as central to knowledge production is contrary to the reality of academic
containment, an ongoing carceral logic of the university. Academic containment, they argue, takes on
many modalities, including “stigmatizing an academic as too “political,” devaluing and marginalizing
scholarship, unleashing an FBI investigation, blacklisting, or not granting scholars the final passport into
elite citizenship in the academic nation—that is, tenure” (2014, p. 22).
A foundational text leading to the development of AUS is Craig Wilder’s Ebony & Ivy: Race,
Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, wherein Wilder traces some of the many
connections between U.S. universities, colonialism, and slavery, arguing that the academy stands “beside
church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage” (2013, p. 11). Wilder shows that
higher education in the U.S. and other colonies in the Americas was founded, financed, and developed
through “the economic and social forces” of the Slave Trade (2013, p. 1), and “the academy was a
beneficiary and defender of these processes” (2013, p. 2). T. Elon Dancy II, Kirsten T. Edwards, and
James Earl Davis have expanded on the relationship between the two in their 2018 article “Historically
White Universities and Plantation Politics: Anti-Blackness and Higher Education in the Black Lives
Matter Era,” where they turn to afro-pessimism as a framework to understand how U.S. colleges and

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universities continue to view Black people as property. Afropessismism is a lens that understands
Blackness “as an effect of structural violence, as opposed to thinking of blackness as a performance and
embodiment of cultural and/or anthropological attributes” (Douglass, Terrefe, & Wilderson, 2018, n.p.).
Alternatively, most recently, Bianca C. Williams, Dian D. Squire, and Frank A. Tuitt’s edited 2021
volume Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in
Higher Education, looks at how the politics and logics of the slave plantation remain embedded in U.S.
higher education. Tied to this argument for recognizing the ongoing relationship between chattel slavery
in the Americas and universities, in an interview for Laborwave Radio, Meyerhoff and SchwartzWeinstein highlight that a critical moment in understanding AUS is the failures of
reconstruction/abolition democracy after the Civil War. After this moment, they argue that universities
and prisons began functioning as a new means of accumulation to address the loss of capital following the
“end” of slavery (Riccio, 2019).
Through this transformational moment, Meyerhoff argues, we see the development of an
“education-carcerality nexus” (2019, p. 205), wherein we can connect the violence of the prison to not
only schools and colleges but education more broadly. AUS scholars repeatedly return to an argument
made by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their 2004 article “The University and the Undercommons”
(later republished in their 2013 book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study). Harney and
Moten argue that prison abolition requires “the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could
have slavery, that could have the wage” (2013, p. 42), a society which, of course, includes universities.
Thus, AUS calls on scholars to understand the relationship between prisons and universities as “two sides
of the same coin...producing obedient, governable subjects” (Meyerhoff, 2019a, p. 205) and for the
abolition of the university as necessary for the abolition of prisons and the building of a new society.
Herzing and Ontiveros have written that the prison-industrial-complex “operates precisely as it
has been designed: to contain, control, and kill exactly the people it targets, including poor people, people
of color, queer and gender queer people, youth, immigrants, and political dissidents” (2011, p. 1). Under
these structures, abolition must function as both “the struggle against patriarchy, capitalism,

41
heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, the state, and white supremacy” (Abolition Collective, 2020, p.
2), and a discipline of imagining and practicing “forms of collective power” working against “the logic of
carcerality, patriarchy, coloniality, racial chattel, racial capitalism, and heteronormativity” (Rodríguez
2019, p. 1612). If abolition democracy is a process toward abolition, it is worth establishing what
abolition is. Rodríguez argues that abolition is both “a dream toward futurity vested in insurgent, counterCivilizational histories” (2019, p. 1575), and “a creative, imaginative, and speculative collective labor”
(2019, p. 1577). In an anonymous contribution to Critical Resistance’s Abolition Now! the author argues
that revolution is at the core of abolition, they write: “the purpose of ridding the state of prisons is to
weaken it so destruction is more easily accomplished” (2008, p. 157). This purpose however is part of a
project that KatherineKellyAbraham in the Abolition Journal argue has a much broader goal than “merely
the end of the state” (2020, p.62). Mariame Kaba roots her understanding of abolition in Ruth Wilson
Gilmore’s argument that “abolition requires that we change one thing, which is everything” (Gilmore,
2018, n.p.), Kaba expands, arguing that while this might seem daunting, requiring that we change
everything means there are infinite starting points (2021).
Kaba states that she approaches abolition as though it may take us five hundred years to change
everything. This timeline can also be put in conversation with the idea that abolition is a horizon (Chua,
2020; Kaba, 2021) or, as Thomas Mathiesen calls it: “the unfinished” (2015, p. 47). The unfinished, he
argues, starts with the end of the current order, but “the point is, then, to refrain from finishing the new -
which means to refrain from terminating the overthrow” (2015, p. 56). The unfinished is a belief that
there is no moment when abolition will be complete; we will collectively discover new forms of harm and
then have to collectively heal from them and stop them from happening again. Chua and Kaba refer to
this as an unreachable horizon. As discussed more in Chapter 5, understanding abolition as a horizon
removes a binary notion of failure and success from the project; we cannot fail or succeed at abolition,
only continue working toward it (Chua, 2020; Dilts, 2017). The final metaphor relevant to understanding
abolition is Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s suggestion that abolition is a garden: “something that grows”
(Critical Resistance, 2008, p. 145). Where understandings of harm and healing are “specific to this very

42
soil” (p. 146), abolition, Gumbs states, requires breaking ground, feeding the soil, kissing the roots/routes,
putting our hands into the earth, providing water and sunlight, weeding as we go, and then sharing the
harvest before the process starts all over again. Dilts argues that reformists view our carceral state as
being at zero and then measure the costs and benefits of reform from that zero point. However,
abolitionists understand that “the current state of affairs is, in fact, intolerable” (2020, p. 239), and we are
already far below a zero point. Angela Davis clarified this in Are Prisons Obsolete?, suggesting both a
garden and a horizon; she argues that “the first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to discover one
single alternative system” (2003b, p. 106). In letting go of this desire, abolitionists must explore multiple
strategies toward the growing horizon.
Conclusion
As shown in this chapter, the existing literature argues that education exists as a system of
maintaining the status quo. Despite being rooted in classed ideological origins and usages of education,
there has remained a belief in the liberatory possibility of education. In particular, the belief in education
as a public good developed throughout the 19th century, though this also relies on a notion of a classed,
raced, and gendered public. Sociology of Education has been a site of exploration of these issues looking
to understand what schools are like, why schools are the way they are, and the consequences of what
happens in schools. Though, as with many disciplines, it can be further understood through sub-fields,
this research turns to two of those subfields in particular: a critical sociology of education grounded in
Marxist theorizing and a sociology of higher education that has mirrored the status attainment and social
reproduction traditions and an efficacy-centered organizationally oriented sociology focused on policy
improvement of the sociology of education as a whole. Critical University Studies has emerged in the
intersections of these two areas, looking at the development of U.S. universities via three transformations:
massification, vocationalization, and marketization. As argued by the field, these transformations have
resulted in universities serving as job training rather than an earlier understanding of them as representing
“an alternative ethic or antidote to the commercial world” (Collini, 2017, p. 16).

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Critical University Studies has also turned to the philosophy of education to understand what a
university is for and what should and does make a good or bad university. I trace the two lineages of
CUS: the first going back to at least the 19th century in the U.S., which offers a broader critique of
universities and includes the work of Upton Sinclair and the League for Industrial Democracy. The
second lineage, favored by most CUS scholars given its “presentist orientation” (Williams, 2012, n.p.),
emerged in the late 1990s and is responding primarily to the privatization of higher education seen
alongside massification, vocationalization, and marketization. This has resulted in CUS arguing that
neoliberalism and the end of the Welfare State have shifted the burden of educating and training workers
from the employer/state to the employee. While research has shown that universities may primarily exist
for the elite to explore ideas of truth and knowledge, they have also always played a role in producing the
morality of the elite. This has only expanded in the 21st century, where the rhetoric of college as
promising individual status and income remains, even when this promise does not always hold (Newfield,
2022). Instead, higher education reproduces “racialized economic inequalities” and legitimizes “the
managerial and antidemocratic aspects of state and national politics” (Newfield, 2022, p. 94).
I then argue that this reveals education as a disciplinary institution invested in a politics of
disposability. The university can best be understood as a disciplinary institution through a carceral
analysis. I argue that carcerality requires a structure of objectification and control and is co-constituted by
white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems that reproduce domination.
Carcerality and a politics of disposability come from prison studies and an understanding of our society as
reproducing racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000 [1983]). Through looking at the work of Dennis Childs,
Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Loic Wacquant, I showed that the prison is an inherently racist
institution, and we cannot end racism without abolishing prisons. To abolish prisons, we must end the
carceral culture/logics that normalizes them–including universities. Universities reflect one underanalyzed part of a carceral system that renders people as disposable objects. I then briefly discuss the
literature that has begun to look at the carcerality of schooling via the theorization of the school-to-prison
pipeline, the school-prison-nexus, the college-prison-nexus, and an education-carcerality nexus.

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Next, I turned to Meyerhoff’s argument that formal education is one mode of study among many,
tied to different modes of world-making. I argued that education serves as a carceral mode of study that
upholds a carceral mode of world-making, which maintains systems of objectification and control through
the co-constitution of white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems that
reproduce domination. I then turned to alternative modes of studying, attempting to exist “within, against,
and beyond the dominant university” (Meyerhoff, 2019b, p. 317). These included “political education,”
“social movement learning,” “free universities,” and “the undercommons.” I situate these modes of
world-making alongside abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019), abolition democracy (Davis, 2005; Dilts,
2020; Du Bois, 2017), and Abolitionist University Studies (Boggs et al., 2019; Meyerhoff, 2019a). By
briefly discussing the history of Abolitionist University Studies and defining abolitionist ideology, I show
the need for other abolitionist approaches to education within, against, and beyond the university.
In their book Against Borders: The Case for Abolition, Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha
write that abolition looks to address the problem of all “social relations that makes prisons appear
necessary and permanent” (2022, p. 149), Abolitionist University Studies looks to understand the
university’s role in reproducing those social relations with a focus on the construction of human life as
disposable through disposability politics. Abolition thus teaches us “that a society predicated on
containment is still based on relation, but it is a relation that numbs us to throwing people away,
exploitation of the poor, population-level acceleration to death and diseases incurred by polluted skies,
water, and land” (Patel, 2021, p. 142). If, as Harney and Moten argue, the object of abolition is “not so
much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have
slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition
as the founding of a new society” (2013, p. 42), Abolitionist University Studies asks to reckon with the
university’s role in the maintenance of “a society that could have prisons” and its (im)possible role in “the
founding of a new society” (2013, p. 42). One of the main offerings abolitionists and AUS offer us
towards building a new society is engagement with new or different modes of study. Harney and Moten
write that while study relates to the university, it “is not limited to the university. It’s not held or

45
contained within the university” (2013, p. 113). In their 2021 article for Social Text, David Maldonado
and Erica Meiners argue that study (and labor) towards abolitionist ends exists within the university
already. They write that study can be found in “[o]ur bodies, our networks, our newspapers, our queer
love, our Signal chats, our posters, our anti-capitalist feminist reading groups” (2021, p. 81). In framing
these practices and spaces of study as part of an abolitionist framework, abolition can be understood as a
goal articulated by Harney & Moten and as an already existent method and practice to reach that goal.
Many critiques of those I have looked at have been rooted in the lack of solutions provided by
their work (see Ferguson on Meyerhoff 2020 and Parker on Giroux 2021). While I follow the abolitionist
belief argued by Davis that we must “let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system”
(2003b, p. 106), I do see the value in exploring the already existent method and practices of abolitionist
study and possible strategies toward the abolitionist horizon. I thus attempt to fill some of the gaps by
exploring abolitionist student activists’ alternative modes of study. Returning to my research questions, in
Chapter 4, I first bring the student to the center of Abolitionist University Studies, asking (1) if
abolitionist student activists draw connections between carceral logics and the university. If so, what
connections do abolitionist they draw between carceral logics and the university, and how do they draw
connections? (2) whether they see universities using carceral logics to enable their “mode of study”
(Meyerhoff, 2019a), if so, why? (3) how do they see carceral logics as limiting study, and (4) what role do
they see university education playing in producing social change? After showing the abolitionist student
activist understands the university as carceral, in Chapter 5 I look to their methods of resisting carceral
role of the student in abolitionist university studies to answer the question (5) do abolitionist student
activists use alternative media in their activism? If so, how do abolitionist student activists use alternative
media toward decarcerating the university? Finally in Chapter 6 I look at their alternative modes of study,
asking (6) do abolitionist student activists believe the university can be decarcerated? (7) what practices
do abolitionist student activists believe a university can enact to decarcerate? (8) what role do abolitionist
student activists believe student activism can play in developing and practicing an abolitionist university?

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(9) what alternative modes of study do abolitionist student activists envision both outside and within the
university? And (10) how do universities enable or disable learning toward enacting social change?
As will be discussed in the next chapter, through centering the student activist, I also attempt to
address della Porta et al.’s critique that social movement studies have not paid enough attention to student
movements (2020). Next, while not de-centering the elite institutions prioritized in the sociology of
education and CUS, I have attempted to expand outside of elite institutions by looking at four very
different institutions in the same geographical area. Through centering the voices of student activists, I
see if their work matches the scholarly understanding of connections between the university and
carcerality discussed in this chapter. I then look at their use of alternative media as an alternative mode of
study and their utopian hopes for the possibility of the university and study. In centering activists, I return
to Freire and Willis’ belief that resistance and liberation should be at the center of our analysis, a theme
CUS has failed to center adequately but that AUS still has time to. In the next chapter, I outline the
methodological approaches used in this study, discussing my methodological frameworks, offering details
on my participants, and attempting to practice as ethically a project as possible. I then establish my sites
of study: interviews, media objects, social media, and created media, before finally discussing the
limitations of my study.

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Chapter 3. Methodologies
Introduction
This dissertation is grounded in methodologies of action research (Fuster Morell, 2009),
articulation (Clarke, 2015; Grossberg, 1986; Laclau, 2011; Slack, 1996), and thick description (Geertz,
1973; Ryle, 1968). I use theoretical analysis (Bandura, 2006; Kostere & Kostere, 2021) to examine each
collected data form (interviews, media, social media, and created media). The methods for this project
were chosen using John Gerring’s criterial framework (2012). Its circularity started with my experiences
in the university and abolitionist activist spaces working to end the prison industrial complex, and I
attempt to address the demands of both breadth and depth in my data collection. My main priority was
that the methods would allow me to converse with abolitionist student activists at these multiple levels of
depth/breadth. In his chapter “After the neoliberal university,” Rob Watts argues that focusing on
students’ voices is a potential remedy to the neoliberalization of higher education (2022). In defining
“voice,” he follows Albert Hirschman in arguing that when members of an organization believe the
organization not to be working, they have three options: (1) exist in the organization, (2) remain loyal to
the organization, or (3) voice their concerns with the organization (1970). Specifically, per Gerring’s
argument that “all knowledge is comparative” (2012, p. 157), I center the voices of abolitionist student
activists in their understanding of the role of the university and education compared to normative rhetoric
around the role of education and the university. While abolitionist student activists make up a tiny
proportion of the student population, I believe this project shows the particular critical perspective they
bring through their centering of carcerality and policing/prisons as one of the primary crises in political
and state legitimacy of this conjunctural moment (Hall et al., 2002; Shedd, 2015).
The attention to both depth and breadth of students’ voices can be seen through my engaging four
data collection methods: (1) interviews with abolitionist student activists and an interview with the coauthors of “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” (2) collecting media objects created by
abolitionist student collectives, (3) collecting social media created by abolitionist student collectives, and

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(4) invited abolitionist student activists to create media for this dissertation. These data sets have allowed
me to center both the voices of abolitionist student activists and the publicly available media and social
media of abolitionist student collectives. While all four forms of data inform the dissertation as a whole,
when centering the abolitionist student’s understanding of the university as a carceral space in Chapter 4 I
primarily engage with interviews with abolitionist student activists. I use the collected media objects and
social media to look at how abolitionist students resist the university and engage alternative media in that
resistance in Chapter 5. Finally, I use the media created for this dissertation in Chapter 6 to look at the
alternative possibilities abolitionist student activists see the university able to play moving forward. This
chapter first covers the methodological frameworks in more detail, before looking at each data collection
method: interviews, media, social media, and created media, and concludes with a discussion of the
limitations of the methodological choices.
Methodological Frameworks
While the dissertation is designed to be an individualized process, I have done my best to follow
Moussa Kaba’s advice that “everything worthwhile is done with others” (Kaba, 2021, p. xviii) and
researched in community and with other abolitionist student activists. This project is grounded in what
Mayo Fuster Morell refers to broadly as “action research” (2009), a network of concepts linking “terms
like activist research, participatory action research, conricerca, memory, reporting, systematizing and
investigaction” (Fuster Morrell, 2009, p. 21). Fuster Morell argues that action research holds five
distinctive tendencies:
1. A “participative-collective method” (2009, p. 28).
2. Subjects or goals “producing alternative content” (2009, p. 28).
3. “Developing strategic thinking for broad political processes” (2009, p. 28).
4. “Building relationships and networking connections” (2009, p. 28).
5. “Opening knowledge” (2009, p. 28).

49
Alongside these five tendencies, Fuster Morell argues for a few more commonalities among action
research. Here, I highlight the four most related to this project. Firstly, “a consciousness of a border
between research done inside academia and that done outside academia” (Fuster Morell, 2009, pp. 23-4).
Secondly, research that often critiques and monitors institutions while centering alternatives to these
institutions (Fuster Morell, 2009, p. 28). Third, an inclination toward memory building via “movement
archiving and documentation” (Fuster Morell, 2009, p. 30), and finally a focus on “organic intellectuals’
contributions to social movements” (Fuster Morell, 2009, p. 34)
Alongside the methodological goals of action research, I broadly understand this project’s
methodology as one of articulation. First theorized by Ernesto Laclau as concepts “bound together simply
by connotative or evocative links which custom and opinion have established between them” (2011, p. 7),
Stuart Hall has fleshed out the theory of articulation. In a 1986 interview with Larry Grossberg, Hall
points to the “double meaning” of articulation: “to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate” but also to signify
the place where “two parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken”
(Grossberg, 1986, p. 235). Together with the focus on research that critiques and monitors institutions
while centering alternatives to these institutions (Fuster Morell, 2009, p. 28), I have tried to articulate, in
both senses of the word, the relationship seen by abolitionist student activists between universities and
carcerality to understand how these connections have been “forged or made” (Grossberg, 1986, p. 235).
However, I have also centered on the ongoing attempts by individuals within the university to break the
articulation, to disarticulate the university from carcerality, and to understand how the university may be
changed or rearticulated (Slack, 1996, p. 114). In doing so, this project speaks to Jennifer Slack’s
argument that articulation can serve as a “methodological framework for understanding what a cultural
study does” (p. 112).
Finally, while not an ethnographic study, I utilize thick description throughout the project. First
theorized by Gilbert Ryle in his lectures “Thinking and Reflecting” and “The Thinking of Thoughts:
What is ‘Le Penseur’ Doing?” where he argues that “thin” description may provide what is happening,
but “thick” description includes details that provide context for the reader. The methodology was fleshed

50
out by Clifford Geertz, who argues that thick description aims to “draw large conclusions from small, but
very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of
collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics” (1973, p. 28). He goes on to say this can
function as a mode of analysis by “sorting out the structures of signification…and determining their social
ground and import” (Geertz, 1973, p. 9). Methodologically, then, this project pays attention to “both the
conditions of their existence and the political-cultural work (practice) that went into making and
sustaining specific articulations” (Clarke, 2015, p. 277). Following Hall, I engage in “the work of
listening” to those resisting it to understand how the linkages are “already being forged” between the
university and the carceral, how they are continually circulated, and where they “are coming apart”
(Clarke, 2015, p. 284).
With these methodologies in mind, I apply them to the method of theoretical analysis of four
forms of collected data: interviews, media, social media, and created media. I will go into the collection
and analysis of this data below, but broadly, I employ theoretical analysis as discussed by Kostere and
Kostere (2021). They argued that “theoretical thematic analysis is driven by theory and themes that are
predetermined and should be addressed in the research question” while remaining “open to the
possibilities of new themes emerging from the data during the analysis” (2021, p. 59). Coming in with my
background in abolitionist organizing within the university, alongside a research background in
abolitionist thought, I had some pre-understandings of where connections between the university and
carcerality may arise (as seen in my interview questions in Appendix A). Following Kostere & Kostere’s
recommendations for step-by-step analysis for each of my forms of data collected (2021, p. 60-61), I:
1. familiarized myself with the data while keeping predetermined categories and research questions
in mind, highlighting any articles that seemed meaningful to the predetermined categories and
establishing new patterns and themes that did not fit within the predetermined categories.
2. reviewed the highlighted articles and eliminated any highlighted articles unrelated to my research
questions.

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3. coded each article and clustered them under emerging patterns/themes. Put aside articles that did
not fit under a clear pattern/theme.
[Repeated steps 1-3 for each data item]
4. revisited the put-aside articles to see if they related to new patterns/themes that emerged.
In applying this method to these four forms of data, I assessed the extent to which carcerality is or is not
hegemonic within the university.
The Universities
Aside from the social media I looked at for breadth, the research focused on four universities in
the Los Angeles area: a research-focused private university, a research-focused public university, a
teaching-focused private university, and a teaching-focused public university (see Table 1). Per IRB
requirements, these universities have been anonymized throughout the dissertation, and pseudonyms have
been chosen. I chose four forms of the university in Los Angeles to apply a version of Glen Coulthard and
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s notion of grounded normativity to the research. Looking at these
different forms would allow a deeper understanding of the different and similar ways universities relate to
carcerality and abolition today.
Table 1
Characteristics of Universities Looked at In This Study
Pseudonym of University Private or Public? Research or Teaching Focused?
California College (CC) Private Teaching
Los Angeles College (LAC) Public Teaching
Southern California University (SCU) Private Research
University of Los Angeles (ULA) Public Research
Coulthard and Simpson understand grounded normativity as a form of “place-based solidarity”
(2016, p. 249). In looking at the difficult practice of solidarity, they argue that grounded normativity is
informed by the practices and procedures “that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to
place” (2016, p. 254). Coulthard and Simpson, in their initial theorizing of grounded normativity, define it
as “the ethical frameworks provided by these Indigenous place-based practices and associated forms of
knowledge” (2016, p. 254); however, later in an interview with Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery,
Coulthard states that while “the hegemonic settler form of life is destroying Indigenous forms of

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life…settlers have a whole host of other grounded normativities that have themselves been violently ruled
out of existence” (2017, p. 117). These non-Indigenous normativities, Coulthard argues, are similar to
“what Foucault would refer to as a resurgence of subaltern knowledges” (2017, p. 117). Given the role of
settler colonialism as central to the production of the university (Bain, 2023; Bhambra et al., 2018;
Maringe, 2023; Morley, 2024; Patel, 2021; Rodríguez, 2012b, Yang, 2017), alongside the differing
relationship to place each university and student holds, I believed that in looking for non-Indigenous
forms of grounded normativity within four universities in the same city–and similar geographic locations–
the specificities of place for each university; the relationship between university, students, and place; and
the differences in their private/public and research/teaching form would be made apparent.
For the social media data collection, I focused, in particular, on the Instagram profiles and feeds
produced at the four universities I interviewed students from–within five collectives–as well as seven
other collectives across the U.S. to compare against my findings in Los Angeles and start to get at
questions of generalizability outside of the city (see Table 2 for more information on these collectives).
Collectives were chosen to include a range of universities in different states, with different funding
statuses (private versus public), different focuses (research versus teaching), and situated within different
communities (rural versus urban). State and type of location (compared to a large city in California) are
also included in Table 2.
Table 2
Characteristics of Additional Universities Looked at For Their Abolitionist Student Activist Collectives’
Social Media Content
University State Location Private or Public? Research or Teaching Focused?
University #1 Illinois Small City Public Research
University #2 Maryland Large City Private Research
University #3 New York Rural Private Research
University #4 North Carolina Large City Private Teaching
University #5 North Carolina Small City Public Research
University #6 Vermont Rural Private Teaching
University #7 Wisconsin Large City Public Research

53
The People
Demographic information on the abolitionist student activist interviewees was collected
approximately six to nine months after the interviews. I asked each individual to share:
1. Age at the time of the interview
2. Gender
3. Ethnicity/Race
4. Citizenship Status
5. Socioeconomic Class
6. Major
7. Organizing Experience (outside of [name of collective])
8. Did you take any classes on activism/carcerality/abolition while a student?
Answers to the last three questions are discussed throughout the dissertation, though notably all
interviewees were concentrated on either Humanities or Social Sciences (the full list includes: American
Studies & Ethnicity, Asian American Studies, Education (2), Fine/Studio Arts, History, International
Development Studies, Chicane/Latin American Studies (3), Law, Media Arts, Narrative Studies,
Organizational Studies, Political Science/Studies (5), Public Policy, Social Welfare/Social and Economic
Justice, Sociology, and Spanish5
); thirteen of the students had organizing experiences prior to their time
with the abolitionist collective, one did not, and three did not provide responses; ten interviewees had
taken classes related to activism, carcerality, or abolition as a student, three had not, and four did not
provide responses. Answers to the first five questions can be found in Tables 3-6. I have used language
used by the interviewees for all questions except when noting whether they were Formerly Incarcerated.
This information comes from whether or not they self-identified as such at some point in the interview. I
did not hear back from four of the interviewees (Armando, Berto, Naomi, and Olivia), so the information
included for them has been taken from the transcript of our interviewees. When the interviewee did not
5 Some students double majored, and others mentioned both their undergraduate and graduate degrees, so there are more than 17
majors mentioned here.

54
provide the answer to a question, or I could not find applicable self-identified information in the interview
transcript, I noted that the information was “Not Provided.” All interviewees were allowed to use a
pseudonym; in the interests of their privacy, I have not noted which interviewees chose to use their real
name or a pseudonym. I also only refer to them by their first name throughout the dissertation. Data from
these interviews are used throughout the empirical chapters of the dissertation (Chapters 4, 5, & 6).
Table 3
Students at California College (CC)
Name/
Pseudonym
Age Ethnicity/
Race
Gender Socioeconomic
Class
Formerly
Incarcerated
Citizenship
Status
Alessia 22 white female Upper-Middle
class
No U.S. Citizen
Elisa 21 Mexican female Lower Class No U.S. Citizen
Olivia Early
20s
Half Latina and
half white, but
very white
passing
woman Not Provided No Not Provided
Sonya 22 Asian woman Low Income No U.S. Citizen
Sophie 22 white/Jewish female Upper-Middle
Class
No Canadian &
U.S.
Citizenship
Table 4
Students at Los Angeles College (LAC)
Name/
Pseudonym
Age Ethnicity/
Race
Gender Socioeconomic
Class
Formerly
Incarcerated
Citizenship
Status
Andy 32 Salvadorean
and
Nicaraguan
male Was poor, now
probably struggling
middle class
Yes Born in Los
Angeles
Nico 30 Latino Male Not Provided Not Provided U.S. Citizen
Table 5
Students at Southern California University (SCU)
Name/
Pseudonym
Age Ethnicity/
Race
Gender Socioeconomic
Class
Formerly
Incarcerated
Citizenship
Status
Avery 22 white F Upper-middle
class
No U.S.
Citizen
Derek 35 Asian
American/Filipino
Cisgender
Male
Working Class No Naturalized
U.S.
Emily 21 East Asian Cis woman Privileged No U.S.
Citizen,
born here.
Fiona 28 Asian F/NBfemme
Middle-Class No Canadian
Citizen
Grace 21 Chinese/East
Asian
Gender
NonConforming
Upper-Middle No U.S.
Citizen

55
Table 6
Students at the University of Los Angeles (ULA)
Name/
Pseudonym
Age Ethnicity/
Race
Gender Socioeconomic Class Formerly
Incarcerated
Citizenship
Status
Andrew 32 Chicane/Latine Man Low Income No U.S. Citizen
Armando 30s Mexican Male Low Income Yes Not
Provided
Berto 30s Chicano Male Low Income Yes Citizen, son
of undocu
migrants
Froggy 38 Mexican Male Grew up poor in the
projects section 8
housing, food stamps,
now a full-time
student in grad
school
Yes Citizen, born
here in LA
Naomi 20s Black, Latina,
Mexican
Woman Not Provided Not Provided Not
Provided
I collaborated with two other groups alongside the individual interviews with abolitionist student
activists. I performed an hour-long group interview with the co-authors of “Abolitionist University
Studies: An Invitation” (discussed more in-depth in Chapter 6): Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick
Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein. They co-wrote the invitation in 2019, which they coined
“Abolitionist University Studies,” I saw the interview as a response to their invitation to discuss the
relationship between student activism and abolitionist university studies. At the time the invitation was
published, Boggs taught sociology and was affiliated with the feminist, gender, and sexuality studies
department and the education studies minor at Wesleyan University; Meyerhoff was a visiting scholar at
Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and program coordinator of the Social
Movements Lab; Mitchell taught feminist studies and critical race & ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz; and
Schwartz-Weinstein was a historian of university labor living in upstate NY. All four scholars research
education, epistemology, and the university. Data from this interview is used in Chapter 6.
Finally, I also hosted a media-making workshop (the data from this interview is referred to as
“created media” to distinguish it from the collectives’ media analyzed for the project). Knowing the
workshop was happening in a separate academic year from the interviews, which meant many of my
participants would have graduated, I reached out to all abolitionist student activist interviewees, inviting

56
them to participate in a workshop where we would “collectively create a piece of media that
embodies/reflects on ‘the abolitionist university,’” and encouraged them to invite anyone else they
thought might enjoy the workshop. Five original interviewees could participate (Berto, Elisa, Emily,
Grace, and Naomi) and an additional thirteen participants joined us (Anahi, Aranza, Emily L., Hannah,
Justin, Kenia, Madu, Nathaniel, Sophie, Vianca, and Zainab). Data from the created media and workshop
is used in Chapter 6.
Interviews
As noted, interviews were conducted with individuals who self-identified as “current or former
students involved in abolitionist activism at [name of university].” I planned to interview twenty students
associated with higher education institutions in Los Angeles institutions for this project—five students
involved in abolitionist organizing at each of the four institutions. As I am aware of at least eighty
abolitionist student collectives in the U.S., I decided only to interview students attending/who had
attended a university in Los Angeles to lessen the variables among institutions other than my controlled
variables of a university’s private/public designation and research/teaching focus. Los Angeles County
operates the most extensive jail system in the U.S., caging more than 27,000 people every night. It also
hosts California State Prison, Los Angeles County, which, as of July 31, 2022, caged 2,322 people. As
documented by the Million Dollar Hoods project–led by Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernandez and Dr. Danielle
Dupuy–this high incarceration rate is not spread evenly across Los Angeles but “has extracted from
largely Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and working-class communities since the 1970s,” meaning L.A.’s
nearly billion-dollar caging budget is primarily committed to incarcerating people from just a few
neighborhoods (Million Dollar Hoods, n.d.). Thus, as noted when discussing grounded normativity, Los
Angeles is focused on not representing universities across the nation but serving as a site of articulation
for broader issues being discussed by student activists around the country. While all activism is shaped by
local culture and politics, universities in Los Angeles meet the educational/social settings standard to
protest as noted by Keniston they are some of the “more selective, “progressive,” and “academic”
colleges and universities in America” (1967, p. 109). Los Angeles College is the slight exception, with an

57
acceptance rate of 91% compared to 13%, 12.5%, and 11% of California College, Southern California
University, and the University of Los Angeles, respectively. Los Angeles is viewed as a “progressive”
city compared to other cities in the U.S., and all four are considered intellectually rigorous and prioritize
academics. I was able to complete five interviews with current/former students from three of the
institutions. As discussed in my limitations section, I could only complete two interviews at the fourth
institution.
All interviewees were initially contacted via email or Twitter/X direct messages (DMs). Initial
emails involved a brief introduction of myself and my research; an explanation of participant criteria, that
they self-identified as a current or former student involved in abolitionist activism at their university;
what committing to the interview would involve; a recorded meeting with me on Zoom for 60-90
minutes, optional reviewing of the transcript, optional provision of follow-up thoughts to the transcript
via email; information on compensation for their knowledge and time; and the offer to answer any
questions or concerns they may have before committing to the interview. As I already had relationships
with abolitionist student activists at SCU from my history of student organizing, I reached out to them
individually. For individuals at California College, I was connected with a faculty member through shared
Los Angeles-based organizing work with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. I contacted her,
and she then connected me with three students. I found the name of some of the members of an
abolitionist collective at ULA in a publication produced by the collective and then reached out to one of
them. For Los Angeles College, I reached out to Andy, a member of an abolitionist collective, via the
Cops Off Campus Coalition’s shared mailing list–a mailing list all members of the Cops Off Campus
Coalition have access to. All subsequent interviewees were found via snowball sampling from the initial
connections and interviews (Emerson, 2015). According to Emerson, snowball sampling is when
“researchers ask the participants they have identified to tell their friends and acquaintances about the
study” (2015, p. 166). After completing each interview, I asked the interviewee if they would like to
connect me with any individual who fit the study criteria, i.e., self-identified as a “current or former
student involved in abolitionist activism at [name of university].” While snowball sampling does allow

58
one to access hard-to-reach populations–in this case, members of informal and formal collectives who do
not list membership online–and is known for being suitable for accessing populations that have not been
extensively studied before it also can create a sample bias while limiting generalizability. Given that the
criteria of the project were already focused on individuals who share a specific identity, and the research
is not intended to be representative of a larger student population, I found the advantages to outweigh the
disadvantages.
Guest, Bunce, and Johnson (2006) posit that twelve interviews can sufficiently reach saturation in
qualitative studies. However, they note that while saturation has “become the gold standard by which
purposive sample sizes are determined” (2006, p. 60), there are rarely factors or guidelines provided for
determining saturation has been reached. Analyzing the transcripts of sixty interviews, they found that
80% of their codes were developed when analyzing the first six interviews and 92% by the next six.
These findings meant the remaining 48 interviews only provided an additional 8% (9 codes). This
recommendation was backed up by Hennink and Kaiser’s systemic review of sample sizes for saturation
in qualitative research (2022). They looked at 23 studies with the criteria that they must “a) use empirical
data to assess saturation in qualitative research or use a statistical model to determine saturation using
hypothetical data, b) focus on saturation outside of grounded theory, c) be published in journal articles or
book chapters, and d) be available in English” (2022, p. 2). They found that while sample size of the
datasets used varied from 14 to 132 interviews, “all datasets except one had a sample that was much
larger than the sample ultimately needed for saturation” (2022, p. 3). Guest et al. (2006), among other
scholars (e.g., Seidman, 2006; Mason, 2010), also recognize that saturation differs across studies as a
result of various factors (e.g., structure and complexity of interview protocol, researcher experience,
heterogeneity of group, etc.). Based upon Guest et al.’s (2006) recommendation and my desire to compare
teaching versus research and private versus public institutions, I aimed for twenty interview participants:
five at each university; as discussed in the limitations section, I could only connect with seventeen. I
could not connect with any more student activists at LAC. While I was given contact information for
eight individuals at LAC, I only heard back from four; only two could make time for an interview. I

59
cannot know why interviewees did not respond or choose to be interviewed. However, I suspect it has
something to do with LAC having the most significant number of students working full time while in
school and the teaching rather than research focus, meaning they may not value doctoral candidate
research in the same way those attending universities where they regularly encounter and are taught by
doctoral candidates do. I could have interviewed more participants at SCU, ULA, or CC, but as I found
fewer and fewer codes after the fifth interview analyzed, I felt I had met saturation. I was concerned that
further interviews with members from these collectives would skew the data toward underrepresenting
LAC.
As noted by many researchers, within qualitative research, the researcher serves as the research
instrument (Poggenpoel & Myburgh, 2003; Rudestam & Newton, 2007). This understanding means that it
is the researcher who creates the environment for data to be shared, comes up with questions to be asked,
“facilitates the flow of communication” (Poggenpoel & Myburgh, 2003, p. 418), and analyzes the
information to pull data from it, meaning that, like researchers, qualitative research and interviews, in
particular, are inherently subjective methods (Fontana & Frey, 2005; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007), as
is the information it produces. Jerolmack and Khan have theorized around an attitudinal fallacy: “the error
of inferring situated behavior from verbal accounts” (2014, p. 179), but as the research questions focus on
abolitionist student activists’ understandings of carcerality, education, and resistance as opposed to their
actions, it aligns with Pugh’s believe that interviews can offer us an example of people’s “emotional
landscape of desire, morality, and expectations” (2013, p. 50). Given this focus on subjective knowledge,
interviews make sense as a method that recognizes and reflects on that subjectivity instead of one that
fails to meet an unachievable goal of objectivity. Hammersley and Atkinson argue that interviews allow
us to acknowledge everyone as a participant-observer (2007, p. 98), and their observations can thus serve
as a resource for the researcher. They highlight that while interviews may not provide the same
information that can be gathered through long-form ethnography and observation, they can illuminate
similar behavior. Thus, while they should not be treated “as beyond all possible doubt...there is no reason
to dismiss them as of no value at all” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 109).

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For all of my interviews, I performed feminist in-depth interviewing techniques. My choice to do
so is rooted in my centering on ethical methodologies that attend to power relations both in content and
between interviewer and interviewee (Scheurich, 1995). Following Virginia L. Olesen’s advice on
feminist qualitative research (2007), I centered the socio-cultural and material circumstances of
participants, including allowing space to discuss how their race, class, gender, sexuality, or other
relationships to power factor into their experiences as student activists and their relationships to
carcerality–as seen in question six of the interview guide (Appendix A), though often these conversations
came up earlier in the interview. As noted, following theoretical thematic analysis, the questions in my
interview guide came from predetermined theories and themes from my background in abolitionist
organizing within the university, alongside a research background in abolitionist thought. These questions
were provided to my co-advisors and edited based on their feedback.
The interviews were structured, with flexibility around interviewees’ responses. If a topic were
discussed for which I had further questions, I would either ask at the moment or note it down to ask at the
end of the interview. For most of my interviews, I found rapport and built trust quickly and easily with
interviews via the snowball sampling and email explanation of the research. Before recording, I started
every interview with an explanation of the research and time for the interviewees to ask me any questions
about myself, the project, and my intentions with the work. During this time, I self-identified myself as
involved with abolitionist organizing. I would name my work with both on and off-campus organizations,
so they understood my political commitment to the organizing work and an abolitionist future. In
particular, here, as a white femme person clearly from outside of the U.S., I would take time to recognize
my positionality as someone affected by carcerality but not by criminalization, highlighting my personal
stake in wanting to see an abolitionist future.
Alongside highlighting and reflecting on my positionality–both with regards to the topic and the
interviewee–during the interview and analysis, I focused on looking “at a “process” or the “meanings”
individuals attribute to their given social situation” (Leavy & Hesse-Biber, 2006, n.p.), rather than
attempting to make generalizations, I then looked for trends among shared social situations, such as

61
themes noted by formerly incarcerated students that were not noted by students who have never
experienced incarceration. I also centered reflexivity in my work by keeping a reflective journal
throughout the process (Hesse-Biber, 2007). I noted any reflections about the project, my positionality,
and my analysis throughout the data collection and analysis stages. These stages included a purposeful
reflection period after each interview. The reflections were then read over and incorporated into my
analysis when relevant. I believe that in doing so, I was able to invite a praxis of “knowledge [a]s affected
by the social conditions under which it is produced and that it is grounded in both the social location and
the social biography of the observer and the observed” (Mann & Kelley, 1997, p. 392). The journal also
allowed me to reflect on and navigate my space as an insider (an abolitionist student activist) and an
outsider (doctoral student/researcher). As noted by Denzin (1997):
The feminist, communitarian researcher does not invade the privacy of others, use informed
consent forms, select subjects randomly, or measure research designs in terms of their validity.
This framework presumes a researcher who builds collaborative, reciprocal, trusting, and friendly
relations with those studied. It is also understood that those studied have claims of ownership
over any materials produced in the research process, including field notes. (p. 275)
I did this through the previously discussed criterial snowball sampling of interviewees, sharing the IRB
information sheet, and sharing transcripts with interviewees. Interviews were held between March 19th,
2022, and July 28th, 2022. The day before each interview, participants were emailed the IRB information
sheet and interview questions with the option to look at them before the meeting (as seen in Appendix A).
The recorded portion of the interviews ranged from 36 minutes to 2 hours 17 minutes, with the average
interview time lasting 1 hour 15 minutes. Notably, the two shortest interviews were with individuals I
knew before the interview. These interviews were shorter as the interviewees made assumptions about my
knowledge of the topics discussed from previous interactions. In working with interviewees new to me,
collaborative and reciprocal relationships were built before and during the interview. These relationships
can be seen in many of my interactions with interviewees during and after the interview. For example, all
but one of the interviewees asked to stay looped into the research outcomes; many stayed with me past the
90 minutes to keep speaking, and many connected with me again afterward or offered follow-up
conversations. Interviewees also frequently expressed great joy and delight in the interview.

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For example, one of the participants and I spoke for three hours, and at the end of that time, she
expressed reluctance to end the interview and said she felt connected to me. This connection between the
interviewer and interviewee was mutual. In my reflective journal, I frequently express surprise at how
joyful and hopeful I feel after the interviews. At one point in the journal, I quote Sara Ahmed’s belief that
“Through the collective, you can assemble and laugh and eat and drink, and remind yourself that the
institution is not everything. The collective is what enables you to keep going” (Binyam, 2022, n.p.). The
interviews themselves attempted to mirror the issues we discussed: collective building, liberation work,
and prefiguration. I also attempted to bring this care practice to my media and social media analysis.
All interviewees were given the option of in-person or online interviews–using Zoom Meetings.
Sixteen of the seventeen interviewees chose to be interviewed on Zoom, and one interviewee–whom I
knew prior to the interview–asked to be interviewed in person. While accessible online synchronous
video conferencing has existed since at least the mid-2000s and is traditionally understood to require
more technology necessary to participate, more preparation necessary to participate, and a larger budget
for equipment or platform fees, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic meeting these barriers has become
the norm for most individuals in educational settings. It also auto-includes data collection technology,
lowers the budget and time for travel to near zero, and often includes auto-captioning, lowering the cost
and time of transcription services (Lobe et al., 2022). All participants who chose to participate via Zoom
had digital devices with a functional camera and microphone, and what Lobe et al. call the “digital
competence to be able to participate in the discussion” (2022, p. 2). Individual video interviews are
understood as “the closest to in-person interaction” (Lobe et al., 2022, p. 2) in capturing the spontaneity
of in-person interviews, as they allow synchronous engagement with facial expressions, vocal tones, and
some body language–all mediated through a screen. The primary ethical issue noted with video
interviewing is negotiating privacy issues when others can observe the data collection. However, as noted
by Pocock et al. (2021), online interviews often allow participants greater freedom in choosing the time
and location of their interviews. A few of my interviewees asked to reschedule their interview on very
short notice, and online interviews allowed us to do so efficiently.

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Participants were paid at the end of the interview via the mobile payment service of their choice
(Venmo, CashApp, QuickPay). All interviewees were paid $100 within one week after completing their
interview. Given the administrative labor of filling out the Google form, arranging a meeting time,
reviewing the transcript, and sending follow-up information, while the interview itself took 60-120
minutes, the process as a whole may have taken up to four hours of participant time, meaning they were
paid a minimum of $25/hour. Given that a living wage in Los Angeles is calculated by MIT at
$21.22/hour, with zero dependents, which was not the case for all my interviewees
(https://livingwage.mit.edu), and that it was my priority to adequately compensate interviewees for their
time and energy, as in my experience student activists are more likely to be from low-income
backgrounds, I paid each interviewee $100.
All interviews were recorded on Zoom, and the audio file was then uploaded to otter.ai, where it
was anonymized and then transcribed using A.I. I then edited each transcript to account for any errors
produced by the A.I. and emailed copies of the transcripts to the interviewees so that they could perform
member checks (Thomas, 2017). Thomas defines member checks as either a transcript of their interview,
a copy of emerging findings, or a draft copy of a research report sent to interviewees for “review,
comment, and/or correction” (2017, p. 23). All members were sent their transcripts, and all members
except one–who stated they did not want to stay looped into the research outcomes–have been sent copies
of conference presentations and publications from this research. Thomas notes that while member checks
are unlikely to affect the theory generalization of a project, they may create a more accurate
representation of “the experiences of participants in ways they can recognize and that reflect their
realities” (2017, p. 28) and do affect participant collaboration while “reducing inequality between the
researcher and participants and empowering participants” (2017, p. 28).
Throughout my data collection and analysis, I employed the constant comparative method—
inductively and iteratively analyzing my data and reviewing and refining my interview protocols. I
manually coded the interview transcripts and journal using two coding approaches. First, to allow new
concepts and categories grounded in participants’ experiences to emerge (Charmaz, 2006), I began each

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coding round using open and axial coding procedures to create and refine grounded categories (Strauss &
Corbin, 1998). Second, I engaged in selective coding to identify manifestations of carcerality within the
university, noting, in particular, the emergence of two categories: the role of space, place, and location in
the construction of carcerality and the ideological role of carcerality in the experiences of relationships
and pedagogy at the universities.
Media Objects
In addition to the interviews, I examined media items produced by abolitionist student collectives
at the four universities. I chose to look at media produced by interviewees’ collectives so that the
interviews could offer insight into the creation, production, and distribution processes that may not
otherwise have been revealed by looking at the objects alone. In defining media, I follow David Morley’s
expansion on Raymond Williams’ definition of media. Williams defines media as a plural medium: “an
intervening or intermediate agency or substance” (1983, p. 144). Morley expands this definition to argue
that contemporary notions of media are “closely linked to that of the process of dissemination, or
circulation, of information by means of some particular channel of communication” (Morley, 2005, p.
212), fundamental to defining a medium then, Morley argues is that it is “an intervening substance
through which signals can travel as a means for communication” (p. 212). While Morley does include
“spoken language” in his definition of medium, I noted to interviewees that while I had an expansive
definition of media, it was rooted in its relationship to temporality and lack of ephemerality. I did not
specify how long it had to last as a media item, just that it existed more than momentarily. These objects
were found on the collective’s websites social media or mentioned during interviews and shared with me
afterward. All were publicly accessible either online or in print on campuses. I found twenty-two media
items within the four universities and analyzed all twenty-two. Collectives at ULA produced thirteen
items. However, some were produced as part of work across the state’s broader university system that
university is a part of, rather than the Los Angeles location. Collectives produced four items at the SCU.
Four items were produced at LAC. However, some were produced as part of work across the state’s
broader university system that university is a part of, rather than the Los Angeles location. Only one item

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had been produced by the collectives at CC, though as came up in our interviews, they were producing
more.
To perform the media and social media analysis, I primarily used textual analysis to understand
how the media sits within the field of alternative media. While most ideological analysis looks at
dominant ideology (Kackman & Kearney, 2018), I looked for the counter-ideologies produced in
response to the university. I understand the texts’ meaning as “always contextual, relative, and situated in
a particular place and time” (Ouellette & Gray, 2017, p. 197). This decision meant they were subject to
my contextual reading; I attempted to limit my personal bias in reading the texts by keeping a reflective
journal. As previously noted, the media items were produced by abolitionist student collectives at the four
universities. All were publicly accessible either online or in print on campuses. These objects were found
on the collective’s websites or social media or mentioned during interviews and shared with me
afterward. All were publicly accessible either online or in print on campuses. Between January 2022 and
August 2022, I found 22 media items and analyzed all 22. All items appeared to be produced between
May 2020 and August 2022.
Social Media
As noted by Mario Small (2022) in his article “Ethnography Upgraded,” virtual space is “a space
of interaction,” and virtual interactions often “multiply and take over more of our lives” (p. 479). Small
argues that virtual space must be taken as seriously as physical space. While I am not completing an
ethnography given the time constraints of the dissertation, given Small’s argument and abolitionist
student collectives usage of social media in “the process of dissemination, or circulation, of information”
(Morley, 2005, p. 212), I looked at how collectives were engaging social media in their activist work. As
noted through my research and network, over 80 abolitionist student collectives have existed and been
active within the past five years across North America. While these collectives use multiple forms of
social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter/X, and TikTok, Instagram was the most
commonly used platform among collectives. I focused, in particular, on the Instagram profiles and feeds
produced at the four universities I interviewed students from–within five collectives–as well as seven

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other collectives across the U.S. to compare against my findings in Los Angeles and start to get at
questions of generalizability outside of the city. As noted, collectives were chosen to include a range of
universities in different states, with different funding statuses (private versus public), different focuses
(research versus teaching), and situated within different communities (rural versus urban).
For each collective, every post, including comments, was screenshotted and uploaded to
ATLAS.ti. Every image was screenshotted for posts with multiple images (a carousel). I also looked at
any visible reels or highlighted stories from each collective. These were analyzed between February and
April 2022. Each collective’s posts ranged from 16 to 267 at the time of each analysis. Overall, I looked
at 804 posts. For the social media posts, open coding was implemented as the first stage of coding. Each
text was “examine[d] closely, compare[d] for relations, similarities, and dissimilarities” (Khandkar, n.d.).
I freely coded using initial coding, in-vivo coding, and descriptive coding. These three types of coding
induced an idea of what the data captured by the primary information either through direct quotation or
summarization of it. After coding four collectives, codes derived from this step were categorized into the
following: collective/organization, type of media/post, the genre of an event in the post, general themes of
content, images, and hashtags. In this coding round, the goal was to develop a comprehension of the
data’s emergent themes. According to Saldana, “idiosyncrasy is a pattern, and there can be patterned
variation in the data” (2003, p. 119). Thus, this coding round involved grouping codes that are similar,
frequent, correspond, and causation of one another, otherwise known as codifying (Saldana, 2009). This
step of the coding process initiated the development of a codebook (see Appendix B), which was then
used in conversation with the sixteen criteria of alternative media established. I looked holistically at the
codebook to understand the relationship between the use of social media and alternative media practices.
Throughout the analysis, I engaged in regular reflexive exercises (e.g., keeping a field journal) to track
moments and examples of this relationship.
Created Media
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire noted the possibility of the visual image to enable
people to think critically. Freire used line drawings or photographs (1973) to represent individuals’

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realities. Photovoice has expanded on this concept “so that the images of the community are made by the
people themselves” (Wang & Burris, 1997, p. 370). These methodological practices have been expanded
into a subgenre entitled “arts-based research,” which Jones and Leavy define as “any social research or
human inquiry that adapts the tenets of the creative arts as a part of the methodology” (2004, p. 1). Dónal
O’Donoghue (2011) has argued that giving participants artistic freedom also allows them “to work on an
edge and between borders of the familiar and the emergent create new possibilities for knowing and
working together differently” (p. 649). Fenge et al. have incorporated expansive creative approaches that
allow participants to engage in art, music, drama, sports, myths, and storytelling (2011). In the case of van
der Vaart et al.’s research in a Dutch village, they held “a hands-on creative workshop” (2018, n.p.).
Following van der Vaart et al.’s lead and given the broad definition of media within my project as
an “intervening substance” (Morley, 2005, p. 212) rooted in its relationship to temporality and lack of
ephemerality, I did not want to limit my participants to a particular medium. Instead, I asked them to
choose, letting me know in advance what materials to provide. I put the creative workshop in
conversation with Ruth Levitas’ argument of utopia functioning as a method (2013), and the exploration
of future re/disarticulations individuals imagine for the university. I asked the participants to create media
that represented imagined embodiments/reflections on “the abolitionist university.” This theme was
chosen both to expand on the final question of the interviews: “What do you think an abolitionist
university would look like?” and to follow Selman and Farrow’s suggestion that “the utopian
imagination” can be used “to enable abolitionist consciousness to overtake the racial capitalist regime”
(2021, p. 400).
In Utopia as Method, Levitas argues for a method she terms “the Imaginary Reconstitution of
Society or IROS” (2013, p. xi). The IROS Levitas argues functions “as a kind of speculative sociology”
that looks to “processes that are already entailed in utopian speculation, in utopian scholarship, and in
transformative politics” (2013, p. xiv). In the context of the 2008 recession and the ever-growing global
ecological crisis, Levitas argues that “change is both essential and inevitable” (2013, p. xii). She argues it
is not the utopia that is impossible, but “to carry on as we are…our very survival depends on finding

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another way of living” (2013, p. xii). While abolition is often framed as utopian, I follow Levitas’
argument that we should understand utopia as “the expression of the desire for a better way of being or of
living” (2013, p. xii). Despite abolition as utopian often being framed as a critique (Shelby, 2022), I
confidently situate this project and all research I participate in as utopian. As discussed in Chapters 5 and
6, all the collectives understand their work as rooted in producing utopian thought, and the prefigurative
practices that create “everyday utopianism” (2013, p. xiii). Levitas argues that Utopian methods ask us to
think “differently about what constitutes knowledge.” They offer us both knowledge of possible futures
and pathways to reaching them.
As earlier noted, knowing the workshop was happening in a separate academic year from the
interviews, which meant many of my interview participants would have graduated, in November 2022, I
reached out to all abolitionist student activist interviewees, inviting them to create media as part of the
project. They were given two options of engaging with creating media that embodies/reflects on “the
abolitionist university” for the project, either—as some participants are no longer in Los Angeles—on
their own before the end of January 2023, or at a workshop in Los Angeles in January 2023, where they
would collectively create a piece of media. Five original interviewees chose to participate in the workshop
and brought thirteen additional participants. Participants were compensated $100 for their time–following
the same compensation logic of the interviews and accounting for one hour of travel time and the threehour workshop–via Venmo or Zelle. A meal was also provided, and transportation/parking was
reimbursed. Eighteen participants participated in the workshop: eight from Southern California
University, six from the University of Los Angeles, and four from California College. No participants
from Los Angeles College joined us. Nine participants were current undergraduates, five were recent
alums, and four were graduate students.
During the workshop, individuals were first asked to introduce themselves, sharing whatever
information they felt relevant. We then spent 90 minutes creating collages/zine pages that participants felt
reflected on “an abolitionist university.” During this time, I moved round the room and took notes on the
conversations I heard. Finally, after the workshop, students were sent scans of the zine pages produced

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and an optional google form to fill out,
6 six participants filled it out. As the media-making workshop
happened after interview data had been coded, I first used the codes and themes established from
analyzing the interviews to compare the created media. Media was thus manually coded via selective
coding to identify manifestations of an abolitionist university that emerged during interviews. I then
allowed for new concepts and categories grounded in participants’ experiences to emerge (Charmaz,
2006), using open and axial coding procedures to expand and refine grounded categories (Strauss &
Corbin, 1998).
Limitations
There are five key limitations to this research project. Firstly, it is not generalizable to broader
populations or contexts, and thus the results may not be applicable to other settings. I follow Alasuutari’s
belief that generalization should not always be a focus for qualitative research, instead it can offer “local
explanation” to produce “classifications, conceptual tools and explanations for different kinds of
phenomena” (1995, p. 144) from an informed position. Empirical research can then be used to understand
the generalizability of the explanations further. So, while not aimed to be generalizable, I do understand
the research as rooted in comparative work, not only through its discussion of private versus public and
research versus teaching universities but also through looking at collectives outside of Los Angeles to
understand Los Angeles as a site of articulation for broader issues being discussed by student activists
around the country.
Secondly, there is the role of subjectivity and bias within the research. As noted in Chapter 1, I
come to this research as someone who identifies as a student activist and understand my research as part
of the reflexivity of my own organizing work. Given, the inherent subjectivity of interviewing as a
method, as well as my own interest in the topic, I recognize and reflect on the subjectivity throughout the
process instead of attempting to meet an unachievable goal of objectivity. Finally, I understand the data
6 Questions included: 1. Do you have any thoughts on an abolitionist university you want to share that you didn’t get to during
introductions? Or any new ones that came up during the workshop? 2. Anything you’d like to share about your zine page? 3.
Anything you’d like to share about anyone else’s zine page? And 4. Did any emotions/thoughts come up during the workshop
(about the workshop) that you want to share?

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collected as truthful to the participants involved during the interviews through its focus on “discourse as
knowledge, not language” (Bonham & Bacchi, 2017, p. 688). Focusing on the subjectivity of the involved
participants, the cases discussed are not necessarily representative of abolitionist student activists as a
whole–though I have attempted to begin the conversation of representativity through an analysis of other
collectives’ social media with very different states and locations variability. This inclusion was partly to
allow the reader to make their conclusions around the analytical utility of the information presented. As
will be addressed in the conclusion of the dissertation, the main factor informing replicability is the
dissolution of many of the collectives. This research represents a particular point in U.S. history (2020-
2023) where the COVID-19 pandemic aligned with the growing Black Lives Matter movement to cause
abolitionist movement discourse to enter the mainstream. However, details of method procedures have
been included should a similar moment arise, and a comparative analysis wish to be done.
Third, is the time, resource, and skill requirements asked of by action research. The cycles of
planning, action, observation, and reflection present a challenge, especially when looked at alongside
deadlines and limited resources presented by the dissertation process. In part, this resulted in my choice to
study a community I was already engaged with, and thus would have fewer barriers of access. Though,
despite this, ultimately I was only able to get 17 of the 20 planned interviews (all three were with
members of LAC). One of the results of this was the hindering of the conclusions from comparing
university focus. As discussed in Chapter 4, I saw some critical themes led by a university’s
private/public status and research/teaching focus. These themes included the rhetorical use of “for the
people” by public universities to frame them as a public good instead of the apparent prioritization of
wealth, lack of transparency and accountability, and the misuse of autonomy noted at private universities.
An investment in limiting critical conversation away from nuance in teaching-focused spaces, as opposed
to the extraction of knowledge for production and commodification seen at research-focused universities.
While I do believe the findings of private (10 interviews) versus public (7 interviews) and research (10
interviews) versus teaching (7 interviews) are applicable, understanding the intersections of these
categories with only two interviews from a public teaching-focused university is not.

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Next, in addressing validity and reliability limitations of this project given the emphasis on
context-specific and dynamic interventions, I return to Gerring’s general criteria for research design. In
addressing plenitude, this project is not aimed at finding some kind of “objective truth” around how
education functions but instead focuses on the voices and perspectives of abolitionist student activists in
their understanding of the role of the university and education in comparison to normative rhetoric around
the role of education and the university. It does so by looking at education alongside their centering on
carcerality as one of the primary crises in the political and state legitimacy of this conjunctural moment
(Hall et al., 2002). Thus, I follow Haraway’s argument for situated knowledge, understanding the
knowledge produced through this project as “about particular and specific embodiment and...not about the
false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility” (1988, p. 582).
A fifth and final limitation of my project, involved the textual analysis of social media. As I
included analysis of content produced at universities other than the four I conducted interviews with, I do
not have access to a broader context of the campus or of the production or distribution process outside of
what is included social media itself. For example, one of the main arguments made at Los Angeles
College was that the university continued to invest more money in policing than mental health
counseling, with an average of 1,900 students per counselor. The details of the university budget were
provided either in the image or text portions of the post, alongside a discussion of the university using the
rhetoric of a “budget crisis” to justify not hiring more counselors while hiring more police officers.
Conclusion
As noted in opening this chapter, the choice of methods was methodologically grounded in action
research through its commitment to a “participative-collective method,” “producing alternative content,”
“developing strategic thinking for broad political processes,” “building relationships and networking
connections,” and “opening knowledge” (Fuster Morell, 2009, p. 28). Data collection that allowed me to
interact with participants (interviews and the media-making workshop in particular) and the usage of
theoretical analysis grounded me in these commitments. In hoping to both articulate the relationship seen
by abolitionist student activists between universities and carcerality alongside the ongoing attempts by

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individuals within the university to break the articulation, to disarticulate the university from carcerality,
and to understand how the university may be changed or rearticulated (Slack, 1996, p. 114), this project
has used thick description to “draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts”
(Geertz, 1973, p. 28) through its analysis of media and social media alongside the interviews and created
media. Methodologically, then, this project engages in “the work of listening” to those resisting it to
understand how the linkages are “already being forged” between the university and the carceral, how they
are continually circulated, and where they “are coming apart” in Los Angeles (Clarke, 2015, p. 284).
The data collection for the project focuses on a range of sites of student activist voice: the
interview, media analysis, social media analysis, and media creation. They also prioritized the utopian
“desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively” (Levitas, 2013, p.
xi) through the centering of abolition in the theoretical analysis. While these voices are almost entirely
limited to students in Los Angeles–with some exceptions via social media–they allow for a deeper
exploration of place and educational institutions’ “intimate relationship” to place (Coultard &
Beasamosake, 2016, p. 254). This specificity has also allowed for an exploration of institutional form to
understand what if any, difference an institution being private, public, research-focused, or teachingfocused makes. Insights from these four sites have allowed for a richer picture of the articulation(s)
between the university and carcerality and the utopian breakages envisioned by abolitionist student
activists. In the next chapter, I turn to look at the connections abolitionist student activists draw between
carceral logics and the university, and how these carceral logics limit study.

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Chapter 4. The Carceral University
Introduction
In this chapter, I turn to answer the question: the questions: (1) Do abolitionist student activists
draw connections between carceral logics and the university? If so, what connections do abolitionist
student activists draw between carceral logics and the university? And how do they draw connections? (2)
Do universities use carceral logics to enable their “mode of study” (Meyerhoff, 2019a)? If so, why? (3)
How can carceral logics limit study? And (4) What role do abolitionist student activists see university
education playing in producing social change? First, using interviews with student activists, I establish a
definition of carcerality that will then be used throughout the dissertation. Next, I turn to how the
interviewees see the role of the university, both as it should be and as it currently is. Then I turn to
findings around the carcerality students see at the university as tied to (1) space, place, and location, and
(2) relations and pedagogy. Finally, I examine whether the focus of the university affects how carcerality
is found within it.
Defining Carcerality
Before asking interviewees to discuss whether they saw carcerality in their universities, I wanted
to establish how they understood carcerality and what interviewees meant when they said they did or did
not see carcerality within their institutions. Six clear themes emerged from this question that carcerality
involves: controlling people, forcing people to conform to the status quo, maintaining structures of
oppression, punishing people, creating avenues to dispose of or eliminate people, and dehumanizing
people. Most students named it as tied to systems of incarceration, but this came up alongside all other
themes, though it most often occurred alongside a discussion of punishing people.
Emily specified that carcerality is centered in “abuses of power...the commodification of people,
and this control that keeps people who are powerful and then takes advantage and makes use of bodies
that are less powerful.” Sophie discussed carcerality as “directly intertwined with the US’s system of
incarceration” but went on to add that “there is a broader sense of carcerality in how carceral logics have

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seeped into so many different institutions that we often don’t see the way in which they’re intertwined.”
She went on to give the medical-industrial-complex, child protective services, and education as examples
of other sites carceral logics emerge, highlighting in particular that these are part of “the carceral state”
and they trickle “into our everyday interactions in terms of how we police and surveil one another.” She
further specified that schools having “funding for metal detectors and school officers versus over artproviding funding for art classes and extracurricular resources” is an example of how controlling people’s
access to resources becomes a priority of the carceral state. Alessia furthered this discussion of control of
resources, stating that not only does it involve being physically “boxed in” but that it also involves “a
boxing of your abilities and agencies of thinking,” as carcerality gives people in power control over
How much you can fantasize or be able to think of your future or what you want in the moment.
How many thoughts do you have to suppress because they simply are not possible. They willyou’ll receive some punishment of some kind, or you’re even violently within your own head
about it because it’s so unimaginable.
Andrew and Nico connected this control to a desire to conform to hegemonic power structures.
Andrew stated that carcerality includes “all the informal and formal institutions of the state and the
society which aim to discipline, punish, and regulate folks’ behavior that don’t conform to hegemonic
norms.” This definition ties back to Foucaultian understandings of power and the rise of the prison as part
of a broader growth of discipline as a system that produces subjected, practiced, and docile bodies (1995).
Nico argued that the current system uses prisons to avoid “providing resources to tackle the root causes”
of criminalized behavior, such as poverty, racism, and discrimination. He argued that it does so to hide
these social problems and, thus, the failures of our current systems from the general population. Fiona
described carcerality as the “sociopolitical-technical-infrastructural condition that reinforces systems of
oppression and division on a very large scale,” and highlighted that, in particular, as discussed in Chapter
2, carcerality is tied to anti-Blackness given the prison industrial complex’s connections to slavery in the
U.S.
Notions of oppression and punitivity were often tied; for example, Avery named carcerality as
“how punitive and oppressive something is.” Derek focused on the ity suffix of the word, noting that it

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meant “carcerality should describe something like a condition or state of being or practice or a policy.”
He argued that the primary condition of being carceral pertains “to punishment and harm and violence
that has [been] systematized and sanctioned by a larger entity.” Elisa named carcerality as “a system that
operates in a punitive way of thinking/being” and that in the U.S., it serves as a political ideology
“independent from data or just evidence that actually aligns with safety, forms of care, and how to protect
people.” Olivia also looked at carcerality systemically, naming it as “practices, institutions, ideologies
that relate to punishment, criminalization, and the carceral systems.” Grace understood carcerality as a
broad system tied to “punishment and exclusion, control and surveillance.” Finally, they also noted that
the key to carcerality is that it “doesn’t allow for growth, it allows for domination and elimination from
your community.” This role of elimination came up again and again with students. For Armando, this
elimination was a process of kidnapping. For him, carcerality means people “against their will being
kidnapped based on arbitrary laws that were created,” he specified that it had played a key role in
colonialism via the incarceration of Indigenous leaders. Andy understands carcerality as “a way of
eliminating folks…it’s a really great way of picking and choosing who you want to be there next to you.”
He highlights that because of human bias, carcerality results in “eliminating the most marginalized” and
gives the example of prisons disproportionately incarcerating Black people as evidence of such.
Naomi and Sonya named disposability–as discussed in Chapter 2–at the center of their definitions
of carcerality. Sonya said she considers carcerality “in terms of disposability and isolation.” It offers a
logic that “not everyone is deserving of certain things…that some people are not worthy and can be
disposed of in our communities.” For Sonya, carcerality goes against her fundamental beliefs and
practices in her everyday life, as she is always thinking about
How can I expand my capacity and my community’s capacity? How can I bring people closer to
me when things are hard rather than pushing them further away? How can I help build that in
others? How can I challenge systems that push people out when they’re in need rather than
pulling people closer?
Sonya went on to note that disposability thus not only takes people out of our lives, but it means “we
don’t think about them, of punishment, of punitiveness.” She added that it often feels like “an easy way

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out” that “doesn’t address the root issues.” Similarly, Naomi stated that her understanding of carcerality is
“very intimately linked to disposability and the concept that our response to mistakes made…is
punishment.” She noted that this disposability is tied to the belief that “there is something fundamentally
wrong with that person that’s beyond repair,” thus, they inherently deserve punishment. Like Andy and
Fiona, she noted that carcerality can be “traced back to anti-Blackness” and the “dehumanization of whole
groups of people including enslaved African Americans.”
Nico also found carcerality as having created a hegemonic ideology that everyone incarcerated is
a bad person, and in doing so, it can criminalize people for trying to survive. Nico specified that “the
people that actually commit crimes, who I think are criminals, the CEOs, the billionaires–that are robbing
society, and creating this type of system, this unequal system–they’re not considered criminals, and why
are they not considered criminals?” He noted that once he realized this, that the people viewed as harming
our society are free, while those trying to survive are incarcerated, that was when he “realized that the
whole system, it’s a joke…It’s just there to lock people up like animals, cage them like animals.” It is this
treatment of people as animals that Nico names as dehumanizing to both the human psyche and body.
Carcerality, Nico argued, is what trains us to forget people “are our neighbors, they are [the] people that
we live with, when you go to the grocery store.” Instead carcerality trains us to see “anyone as a potential
criminal,” and thus trains us to view anyone as less than human.
The Role of the University
Interviewees were first asked how they understood the university’s role today via the questions
“What do you think the role of the university should be? And what do you think the role of the university
currently is?” While many answered these in opposition to one another, several key themes emerged.
Regarding what role the university should play, students named providing education, functioning as a site
of autonomy and agency, protecting and supporting students, providing resources–including both
“knowledge-based resources [and] material resources,” providing a university for all, and building
community–including addressing current displacements the university has caused. Only one student
named the university to be doing any of these things–Elisa highlighted she felt protected and supported

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within Chicanx/Latinx studies, and as will be discussed in more detail, Alessia, Andy, and Sophie did
note the role the university had played in their political education. However, they viewed that as the
exception rather than the rule to the university’s role. The rest of the interviews found that the university
is rooted in investments in capitalist individualism. As I go into below, across the interviews, students
argued that the university is exclusionary, serves as a gatekeeper of knowledge, and conditions students
towards professionalism. Andy, Andrew, Emily, Fiona, and Nico noted that the university functioned as a
business and debt-maker, selling dreams to students for high costs and prioritizing its wealth
accumulation.
As A Provider of Education
When naming what they believe the university’s role should be, most interviewees first named
the university as a provider of education. However, many argued that what they meant by education
differed from how they see education currently functioning in the university. As a Public Policy and Law
student at SCU, Avery noted, “I think it should be more just about learning what you enjoy and enriching
your mind” instead of “proving you can do the work.” Nico, a Chicano Studies major at LAC, similarly
argued that the university as a place for learning could be defined as “a place where a diverse group of
people come together, engage in critical discussions on contemporary issues, also historical issues, where
it just makes- it prepares the individual, not only to engage in the world around them but know their place
in the world.”
Collaboration in learning was vital for many students; Sophie argued that the university should be
“a place for students to learn about issues they care about, to build connections, build community with
fellow students, fellow professors, who do research or teach in those similar areas,” and with surrounding
community members. Literature in higher education shows most students view attending higher education
not as a place of learning or community-building but as the expected next step (Feige & Yen, 2021;
Henderson-King, 2006; Maisuria & Smith, 2023), a requirement to gain employability via skills
acquisition (Astin et al., 2002; Feige & Yen, 2021; Glass et al., 2021; Henderson-King, 2006; Maisuria &
Smith, 2023), and a space for personal growth (Feige & Yen, 2021; Glass et al., 2021; Henderson-King,

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2006; Maisuria & Smith, 2023). Studies on broad student populations have found that wealthier students
at more elite universities understand education as personal growth, whereas poorer students at local
universities tend to focus on employability (Glass et al., 2021; Maisuria & Smith, 2023). These class/elite
differences were not found among interviewees or their perceptions of their universities.
As A Site of Autonomy and Agency
Interviewees understanding of how education should function strongly differed from most of their
experiences of how education functions. In particular, multiple interviewees explicitly named that they
believe the university should serve as a site of autonomy and agency for students, with Sonya defining
education as a “sense of freedom to explore and challenge and create.” Elisa noted that the university
should “protect and support students…to ensure that we have a model of education that suits our interests,
and our life aspirations, and a healthy and safe environment.” However, these students believe the
university as it currently stands often restricts autonomy. For example, Derek noted that despite
universities espousing support for free speech, often in formal guidelines, they will also release protesting
guidelines and punish students who break those guidelines–often under the guise of safety. Derek argued
that their doing revealed “some level of authority in the university law that restricts free thought” and saw
it was primarily administrators restricting student and faculty thought. Emily stated that the university
should support traditional students in learning to be adults “but then also learn and have more freedom to
choose what they want to learn and have that agency.” This theme of choice over what students are
learning came up with Grace also, where they noted that they wished the university could “be a more
open place, in which we have more choice and to- self-directed- just being able to learn literally whatever
we want and to be supported.” Highlighting, in particular, that the opportunity is valuable even if it will
not lead toward a career or financial improvement. Instead, it is simply “putting your energy into
something that you’re interested and passionate about.”
As A Gatekeeper
Interviewees argued that when the university did function to produce knowledge, it served as a
gatekeeper to that knowledge. Sonya, an Asian American Studies & Organizational Studies major, stated

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that while her experience had been overall positive with professors “who really do try to challenge the
hegemonic norms or the dominant ideologies, and allow students to have a lot of space to explore,” she
did not believe that to be the case with all universities. Noting that often in other universities or
disciplines, “it’s much more of like ‘this is the way you do it, this is the theory that’s correct and been
proven.’ And it’s more of a you’re getting poured knowledge into rather than you’re generating and
creating knowledge and frameworks and possibilities together.” Her take on how the university
approaches knowledge ties to Paulo Freire’s banking method, which argues that education currently
functions through teachers depositing information to a student, who must then memorize the information.
Freire argued firstly that “implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between
human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the
individual is spectator, not re-creator” (1990, p. 62), and thus it lessens their humanity, dehumanizing
individuals. Freire then argued that it is through the banking system that the oppressed are taught to
prescribe to the oppressor’s systems, as the banking method “anesthetizes and inhibits creative power”
and “attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness” (1990, p. 68). In gatekeeping what
knowledge is accessible to students, the university continues to view itself as the depositor of information
and the student as a receptacle, dehumanizing them and prescribing the oppressor’s system.
As Run for and By the People
The role of the university as a provider of resources came up both in regard to education as a
resource but also in terms of non-intellectual resources, with Andy noting that it should provide a “safe
space for students to go and get resources and get the training they want to get and get the help they’re
supposed to need.” Fiona expanded the idea of who the university should be for when she argued that it
should redistribute “knowledge-based resources [and] material resources.” The question of who the
university serves came up repeatedly in interviews, with multiple students naming it should be “for the
people.” Fiona said the question “Who does the university actually serve?” comes to mind when asked
about its role: “It should be for the people and for the community and for learning and fun.” Armando and
Froggy both argued that the university could create a bridge between those in positions of power and

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those in the surrounding community. Alongside the surrounding community, interviewees also named the
university’s complicity in settler colonialism, with Naomi arguing that the university “has a duty, at some
point, to return that land, and to, in the meantime of returning that land, try to figure out how to, I think
coexist, and give space to the indigenous people in the area, but also, to the communities that the
university has displaced through its procurement of land and how they’ve continued to build.”
Derek also believes the university should be “more democratically run,” not just for the people
but by the people. He noted that while there might be “a need for some people to be shepherded by a
teacher...I don’t think that dynamic has to characterize the whole university…I think there could also be
room for other types of power dynamics where it’s more equal or egalitarian.” Derek also noted that
based on his later experiences at a private university, his meaning of “for the people” did not just refer to
admissions. However, to whom the funding and research of the university serve. He highlighted that at
both public and private universities “there’s a lot of grant funding from the military and the government
that ultimately is in service towards national security and things like that. So, to me, that university is for
the state” rather than the people. In doing so, he references the long-held argument that the state is defined
through its monopoly over violence (Lenin & Chretien, 2014 [1918]; Seigel, 2018; Weber et al., 2009),
and the armed forces and police serve to act as “violence workers” (Seigel, 2018, p. 10) and “the humanscale expression of the state” (Seigel, 2018, p. 9).
As Conditioning People Towards Professionalism
Derek’s interview was the only time an interviewee named the current role of the university as
serving state interests; this may be because of Derek’s Ph.D. in Higher Education and, thus, a more
significant understanding of the university. However, it was connected through arguments that tie to
Marxist theorists’ notion of the state’s role in maintaining capitalism (Lenin, 2014 [1918]) when
interviewees argued that the university serves to train and condition students to be obedient workers.
Grace stated, “As it is now, definitely it’s designed to condition people…to be able to exist in our society
as productive producers, to profit and also to submit to the hierarchy.” They tied this conditioning to the
lack of choice, the enforcement of structure, “instilling obedience to authority,” and students

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“unknowingly becom[ing] comfortable with having our autonomy be restricted in these ways.” This
perspective reinforces what educational scholars such as bell hooks (2003) and Subini Annamma (2016)
have found in the ideological reproduction of education. Sophie argued that the university breeds a “very
individualist mindset of building students towards a career, thinking about always further networking,
always further thinking of the next future steps, but about which ways are gonna make the most money,
which ways they’re gonna set themselves up for, for the career that they want and think you’re going to
succeed in.” In doing so, she believes universities fail to get students “to critically engage in why they’re
doing that work.”
The notion of the university as “for rich people” came up repeatedly in interviews, particularly by
students attending private universities, as students discussed the exclusionary nature of the university,
with Derek noting that “right now higher education is very exclusionary, exclusive, and it’s very
authoritarian.” This notion was often tied to interviewees’ understanding that the university’s goals were
wealth accumulation, extraction, and hoarding. Emily argued that the university is “just this money
machine that doesn’t actually care about its students.” An argument Nico backed up when he stated that
“it’s a very profit-driven corporate type institution, its sole purpose is to make money. And as such, its
purpose is to recruit as many students as they can.” While Emily attends a private university, Armando,
Andy, and Nico attend public universities, and all make a similar argument. Armando argued that the
university is “an exploiter, an opportunistic exploiter, we’ve seen, especially during the pandemic, of it
basically ripping students off of their education.” So, while both students saw wealth accumulation as a
goal, private university students understood this wealth as accumulated by individual students. In
contrast, public university students understood this wealth as transferred from the government to the
university via debt.
As An Extractive-Exploitative Dynamic
Andrew, who had majored in International Development Studies and was currently in the process
of getting his Ph.D. in American Studies, also noted that not only does the university accumulate wealth
from and through its students, but it also extracts it from the surrounding community. Andrew referenced

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Davarian Baldwin’s scholarship, noting there is an “extractive relationship between the university and
neighborhoods that it exists in. Basically, it accumulates- having access to public funds and public
services yet not contributing via taxes.” Baldwin’s book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How
Universities are Plundering our Cities examines how universities take from and shape cities, reinforcing
their colonial and white supremacist legacy. Baldwin writes that
colleges and universities have become city managers that, along with producing educational
services, also discuss students as consumers, see alumni as shareholders, and imagine the world
beyond the campus walls as either prime real estate or a dangerous threat to the brand. (2021, p.
13)
Andrew highlighted the critical role police play “in this extractive-exploitative university-community
dynamic.” He gave the example of the University of Chicago, where security guards hired during urban
renewal efforts “were instrumental in demolishing buildings where Black folks were and expanding the
power and reach of the university.” The role police play in extracting from the surrounding community
and sustaining the university’s property and wealth was repeatedly raised by students about why they
believe abolition to be the method of change in reconfiguring the university. Froggy also brought up the
university as reinforcing a colonial and white supremacist structure; he said he believed universities to be
“a reflection of the racist roots that our country was founded on, in terms of separating people or even
giving value to people versus devaluing other people or dehumanizing other people.” As earlier noted,
this theme of dehumanization is vital to the interviewees’ definition of carcerality.
Students brought up endowments when discussing the university’s wealth hoarding. Fiona
critiqued the university’s choice to hoard money when they could use it to meet community, faculty, staff,
and student needs. She noted that her private institution is
Just sitting on the world’s biggest pile of money. And I don’t know what this is for. Why are
[they] hoarding- or holding on to this giant endowment? When there are very active present needs
and concerns that the people who make up this community in terms of staff and faculty and
students, and then the surrounding community, there are very apparent needs or ways that that
wealth can be used to make the world better.
Andrew also brought up the endowments, stating that “even at public universities, the endowments are
something that folks don’t really think about much. And these universities in these systems have access to

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billions and billions of dollars.” Charlie Eaton has argued that endowments at the most elite private
universities in the U.S. “have almost uniformly grown by 500 percent or more in the last forty years”
(2022, p. 55), to the point where they now function as hedge funds. Meaning while the university presents
itself as a provider of class mobility, the vast majority of wealth is hoarded within a few universities,
which Eaton notes benefits a small and well-off undergraduate student population who are primarily “the
children of donors, board members, and others from similar backgrounds” (2022, p. 73).
As A Dream Seller and Debt-Maker
The connection between the university and wealth brings us to the interviews’ next theme: the
university as a dream seller. Andy noted that when growing up, people think of the university as where
they will go to get educated, with the promise that they will “make these millions of dollars, right? Or
just…make a lot of money with the bachelor’s or master’s degree, right? Well, I think the university sells
this dream, but it’s not necessarily true for everybody.” Andy argued that if the university was going to
“sell this dream that folks get an education and their life is set” without providing job placements or job
guarantees, then they were selling a falsehood. Andy’s use of both “sell” and “dream” is interesting here.
The dream is not an education but a dream of class mobility or stability-depending on where the student
starts. This dream is tied to the university as a debt-maker or interlocutor of debt between the student and
the government. This role has received national attention over the past decade, with the rise of the Strike
Debt Collective out of the Occupy movement and the 2022 Biden-Harris Administration’s Student Debt
Relief Plan, forgiving 73,600 people up to $20,000 of government student debt (U.S. Department of
Education, 2024). Andy, a student at the least expensive of the universities, noted that he knew if he went
to an expensive university, “I’m gonna come out with all this type of debt, you know, and I don’t want to
come out with that stuff. And with no guarantee of employment.” He said he thinks “that’s one thing that
the university fails to do,” meaning they fail to communicate the financial burden of education. This
burden, many interviewees reiterated, goes against public university’s claims to serve the public, or as
Andy put it, the university “should be there for everyone.” This understanding of debt as an individual
burden, and thus the student as an “individual customer to a single institutional provider for a specific

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service in the present,” negates the historical role of education, which understands education as rooted in
a “social contract whereby each generation contributes to the education of future generations” (Collini,
2017, p. 239), understanding each learner, and each university as “part of the world of learning” that
requires “the work of many people over many generations in many other institutions” (Collini, 2017, p.
239). Debt is also tied to the subversion of student resistance. In 1967, then Governor of California,
Ronald Reagan, justified growing tuition fees at the UCs under the belief that tuition would help “get rid
of undesirables.” According to Ray Zeman, Reagan stated, “Those there to agitate and not to study might
think twice before they pay tuition. They might think twice how much they want to pay to carry a picket
sign” (1967, p. 1).
For A Good Political Education
Multiple students highlighted the university’s role in their radicalization and political education.
Alessia argued that “I don’t think the university is necessary. I think what’s necessary is good political
education,” but shared that she felt she had received some of that political education within the university.
In acknowledging the university’s role as one possible site of political education, but one that generally
serves privileged students, the interviewees highlighted who gets to learn about systemic issues and
violence through theory and who gets to learn it through experience. Andy also highlighted that much of
that radicalization happens outside the classroom, in student organizing or community services spaces,
stating that “the university is this place where people come and learn about building together, equality,
and inclusivity…the university itself doesn’t always uphold those ideas.”
Elisa and Sophie noted that while political education is rarely sanctioned or upheld by the
university, that knowledge can be communicated in smaller departments, programs, or classes. Sophie
noted that as part of her university’s Critical Action & Social Advocacy (CASA) program, she challenged
the normative structures of education and research by focusing on working “for the community instead of
with the community.” She went on to say that for her, programs like CASA represent “what the role of
universities should be” because they create a space “for students to engage with issues in a more ethical
way, to be able to foster community and push back at often with the neoliberal forces of the institution.”

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Sophie’s belief is also reflected in a rhetorical question about the university’s role Fiona asked during her
interview: “If we’re not here to make the world better, I don’t understand what we’re doing?”
The university’s role in creating pockets of radicalizing spaces also came up in answer to the
second question. When asked, “Do you believe that the university is the best place for learning?” Andrew
replied that during his undergraduate experience, he learned a lot “about organizing, about applying for
funding. About institutional power.” However, he went on to say, “now that I think about it, none of the
things that really stick out are things I learned in the classroom.” he noted that the most exciting sites of
learning allowed him to be in community with other like-minded people, “being able to learn and build
with them, and not necessarily because of the institution [but] in response to the institution.” As discussed
by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, regardless of whether the university intends to create radicalizing
spaces, these radical spaces, or “undercommons” as Harney and Moten refer to them, must be understood
as part of the impact of the university, creating a place for subterfuge, where “subversive intellectuals
engage both the university and fugitivity” (2013, p. 9). This, they argue, allows individuals to be “in but
not of” the university (2013, p. 26), because “it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge,
and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment” (2013, p. 26).
In Opposition to Alternative Learning Spaces
Most students said no, they did not think it was the best place for learning, though many offered
examples of alternative learning spaces or conditions as to whom it could be the best place for learning.
Andrew stated, “It can be for some people…But with a lot of folks that get overlooked in these- in
universities, like the non-traditional students, the formerly incarcerated students, the folks that are foster
kids. I think that universities have a way of continuing the inequities and inequalities that exist within the
broader community.” Andrew thus reiterates the university’s role as an exclusionary space even when
more individuals are allowed in. Sonya highlighted that “everywhere is a place for learning, and…it’s
really important to validate and honor knowledge that happens outside of a formalized university setting.”
Doing so, she argued, allows us to question who we view as experts and recognize lived experience and
storytelling as legitimate forms of knowledge and theory production. Alessia also looked to organizing

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spaces as a primary site of knowledge production, naming the education campaigns of the Black Panther
Party as evidence of “alternative spaces where you can still learn without having to be through a
university.” She specified that she would love to see more examples of alternative educational spaces
outside the university, and radical faculty in particular, taking their knowledge outside. Alessia specified
that this was part of her vision for abolition, to try to “create alternatives outside of the state, to fulfill
needs, and problems that often are just fake anyway- propped up by the state.”
Andy highlighted alternative educational spaces, such as the workforce development training
program he was involved with, where many people can learn. Noting that while he “used to think that
university was the best place to learn some stuff…I would say there’s a lot of other places where people
specialize and thrive, you know. And I think that’s definitely one of them, the union and the trades.”
Andy, Derek, and Nico noted that while the university serves as a site for particular kinds of learning,
they did not believe it to be the best place for learning. Making a similar argument to McMillan Cottom,
Derek noted that while he did not think it was the best place for learning, he believed it provided “a better
credential” than other for-profit spaces. Olivia noted that while she did feel she had “learned in part from
my classes,” she also felt some of the most impactful sites of learning she had experienced included
internships, off-campus work, and clubs and organizations she partook in. While this argument is in line
with much of the work on experiential learning (Keeton, 1976; Kolb, 2014; Kolb & Fry, 1974), outdoor
learning (Dewey, 1916; Prakash & Esteva, 1998; Ward, 1995), and more critical lines of research such as
the unschooling movement, culturally we continue to associate schooling and formal education with
learning and study. Nico and other students went on to specify that not only did they not feel the
university was the best place for learning, but that it plays an active role in limiting learning. I will return
to this theme of the limiting role of university pedagogy later in this chapter.
Elisa noted that she found the university to “be a very restricting place.” She noted that at her
liberal arts school in particular, “it can oftentimes feel really hard to ask a question, or to push back on an
idea…that it seems like everyone is in agreement with, because there’s this fear of getting canceled, or
having the wrong opinion.” This form of social behavior limiting learning is different from Nico’s

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argument around the structural limitation but can also reflect a systemic issue in the limitations of the
university. Interestingly, these critiques mirror conservative criticism of the university that it is too
“politically correct” or, in more recent years, “woke” (Arnold, 2019; Boggs et al., 2019; Mandelbaum,
2020; McKie, 2018; Montegary, 2022). While reflecting the refusal to engage an orthodox versus
progressive binary, this critique also results in claims of crushing of academic freedom despite, as Abigail
Boggs has shown, that academic freedom has always been constrained and selective (2020).
Froggy said that not only does he not believe the university to be the best place for learning, but
that “a lot of times, academia is publishing things that people already know.” He argued that academia is
often 30 or 40 years behind community theorizing. However, because they “gave it an academic term,”
academics get “romanticized as these incredible, smart people” when in reality, what they are theorizing
“for a lot of people, it’s common sense, common knowledge.” He then noted that the role he believes the
university plays is constructing and upholding systems of expertise through constructing credentials
rather than knowledge. Froggy, here, is making a similar argument to Gramsci’s argument of the organic
intellectual (1971), alongside arguments others have made around activist scholarship. For example,
Charles Hale’s introduction to the edited collection Engaging Contradictions notes that “as nearly all the
chapters in this book point out, activist researchers learn an enormous amount from the activists with
whom they work” (2008, p. xx), Hale goes on to point out that academia often ignores “the activist
origins of theoretical innovation” (2008, p. 23).
Some students, such as Emily and Naomi, did believe the university “can be a great place for
learning.” However, they argued that it was dependent on the individual. Naomi argued that the university
is “a really good place to formulate your thoughts and view existing contradictions.” Emily said, “I think
that we are programmed to believe that the university is where we go after high school, but that’s not
necessarily the case for a lot of people. Some people would benefit from going the nontraditional route.”
Emily’s statement aligns with research showing middle and upper-class students understand the
university as “the next step” (Feige & Yen, 2021; Henderson-King, 2006; Maisuria & Smith, 2023) the
implication of the university as the “traditional route” is worth analyzing further. As of 2022, the National

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Center for Education Statistics saw 40% of 18-24-year-olds enrolled in college, suggesting, for the
majority of people in the U.S., not going to college is the traditional route. With 55.3% of 18-24-year-olds
employed in July 2022, arguably the workplace remains the primary form of continuing education postHigh School in the U.S., but whether it is understood as such is up for debate. While learning in the
workplace has been explored by scholars for decades (Bowen & Drysdale, 2017’ Rosen, 1972; Wenger,
1998), the ideological work of the workplace is generally assumed to be identical to the ideological work
of society and not targeted by conservative critiques in the same way universities are. In the U.S. this of
course can be seen through individuals primarily being viewed as “human capital” within the workplace
(Becker 1964, p. 1). Bowles and Gintis have critiqued the concept of human capital, arguing that it
disappears the role of labor power, thus attempting to eliminate class (1975). Despite this critique, human
capital remains one of the most engaged economic theories. Bowles and Gintis’ critique notes that while
they agree that evidence indicates “schooling enhances worker productivity” (1975, p. 75), they argue this
is because it “legitimates economic inequality by providing an open, objective, and ostensibly
meritocratic mechanism for assigning individuals to unequal occupational positions” (1975, p. 78),
ignoring the maintenance of class hierarchies it justifies. As discussed in Chapter 2, Bowles and Gintis
argue that class is the primary structure being maintained by educational institutions and that “race, sex,
age, ethnicity, and formal credentials…are used to fragment the workforce and reduce the potential
formation of coalitions within the firm” (1975, p. 76-77), a focus on carcerality rather than capitalism
allows us to understand that capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems
that reproduce domination use both educational institutions and the workplace to objectify and control
people.
Sophie caught on to this complicated definition of learning, adding, “it depends what you mean
by learning.” She argued that if in the humanities and social sciences we mean “theorizing issues- classes
as a way to have all the right language all the right tools to understand these complex social issues,” then
“that’s often what higher education is doing.” However, Sophie also raised the role of praxis, adding that
she saw a “real disconnect between students being able to talk super, super eloquently about these social

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issues, and then actually learning strategies to organize to fight for social change, or doing direct action
work that has real genuine implications.” She highlighted this was not to discount the importance of
theory and drew on the work of bell hooks to discuss how theory can create a foundation for
understanding and serve as “a site of healing and a place for healing,” especially for those with the lived
experience of issues being discussed.
As A Producer of Individual versus Collective Change
Avery, Elisa, Grace, Nico, Olivia, and Sophia agreed that changing society should be the
university’s primary role. Elisa noted that she felt this especially true given “the amount of resources that
[universities] have in terms of money [and] connections.” Sophie agreed, arguing that she has learned
“there are so many ways to appropriate institutional resources” towards organizing for social change.
Nico agreed with this, mainly that historically there “used to be spaces where people could come
together,” such as in their neighborhoods or workplaces. However, those neighborhood spaces have “been
decimated, just suburbia and destroying of urban environments for profit like speculative houses
practices.” The workplace “has been decimated, just with union protections being chipped away
throughout the years.” Nico argued that the university has thus become one of the few last places where
people “can actually come together and talk about these things in a constructive, critical way.” Nico
argued that creating those spaces where ideas can be discussed, and people can educate one another is
central to how we envision the future of our society. Grace highlighted that currently, when the university
does claim it teaches to change society, it does so in a very individualistic way. While at universities,
“you can become a better human individually,” that does not mean “you’re making material benefit
changes to other people.” They thus argued that if the university continues to claim it teaches to change
society, it needs to start thinking through what collective rather than individual change looks like.
For Whose Society?
Andy, Derek, Emily, Fiona, and Naomi stated that while they believe the university should teach
to change society, such a concept raises difficult questions about how and who decides the new society’s
goals. Naomi cautioned that while she did believe this should be a goal of the university, it “is going to be

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the goal on the right side too,” so the goal of changing society can only work if it is principled in a
collective understanding “of what it means to transform a society.” Derek’s opinion pushes back against
Grace’s argument for collective change. As Derek pointed out, “the university’s not a person,” so while
he believes “that society can change from what people learn at the university,” he thinks that “so many
people will teach, and many people will learn, and they’ll have their own goals and ends with that, and
those goals and ends could be different from what was stated” so ultimately for change to happen, the
university needs to function as “a democratic space” with “equal power relationships in the university.”
Andy noted that the university’s primary function should be “to change ideology…especially the hateful
ideology...the anti-Black rhetoric or the sexist oppressive type of culture that still exists.”
Interviewees were then asked if they believed that the university does teach toward changing
society. Alessia, Andrew, and Avery all stated that it does not. No one said they believed it did, but most
students said there were pockets in the university that taught towards changing society. Andy named the
Latin American Studies program and the Ethnic Studies program, highlighting “departments that really
focus on race, gender, sex, class,” and the academic work they produce “really helps change society.”
Grace, an American Studies and Ethnicity major, argued that they feel like their field “does teach me
towards changing society,” mainly via academic readings that Grace has then been able to “put in line
with the direct organizing I do within my community.” Sophie highlighted a class she took called
“Practicing Abolition Democracy” that was structured around “a space of co-learning, co-creating, where
it really pushed back at the model of other classes that I’ve taken before” where she and fellow students
were able to work on a project related to enacting transformative justice at the university. Sophie did
specify that she thought this kind of work to be “uncommon” as she has been in a class where “all I’ve
been taught is how to write a really good paper, how to sound smart in discussions, how to challenge
people’s ideas, in not always productive ways.” Sophie does not seem to connect these practices to
changing society.
Derek stated that while he felt he had learned how to change society in his university experience,
he thought only some people learned how to. Derek also did not think “everybody comes to learn that.”

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Instead, as discussed in Chapter 2, he argued that many people come to “maintain the status quo.” Even
when these individuals are exposed to alternative ideas, Derek thinks they can “still leave thinking in a
very oppressive way or behaving in a [sic] oppressive way.” Avery argued similarly, stating that the
university “teaches much more to adjust students to the status quo.” Noting that in her Public Policy
Major, she felt they were “very willing to recognize that there are problems, but they’re very
uncomfortable addressing root causes of those problems, or challenging government systems.” Fiona
made a similar argument, stating that when discussing the university as a whole, she would argue that it
“works to maintain centers of control and maintain our heteronormative hegemonic society.” She noted it
does that “through conditioning behavior and space, and carcerality.” Not only through maintaining a
police force but also “in terms of the normative codes of behavior and conditioning and relationships to
each other and to work and to labor, and the ways that it reinforces particular modes of being that
reinforce this normative white supremacist model of society that we’re in.” Students clarified that the
primary role they felt the university took on was maintaining society and power structures as they are.
As A Punishment Structure
Finally, when discussing the university’s role, interviewees were asked, “What would you most
like to change about the university?” Unsurprisingly, many students said they would like to see the end of
campus policing. Fiona named it the “easy answer,” and Derek noted that
There’s a lot of investment in punishment structures that somehow get called something else, like,
“Oh, this is for safety. Oh, this is, you know, to help you socialize and our looking out for you.”
But ultimately, it’s still a form of authority that can hurt people.
He argued that all universities should look at their structures that involve or result in harm before asking,
“Are there practices that universities should stop doing?” instead of their usual efforts to ask, “What can
we do better?” He noted this is because it is much easier for institutions to admit they could do something
better than to ask, “What should we stop doing?” and admit they have done something wrong.
As A Redistributor of Resources
Most students discussed wanting to change who had access to which resources. For example,
Armando again said he would like to see the university population reflect the community in which it is

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built. Alessia stated that ending private universities would “take away a lot of violent institutions in one
fell swoop” as well as play a role in the correlation between wealth and access to more resources and “a
better education” or “a better-named degree.” Andy, Froggy, and Elisa argued that they would like to see
the university be free. Grace made a similar argument, but not much around the cost of the university, but
the accessibility of it. They highlighted that the education you have access to growing up affects your
education later in life. The admissions process should “be a lot more informed based on systemic issues.”
This question also raised conversations about the overall redistribution of resources by the
university. Derek noted that in the way the university works, “the word poaching comes to mind,” as
students “already have to pay to go here, and then you have to pay to park here, then you have to pay to
live here.” He went on to highlight that during his time as a graduate student living in graduate housing,
the university had repeatedly increased the cost of rent without increasing his stipend and that in doing so,
the university created a “weird cannibalism of sorts” but one that does so through Derek, where “it’s
eating from me. It’s giving me money to eat from me with the money that it gave me.” So, an initial small
step Derek saw, especially at SCU, was that everything other than tuition should “be free or very low
cost, and at least not increase year after year.” Derek went on to tie that to the university’s inability to
look at issues structurally, naming that, for example, when it came to food insecurity, instead of forming
and fundraising for food pantries, “why don’t [universities] just lower the cost of food? Or give students
money to pay for the food?” Thus, Derek argued that a structural analysis of university issues would
allow them to implement structural solutions rather than relying on their current individualistic models for
problem-solving.
Andrew named similar issues, stating he would like to see the university “compensating folks,
supplying students with secure housing, [and] making sure students don’t have housing insecurity or food
insecurity.” He highlighted that these practices at ULA felt particularly upsetting when we “pay fucking
football coaches $5 million.” This argument that the issue is not universities lacking resources but where
they choose to distribute them came up repeatedly in the interviews. Froggy brought up that he would
like to see the university “give people with lived experiences, the same type of expertise, treatment, as

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professors.” Part of this, he argued, involved having the surrounding community have a say in who was
hired as faculty and administrators at the universities in their neighborhoods, and that they could play a
role in grading students work, to better enable students and community connection. Andy highlighted the
irony of hiring more and more police officers at LAC when what students need and are calling for is
access to counseling and psychological services. Fiona also noted the need to redistribute resources “at a
broader social scale.” She envisioned “reallocating DPS7 resources and developing new systems and
structures of accountability and transformative justice and centers of healing.”
As A Redistributor of Power
Systemic university responses to violence also came up in my interviews with students from CC,
where many of them had been involved in the project centered on enacting transformative justice at the
university. Elisa, Olivia, and Sophie said they would like to see the end of Title IX, which Elisa states is
“not survivor-centered at all.” Reflecting similar arguments made by Sara Ahmed in 2012 and 2021,
Olivia highlighted that in their research, they would come across “a lot of institutional barriers and
limitations,” which sat in contrast to the “social justice-oriented rhetoric and language” used by the
university on these issues. Sophie said that she is “ultimately going to try to…advocate for a full-time
position of a restorative justice practitioner on our campus,” hoping that that person could serve as a fulltime answer to addressing structural change at the university regarding interpersonal harm and sexual
violence.
Alongside the redistribution of resources, students also said they would like to see the
redistribution of power at their universities. Elisa said the administration had been “harmful towards
Black and Brown, and first gen low-income students,” particularly regarding resource distribution and use
of punitive policies. She argued that they are “just doing things to benefit the trustees, to benefit the name
of the school instead of actually caring about the lives of students.” While students did not name how they
7 DPS is SCU’s Department of Public Safety.

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would like power redistributed, the recurring theme of desiring a university by the people implies far
more democratic governance from students and community members.
This change also resulted in a desire to see the university play a more active role in community
and collective building with its students and neighbors. Avery said she would like to see her university be
“an institution by and for the surrounding community.” She feels all universities “should see themselves
as there to change society and truly be an institution for the community, not just for outsiders.” In doing
so, she critiques her private university’s role in bringing in people from outside California and outside the
neighborhood surrounding her university, including herself. Naomi asked for even less, saying she
“would want the university to stop playing an active role in destroying different communities.” To explain
what she meant by destroy, she noted the land they take up, including via “expanding or encroaching into
different communities,” gentrification, displacement, research that furthers policing and surveillance
infrastructure and technology, investing in “companies like BlackRock, and in having hands in Israeli
apartheid.” Naomi understands the university as actively harming not just the neighborhoods surrounding
her university but neighborhoods worldwide. Sonya said she rejects university ideals of being a good
student, instead measuring herself by asking questions such as “How am I showing up for my
community? How am I showing up for myself? How am I showing up for the community outside of the
colleges? Is what I’m doing sustainable? Is what I’m doing contributing to a larger movement or a larger
purpose?” Noting that this goes against the individualistic mindset of the university. She would like to
see the university “be more of a collective, where it’s more about supporting each other, and how we can
learn and grow from each other.” She highlighted that a university centered on the collective would go
against many of the ideologies and practices of the university as it currently stands, such as curved
grading systems, which she sees frequently at her university.
As Getting in the Way of Your Education
Grace, Sonya, and Nico said they would like to see the university be a space of learning again.
There is a consensus among most interviewees that the university was focused on learning as its primary
goal at some point, but that is no longer the case. Sonya highlighted that she would like to address the

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“structural things in [the] university that put stress onto education and put standards onto education that
take away from learning and actually create stress in ways that are counterintuitive to learning, growth,
and creativity.” She went on to paraphrase a Mark Twain quote shared by a friend, to make sure did not
“let school get in the way of [her] education.” The connections between carceral education and
counterintuitive practices are discussed later in the chapter when looking at Relations and Pedagogy.
When discussing how the university could be different and precisely how it could do less
destruction, Naomi stated, “But would it still be the university if it wasn’t that? … I think that’s what the
university’s scared of.” Whether the university is still a university if it is not “playing an active role in
destroying different communities” is ultimately at the heart of Abolitionist University Studies. If U.S.
universities have always been complicit in colonialism, slavery, genocide, and war, would they still be
universities without these things? Or would they be something else entirely?
Space, Place, and Location
In looking at themes around answers surrounding space, place, and location, I have included
students’ answers to five questions:
1. Do you see carcerality within the physical layout and design of the campus?
2. Do you see carcerality within the campus’ relationship with the surrounding community?
3. Do you see carcerality within housing?
4. Do you see carcerality within public safety on or off campus?
5. How do you think the location of your university affects the way it engages in carcerality?
As noted in Appendix A, these questions were not given in the above order but interspersed with other
questions about the university’s relationship with carceral practices and ideologies. In their answers to
these questions, several recurring themes tied to David Sibley’s notions of geographies of exclusions
(1995) came up: the effect of COVID on the carceral practices of the university, carceral university
practices’ of isolation, the role of funding and finances in the carceral practices of the university, the
entwined relations between gentrification and the university’s carceral practices, and the treatment of
unhoused people as it relates to this; the very literal gatekeeping of their universities from the surrounding

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community; the over-policing of students and communities of color; the framing by the university of the
police as the only option to meet students’ safety needs; racial profiling in technology by police the
mission of each police force and whether they serve their institution or the people; the role of surveillance
in modern day society; the active role the university plays in dismantling protest; and how lack of access
for people with disabilities plays a central role in carceral ideologies. Throughout this section, we see
Sibley’s argument that “the guardians of sacred spaces” that reproduce structures of domination “are more
likely to be security guards, parents or judges” (Sibley, 1995, p. 72).
Expanding Carcerality in Response to COVID-19
Many of the students interviewed noted that they believed their universities had become more
carceral in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with many noting they believed the university used
the pandemic as an excuse to further their control over people, to encourage students to conform to the
status quo and to justify the disposal and punishment of people. Grace and Avery, both students at SCU,
highlighted that “a lot of the entrances around SCU were closed off to the surrounding area,” Avery noted
she believed the university used the pandemic to “jump at any opportunity to exclude everyone but
students from the physical campus.” On the other hand, four students at CC highlighted how COVID-19
was used as an excuse to punish working-class students of color at their university disproportionately.
Alessia noted that students were given an evacuation notice when the pandemic hit, and no one was
offered any help paying for flights despite the sudden evacuation. She noted that student collectives “had
to really fight to keep students allowed into emergency housing,” and get the university to understand
how a sudden evacuation financially impacts students. Elisa also mentioned that many students at her
university were asked to do weekly COVID tests, and if you missed three in a semester, you were
suspended. A clear example of the university attempting to control people, force people to conform to the
status quo, maintain structures of oppression, punish people, and create avenues to dispose of or eliminate
people.
Sonya brought up the same policies at CC, noting the ripple effects of taking away students
housing that “doesn’t take into account the complexity of people’s situations” and argued that the

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university’s “solution is to remove and punish rather than to address the need.” Sonya also named the way
she saw carcerality in the “confinement of ideas” that removing people from their housing is “the only
way to protect the community.” This confinement, she argued, is
A failure to imagine what can exist beyond that because there’s so many things, and I think that
that is what I try to bring to the campus is- or, in conversations with people, is: there’s always
another way, there’s always something else that we can do, and there’s always a root cause, and
that we can look to instead of just punishing the behavior.
Alessia also highlighted that COVID restrictions had been used to make community building and
organizing more difficult, as in-person club meetings were banned on campus. She noted that this rule did
not apply to student-athletes, so the COVID restrictions seemingly targeting specific student collectives
that questioned the status quo, including the abolitionist collective she was a part of, felt “like a carceral
act.”
Practices of Isolation
Olivia noted the relationship between isolation and her university’s carceral logics. While many
universities, she noted, seem to have been “plopped in the middle of a poor neighborhood, and then
fenced off,” her university was in a wealthy town surrounded by much poorer communities. Olivia ties
this to how many students attend university in “a whole different area/neighborhood, and you know
nothing about the history, nothing about the people, the community, you’re just there to learn and leave.”
This mentality, she argues, is extractive, disconnected from the community, and tied to disposability. She
mentioned that when you look at prison sites, you see that “we put people we find disposable, or we
considered disposable in land that we consider disposable,” and then forget about them. This argument is
similar to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s aforementioned assertion that governments have deliberately built
prisons to use financial capital, land, labor, and state capacity surpluses that were not going anywhere
(2007).
Olivia argued that prisons and universities both use isolation techniques to maintain our current
society, but in very different ways. So, at her university, “the school creates that isolated container, in a
way that’s supposed to be like a beautiful bubble and positive,” Despite this, she “wouldn’t consider

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isolation or any of these characteristics that- necessarily positive or great and especially when you look at
it in the context of the prisons you’re like, ‘that’s awful.’ But here we are reproducing these things and
trying to pass them off as good.” Olivia raised essential questions about how individuals get isolated into
temporary communities in prison and university. However, the mark that these experiences leave on
them, and their resumes differ significantly.
Turning Safety into a Business
Many interviewees brought up the role of funding and finances in the carceral practices of the
university to maintain the university’s current operations. Andy noted that when he looks at public safety,
he does not “see safety, I see a business,” arguing that campus police stop and ticket students or prioritize
parking violations primarily to grow the university’s finances. Nico highlighted that universities could
give students substandard housing because they are “gonna stay there for a year, two years tops, and
move away. And then we just assume it’s someone else’s problem.” Relying on student turnover and lack
of agency allows the university to prioritize growing university finances over meeting students’ basic
human needs. Olivia named similar issues in housing at her university, arguing that it “centers profits and
punishment as opposed to care.”
CC students Alessia, Elisa, and Sophie brought up where the university puts its money. Elisa
noted that “the school still donates to private prison companies or to people that are donors of private
prisons.”8 Alessia raised that many of the “industries popping up to support anything related to college
students, college parents…are directly exploiting those in the surrounding area.” Moreover, Sophie said
that their campus dining halls used to be run by Sodexo, a French food services and facilities management
company that, as of 2022, fully managed six prisons in the U.K. and provides food, maintenance, skills
training, education, and programs in 84 other prisons in nine other countries (Sodexo, n.d.). After ten
years of student activists organizing, the university dropped its contract with Sodexo.
8 While my own research has not been able to confirm this, I have been able to confirm that CC has accepted donations from
individuals funding policing and prisons. CC does not publicly share its investments and did not respond to a request for more
information on their investment policies.

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Gentrification in/by the University
Students tied these carceral logics to not only maintaining current structures of oppression but
expanding those structures through gentrification, which disposes of or eliminates people from the
surrounding communities by prioritizing the university’s needs over the peoples. Alessia noted that she
sees students as going in to “suck up all the resources [and] run rampant.” Highlighting that, particularly
with the pandemic, many students still came and lived in the town despite classes being online, and they
“spread COVID like wildfire.” Sophie, also a student at CC, raised that even before the pandemic, the
university’s expansion “to provide more student housing off-campus has displaced the surrounding
nearby predominantly Latinx community.” She brought up how the surrounding community pursued legal
avenues, but that “ultimately the institution has a lot more funding and a lot more money and a lot more
legal support, to be able to win those battles time and time again.”
Students at SCU were particularly concerned about their university’s role in gentrifying the
surrounding community and how that led to the forced displacement of many long-term residents. SCU
was initially built in a wealthy white neighborhood. However, various policies and immigration changes
in California made the neighborhood a majority Black community by the 1940s and a majority Black and
Latine community by the early 1990s. In response to racial unrest in the 1990s, the university published
its first Strategic Plan. In it, they listed “environmental threats” to the university, which included:
Los Angeles: The dangers of continuing instability in SCU’s immediate neighborhoods, along
with Los Angeles’ other problems, are detrimental to the continuing success of the university.
Issues include crime, poor primary and secondary education, unemployment, urban blight,
weakened families, and natural disasters.
In characterizing the city as a threat to the university, they positioned themselves in opposition to the city.
Following the release of the strategic plan, SCU began purchasing land surrounding the university,
closing local businesses, and replacing them with mainstream chains, which they felt better reflected the
needs of the student population.
Fiona noted that she understands that “campus centers consolidate power and exclude and push
out people from the surrounding community,” but that she believes that given the supposed ethical goals

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of the university, they need to be more reflective on their complicity in doing so. Emily argued the role of
real estate profit-making expanded past the university, as because of it, property management groups “are
seizing property and then increasing surveillance and adding more cameras and security.” Avery, Derek,
Emily, and Grace also highlighted SCU’s role in pushing the narrative that the surrounding community is
“dangerous.” Grace brought up that because of the “social capital and power of being SCU students, we
are able to sort of shift that away and take away the autonomy from these [surrounding] communities,”
but part of that power requires that South Los Angeles is “produced and framed as being high crime and
dangerous,” as it justifies much of the university’s spending on campus policing and on displacing
neighbors, as these actions are “deemed more acceptable and actually wanted by SCU students or families
because there is this notion that it’s protecting us from the outside community that is inherently violent.”
Derek agreed, noting that maintaining the rhetoric of the surrounding community as dangerous
contributes to the university being walled off from its surroundings, and then having a police
force to keep people safe, and then try to remove or detain people who could be “dangerous” to
the students from the perspective of the university. And then I think with the expansion of
university property beyond the formal campus, it just further allows the police force to expand the
boundaries in university into these little pockets and then allows the police to further have a reach
on and off those property lines too, as well. I think this university wants to keep itself an island
within its location rather than being more integrated and open.
Derek and Emily tied these choices by the university to the legacies of redlining and structural racism that
have led to higher crime rates in South Los Angeles (see Anders, 2023; Bloch & Phillips, 2022;
Comandon & Ong, 2020). All of the white participants named their whiteness in protecting them from
many of the more explicit forms of policing on campus, such as being stopped by officers or being at the
end of extra surveillance. Avery noted that she did not believe this narrative of associating Black and
Brown communities with violence to be exclusive to her university but that it is prevalent for universities
in big cities to market “their divide against the “scary” Black neighborhood around them.” This statement
aligns with Davarian Baldwin’s argument that most universities now “imagine the world beyond the
campus walls as either prime real estate or a dangerous threat to the brand” (2021, p. 13). SCU students
saw SCU as doing both by understanding gentrification via the real estate market as the solution to the
“threat” presented by the poor and working-class communities.

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Literal Gatekeeping
Students often tied this conversation around gentrification to the literal gatekeeping of their
universities from people in the surrounding community (see Dizon, 2023b; Sherman, 2020). Andrew
noted that, despite attending a public university, “the role of policing in managing and order within the
community has manifested in the removal of houseless people.” He noted this seemed rooted in the
location of ULA in a predominantly wealthy and white neighborhood, which he argued contributed to an
ideology of insiders and outsiders, where the university believes they “have to regulate who rightfully
belongs here.” Andrew brought up the murder of Karen Toshima in 1988, which contributed to the idea of
historically “safe” neighborhoods no longer being “safe” in Los Angeles. Andrew’s argument reflected
the understanding at the time that gang violence was leaving ghettoized neighborhoods in Los Angeles,
and wealthy, white neighborhoods were no longer safe (Alonso, 2020; Viator, 2020). Media attention
revealed that many white and wealthy people in Los Angeles were comfortable with violence happening
in other parts of LA as long as it did not affect people who looked like them (Alonso, 2020; Viator, 2020).
Andrew noted that the location of Toshima’s murder was used to justify racialized and classed ideas of
who the police were to protect and who they were there to police, perpetuating the dehumanization of
communities of color and prioritization of white safety above all else.
Nico, who attended both ULA and LAC, one in a predominantly white, wealthy area and the
other in a predominantly Latine and working-class neighborhood, noted the visible differences in his
experiences. In the latter, he lived a five-minute bus journey from school and felt part of the community,
but in the former, he had to drive many miles to get there. Nico noted that as he could not afford the
parking pass, he had to park in the surrounding wealthy community, and he often found his car had been
vandalized in these wealthy neighborhoods. Whether intentional or not, he ties it to a “feeling of these
people that historically have been allowed in these institutions seeing you and making you not feel like
you belong here.” He brought up his experience of residents in these neighborhoods crossing the street to
avoid him and the emotional exhaustion and feelings of ostracization that come with that experience.
When discussing his experience at LAC, Nico noted that while he felt more like he belonged there, he

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saw little engagement with the surrounding community. Nico stated, “Even though some students might
come from that community, it just doesn’t feel like the university itself is doing anything to be an
environment where the community feels like they’re proud to have that campus in their community.”
Andy noted that he had heard that LAC was trying to market to a predominately white and wealthy
neighborhood rather than the surrounding community. This connection–that when students felt they
belonged in the neighborhood, the neighborhood still felt separated from the university–reflects the elite
divide still created by the university, presenting the surrounding community as less worthy.
This divide between the campus and the surrounding community was even more heavily felt by
the students at private universities, who repeatedly named the very literal gates that kept them apart from
the surrounding neighborhoods. Emily noted that the fences around SCU’s campus and the expansion of
the campus into a gated “village” played a crucial role in “gentrifying the neighborhood and kicking out
the family-owned, South-Central-owned businesses in favor of corporations.” Even though the “village”
is advertised for the broader community, only students live in it, and “it’s gated and closed after 9 p.m.”
Fiona brought up that “the giant fences and gates and walls” reinforce the narrative of their university as
an unsafe area. She highlighted that before she came to the university, “so many people warned me about
the surrounding community and where to live.”
Furthermore, when they arrived, Fiona saw how that divide played out, in “a noticeable shift in
the landscape” when you enter the university. However, she did not see a materially unsafe community
surrounding the university, but one that was under resourced. Fiona highlighted how the university
presented itself as “some benevolent savior coming into the community and making it better,” but because
of the gates between it and its neighbors, the surrounding community is “never actually represented or
given a chance or a presence on campus.” Emily noted a similar relationship, highlighting an example
when the Community Advisory Board9 held listening sessions for students and community members but
9 SCU had received a recommendation to form a Community Advisory Board for their private police force in 2015 but had not
followed through. In the wake of the 2020 uprisings against police, SCU’s President implemented the Board as “an independent
voice advising the university on best practices regarding safety, policing, and the engagement of DPS with our community”
(University Communications, June 11th, 2020). Notably, abolitionist scholars Richie et al. in a resource released two days earlier,

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held them during the day meaning very few community members could attend. She notes that when they
can attend university events, “it doesn’t seem that South Central residents are being listened to at all.”
Emily noted this often resulted in a condescending attitude from the university towards the surrounding
community where they claim, “We know what the surrounding community wants. And we’re already
doing that,” but that seemed to be rarely the case.
Avery and Grace, students at SCU, both raised that not only does the university exclude the
community materially, but they do so ideologically. Avery noted that the neogothic architecture of the
university exists to “exude elitism” and is “very intentional to be really defined from South Central.”
Grace brought up that the university uses the rhetoric of the “[university mascot] family” to maintain
ideological divides. They note that it is an exclusive family that includes “students and staff and faculty
and alumni,” but “it doesn’t necessarily include its positionality of being in South Central in that we’re
surrounded by a lot of working-class people and Black people and Hispanic people and other people of
color.” Despite having charter schools primarily composed of students of color “right across campus,”
these students are never framed as part of the university’s “family.” Instead, they seem to prioritize “Who
do we benefit by including in our family?” and “In what ways are we able to increase our likability by not
including our surrounding community in terms of bringing in more people that SCU thinks will contribute
to their campus.” Grace then went on to clarify that by “contribute,” they specifically believe the
university means “financially and economically” because the benefits they are most interested in benefit
them in the “long run in terms of power and capital rather than people who could actually understand the
power dynamics.” This argument backs up the fantasies and realities of university-community
relationships, as Baldwin (2021) and Baum (2000) discussed.
named the flaws of Community Accountability/Review Boards as “merely symbolic” and lacking the power to make systemic
changes in policing (2020, p. 2).

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Concerns for Order, Control, and Restriction of Movement
Students repeatedly raised the work the university does to control members of the surrounding
community, both via literally gatekeeping the university from them but also ideologically excluding them
and then policing them when they do enter the campus. Derek named how they use the gates to “close
off” and “demarcate space,” both for who should not be entering the campus and where campus police
patrol. Derek also raised that as part of his work in the abolitionist collective on his campus, he had found
out the gates were recent; they had been built in the mid-1990s, possibly as a response to the 1992 Riots
(see the earlier conversation of SCU’s 1994 Strategic Plan). Derek highlighted that campus police hold a
Memorandum of Understanding with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which means they can
“punish and surveil and detain…literally anybody who’s not affiliated” with the university. Alessia raised
a similar issue at her university, which houses multiple colleges, one of which is a historically women’s
college. She noted that you often “have to take these weird routes” on campus because of the boundaries
between colleges, and “it’s like a fortress around” the historically women’s college, reinforcing methods
of control around different individuals.
Grace also highlighted this was a choice, as in their experience with a university in their
hometown, students and community members “can walk through campus without having to be stopped
for entry, there’s no specific entrance and there’s more free movement.” Elisa and Olivia both brought up
that campuses limit access to the campus itself and resources on the campus. Elisa highlighted that
bathrooms on campus require codes to access, and if students let outside community members use them,
they “can get in trouble.” Olivia mentioned that there are “punitive responses” if students violate rules
around access to university property. In doing so, she notes, the university “doesn’t put forward some of
the needs people might have and doesn’t necessarily center the people who are looking for these
resources, rather it punishes those who “misuse” the resources.”
Tied to this, many students, particularly those formerly incarcerated, raised the “prison-like”
nature of the space. Armando noted that “there’s some spaces on campus like internally in terms of their
brick walls, right, even some of the bathrooms the way they’re structured and designed is very like a

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prison.” He referenced a conversation with a student, who told him they thought using cement in campus
architecture was “very earthy,” whereas, for him, it only reminded him of prison. This argument about the
architectural connections between schools and prisons has been made by Frank Locker (Valencia, 2020),
Marianela D’Aprile (2021), Julia McFadden (Penny, 2021), Amber Wiley (2015)10, and Claire Latané
(Stanford, 2023). They argue that schools and prisons both feature “cold institutional design” because it
“is often the cheapest, fastest option” (Penny, 2021, n.p.). However, it is also because both perform
similar ideological work: crowd management (D’Aprile, 2021, n.p.) and “utilitarian concerns for order,
control, and restriction of movement” (Wiley, 2015, n.p.). This argument came up my interviews with
formerly incarcerated interviewees, all attending public schools. However, given the governmental
connection, it is unclear whether this connection exclusively extends to public institutions or whether
formerly incarcerated students would have made identical/similar connections at a private institution.
The Over-Policing of People of Color
Most students raised over-policing and profiling as part of the connections they saw between the
university and carcerality. Many students argued that Black and Brown students are disproportionately
policed and harassed by police (see also Dizon 2023a), but formerly incarcerated students pointed out that
it went beyond just race to those who were read as criminally involved based on their race, but also on
their hair and style choices, their tattoos, and the cars they drove. Armando, a formerly incarcerated alum
currently working with formerly incarcerated students at ULA, noted that many of his students “feel like
they’re heavily policed,” especially by other students. Furthermore, many felt reminded of the age
dynamics of prisoner-and-prison-guard when living in student housing where 20-year-old RAs are
checking in and surveilling them. He highlighted that at such a young age, we often see students willing
to reinvest in normative power structures, so when they take on “that role of power, they go and think
they should be snitching and reporting to the authorities.” He also noted that as someone who, while
incarcerated, had already spent time living in the same room as three other men, despite roommates being
10 Wiley has also put together a reading list on the connections between educational and prison architecture that can be found at
https://www.we-aggregate.org/piece/schools-and-prisons-further-reading

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viewed as a “traditional” part of the college experience, he was not interested in reliving it through the
structure of university housing. Avery, Elisa, Grace, Naomi, and Sonya said they had seen either the overpolicing of Black and Brown students or the statistics revealing the drastic over-policing of Black and
Brown residents. All interviewees who self-identified as Black or Latine noted either that they did not feel
safe around campus police or had personally experienced harassment by campus police. Armando
detailed how being targeted by police for not “looking” like a student was a recurring microaggression,
even when no violence happens between the student and officer. He noted a friend who always wore his
ID around his neck to lessen the hassle of being read as “not a student” while on campus11.
Nico brought up that campus police are a new and U.S.-specific phenomenon. He also
highlighted that he did not believe it to be a coincidence that campus police arose after the end of the
Civil Rights movement, “where more students of color started going into university.” Roderick Ferguson
draws this connection out in his argument surrounding the 1970 report of the President’s Commission on
Campus Unrest, ordered by Richard Nixon in response to the national student strike protesting the
Vietnam War, the American invasion of Cambodia, the killings of four students at Kent State University,
and the killing of two students at Jackson State College. The report recommends that every university
“improve its capabilities for responding effectively to disorder” (U.S. Govt, 1970, p. 12) while
strengthening “its disciplinary process” (U.S. Govt, 1970, p. 13). While also recommending universities
adapt to the changing “makeup and concerns of today’s student population” (U.S. Govt, 1970, p. 13).
Ferguson argues that these simultaneous demands resulted in both rhetoric of diversity and campus police
departments serving as institutional responses to student protest (2017).
Police are the Only Option
Nico noted that in other countries, and before police were on U.S. campuses, campus officers
were “unthinkable, unimaginable,” but now they are presented as natural and required. Many students
11 Jude Dizon has similarly found one tactic Black male students use on college campuses to avoid interactions with
police is wearing “clothing and items such as a backpack or a bicycle” to assert their university student “status and
distance themselves from crime” (2023a, p. 9).

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highlighted that their university presents the police as the only option to meet students’ safety needs.
Alessia mentioned that campus security is who you must call “if your bike lock is stuck…if you want a
lift from one place on campus to the other…if you’re transported, because you drank too much…if
someone’s too loud.” She stated that there is thus a limitation “on who you can call and reach out to,” The
university presents the narrative that Campus Security should be your first call (see Watkins 2020).
Olivia, Elisa, Sophie, and Sonya–all students at the same university–also raised the ubiquity of campus
security as an issue. Olivia called it a “one solution response to concerns over safety.” Elisa highlighted
that despite their name, they do not “promote a safe campus.” Highlighting that for her and other students
who have experienced police maltreatment, the police signify violence rather than safety, thus often
resulting in people avoiding using their “safety” services (see also Dizon et al., 2022; Johnson & Dizon,
2021).
Sophie said that something that stood out to her was that while in other spaces, such as alcohol
education on campus, the campus offers a contextualized notion of justice, one which understands
“people are going to engage in these explicitly illegal behaviors.” When some of those laws are broken,
they are handled in “pretty non punitive ways or punitive but not having these really long-term
disproportionate repercussions.” She noted that because of this, she has thought about how the university
can often serve as a “really weird bubble, where it’s like people are constantly catching these illegal
activities, and there’s often not the same consequences, or punitive responses as there might be outside of
these kinds of bubbles.” However, these bubbles are not evenly distributed among issues or students and
often can serve as very telling as to what the university’s priorities are. Sonya raised that while other
campuses may have their own police forces, her campus did not. They had campus security, who do not
have jurisdiction over non-students and, to her knowledge, are not licensed police officers. Because of
this, she does believe that Campus Security is preferable to the local police holding jurisdiction over the
campus if the campus has to be policed, but she would prefer “community-based solutions over a public
safety team.”

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Technological Surveillance
The students also understood the over-policing on campuses through the expansion of
surveillance on their campuses, primarily via surveillance cameras. Alessia noted this was particularly
true for students living on campus, where the university “control[s] every aspect of it.” Grace brought up
technological checkpoints around campus that required students to have their IDs scanned throughout the
day12. Emily brought up that off-campus housing also meant the expansion of technological surveillance,
as housing management companies had to produce “services” to justify their increasing costs.
Armando noted the vast number of cameras on campus, but also that it went past technology; he
referenced Foucault and how students surveil one another, mainly “where folks who do not fit the mold of
what a typical college feels like, there’s eyes on you, it feels like there’s always heavy sets of eyes on
you.” Andrew brought up a similar argument, stating that the student body often serves as a “conduit for
state violence” in their willingness–but mainly white students–to call the police on one another (see also
Suriel et al., 2024). Sophie also saw this “embedded system of student policing” as “explicitly
incorporated into the school culture.” Olivia, a student at the same university, saw the same issues,
particularly for Resident Assistants, and stated that “certain positions on campus have been influenced
either by society or by the school and job descriptions, to engage in carceral responses and to really
replicate some of those punitive systems.” In doing so, she noted, the institutions become limited in their
responses and their possible responses. Thus, the students saw carcerality not only in the technological
changes on campus but also in the ideological investments of the institution towards producing
disciplined subjects.
Property Before People
Finally, students saw carcerality in the practices of their campus police, namely that they
prioritized protecting personal property over people and stopping resistance. Armando brought up that
after a series of robberies near ULA, he saw an increase in surveillance in the neighborhood, and he could
12 These checkpoints have since been removed as they were part of the COVID-19 security measures taken on SCU’s campus.

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not help comparing it to his neighborhood “where those robberies happen on a daily.” He rarely sees that
kind of resource investment in his local community. Andrew highlighted those conversations with other
abolitionists often focused on “trying to figure out exactly what police do now.” As he argued, history
reveals that “police are there to maintain order and protect capital.” Derek also raised that as SCU’s
campus police served a private institution, they had “more power than the city police department because
they can be empowered to enforce state laws” and private rules. This he argued, is because their main
priority is protecting their institution.
Andrew, Nico, and Naomi claimed that this investment in protecting the institution rather than the
people could mainly be seen in the university’s responses to student protests. Andrew and Nico discussed
structural problems on campuses “designed in a way to prevent student activism…there wasn’t a central
square where people could come together and organize or do a protest.” Nico noted that on his graduate
campus, which has a more extended history of student activism, it felt like “the university is constructed
in a way that it’s like, ‘here’s a little space where you can do a little protest’. But it’s separate from
university. So, kids can just go around, can just go past it without having to engage in what students are
actually advocating for.” Nico found this pushing of dissent to the side jarring, wondering out loud, “if
not the university then where?” Naomi brought up the ever “looming” presence of police on campus, and
how they failed to protect her and other protestors at an event for a “far right-wing conservative” that
came to talk on campus. Because of this, to Naomi, police serve as a “looming threat” on campus.
Relations and Pedagogy
In looking at themes around answers surrounding relationships and pedagogy within the
university, I have included students’ answers to nine questions:
1. Do you see carcerality within the relationships between students and staff?
2. Do you see carcerality within the relationships between students and faculty?
3. Do you see carcerality within the relationships between staff and faculty?
4. Do you see carcerality within the way students are treated when they make a mistake or break a
rule?

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5. Do you see carcerality within the way knowledge is divided up into schools/disciplines/fields?
6. Do you see carcerality within the way classes are taught?
7. Do you see carcerality within grading methods?
8. Do you see carcerality within the kinds of degrees handed out?
9. Do you find any of your identities - such as race, gender, class, etc. affect your personal
experience of that carcerality?
As noted in Appendix A, these questions were not given in the above order but interspersed with other
questions about the university’s relationship with carceral practices and ideologies. In their answers to
these questions, several recurring themes came up: the framing of the police as a “resource,” surveillance,
the maintenance of hierarchies, the unequal power distribution between different groups, the limited
approach to learning, punitivity, a lack of accountability, and finances as a motivator. Students
highlighted the centrality of white supremacy, ableism, sexual violence, and the othering of formerly
incarcerated students to the on-campus relationships. Similar themes have been explored by Dylan
Rodríguez in his article “The Disorientation of the Teaching Act” (2010). Finally, students noted a few
methods of resistance they saw within their universities: inverse surveillance, collective power, and
supportive relations.
Police as a Resource
Derek noted that faculty are encouraged to call university police if they feel “they are being
threatened by a student,” which Derek highlights means that “by design, if people or someone feels
startled by somebody at the university, probably our most obvious response would be to then go to the
university, which would then entail a carceral response because it would probably involve the university
police.” He notes that many faculty are given no options but carceral options to engage if they feel
concerned for their safety. Mirroring broader policing trends, many Black, brown, formerly incarcerated,
and neurodivergent students are treated or seen as a threat to everyone else simply because they may fail
to meet normative standards of what it means to look or behave like a student. Not only are these students
viewed as less likely to belong on campus, but they are also viewed as disposable through the willingness

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to call the police on them, despite the now generally accepted fact that police are more likely to be violent
towards Black, brown, formerly incarcerated, and neurodivergent individuals. This supports findings by
education researchers about police treatment of students in K-12 education (Annamma, 2016; Annamma
et al., 2021; Shedd, 2015).
Gendered and Racialized Hierarchies
Many students brought up how gender hierarchies are reproduced in campus relationships with
police. Grace, for example, named that as someone who gets read as a woman, there is an assumption
when they interact with the primarily male campus police force that they are “less knowledgeable about
how these systems work and how they’re supposed to be functioning.” Sonya raised similar issues in her
experience, naming that she has had male police officers “try to intimidate me,” threaten “to come to my
home…or my workplace, [and] send me emails” where they will list my address and say, ‘Oh, I’ll come
at this time, or if you don’t respond, I’ll come find you’.” She has also had police officers contact her
workplace and talk to them about her. To her, this abuse of power is rooted in their power as state
representatives and gender and racial power dynamics.
This construct of belonging is one of, but not the only, way hierarchy is constructed within the
university. Alessia, Avery, Emily, and Grace, all students at private universities, noted how students treat
custodial and service staff as lesser than or invisible. Alessia noted that she sees a “horrible superiority
complex” at her university, which she believed was carceral because it meant that those who paid to be on
campus had the right to control those who were paid to be there. Emily mentioned an example when, in
the Summer of 2020, a “student on barstool13 bragged about getting one of the custodial staff in their
residential floor fired.” She described this relationship as carceral because “students will wield their
power and authority and their credibility of being a wealthy white student- to this man specifically, and
they have the power to get staff fired, and that’s their livelihood, and the way that they survive.” Fiona
13 Barstool Sports is a U.S.-based digital media company, that publishes sports journalism and pop culture-related content,
described as a site of “toxic hypermasculinity that celebrates misogyny and encourages cyberbullying” (Garcia & Proffitt, 2021,
p. 731). It has for a long-time targeted college students as part of its audience and has started a series of university-specific social
media accounts. E.g. @barstooltulane on Instagram.

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brought up a similar dynamic and noted that a lot of the administrative and custodial staff on campus
where people of color, older, and “from the surrounding community,” as opposed to students who are
primarily white, young, and from out-of-state, enabling a hierarchy of deservingness. Grace described the
fact that the custodial staff are “basically made invisible” reflects “another example of exclusion, and
elimination in terms of- these people aren’t really considered by the university part of the [university
mascot] family, even though they’re really the key parts of why the school looks the way and is able to
function the way it does now.” Grace also highlighted that these same people are likely to come from
communities more directly affected by policing and incarceration than the populations most students
originate from.
Faculty Power Over Students
Almost all the interviewees named the unequal power distribution among different groups at the
university, focusing on the power faculty hold over students, allowing for exploitation and control over
them. Andrew highlighted that this began in K-12 education but continued, if more subtly, in higher
education. Alessia and Avery highlighted the faculty’s choice to tie attendance to grades. Alessia asked,
“Are they even considering what it takes to be able to get yourself to wake up every day and go to these
classes? And fully be there, I’ve dragged myself to classes in really horrible states because I’m so terrified
of what will happen when I lose out.” She noted that this became even more pronounced as the pandemic
went on. Classes returned to being in person despite the ongoing spread of COVID-19. Avery said that
this choice often made classes feel very transactional, that you allow yourself to be controlled and receive
some form of payment in a grade.
Other students described grades as transactional and punitive, especially when tied to one’s
financial aid status. Olivia argued that “professors that can punish students for not showing up on time or
turning the work in” create power imbalances. Grace noted that they did see carcerality in grading
methods because grading “often relies on the fear of punishment for getting a bad grade.” Thus, grading
coerces students into doing work or showing up to class and encourages them to agree with the professors
in fear of retaliation. Nico named his own experiences with his grades being tied to his financial aid, and

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that because of this, he often felt faculty could hold his grades, and thus his financial aid, “as a form of
hostage” to coerce him into doing work their way.
Assumption of a Normative Student
Nico also highlighted how this presumption of the prioritization of grades presumes a specific
normative student once again, as he was working two full-time jobs while attending classes, it made
assignments even more challenging to manage. He also noted that when he started college as a 17-yearold, Nico could not ask for extensions or help from faculty, as he “felt trapped within me being this ‘poor
brown kid’. Just do as you’re told. Don’t bring attention to yourself. These are just the way things are.”
Thus, grades and their connections to financial aid reminded Nico of his place within his university’s
class and racial structure. Emily also brought up these racial power dynamics, naming how class
discussions can be “draining on students of color psyches,” particularly when participation grades lead to
“white people talking and saying harmful things” rather than reflecting on what they have to offer to the
space. Thus, she argued, professors need “to incorporate make space/take space” into their understandings
of participation and grading.
Alessia and Armando both highlighted being punished for “the smallest of things.” Alessia tied
this to disposability politics, highlighting how grades are often presented as this idea that if you miss a
single deadline, you’re no longer a worthy student and “the professor’s gonna lose their respect for you
also too, and that’s part of it. You’re losing social clout, you’re losing grades, and you’re losing your
ability to do it again.” This lack of second chances, in particular, was tied to carcerality for Alessia.
Armando connected this similar lack of leeway to “three strikes,” referencing habitual offender laws
(often called “three-strikes laws”), which, to him, reflects how we have brought carceral ideology into
schools. He named that, in his current position as a staff member who works with students, he often found
himself saying something like “I’ll give you two chances, the next one…” before realizing how he had
been socially conditioned to be punitive. Since realizing this, he has been “trying to stay away from
punitive practices that have been pushed on us” and instead offering restorative and transformative
opportunities to his students.

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Limited Approach to Learning
Sonya and Armando tied this power relation to the work of Paulo Freire, stating that often the
university reproduces the banking system “where the teacher is seen as a sole holder and creator and
knows everything about it, and there’s no exchange” (Armando), and that we think “of professors as
experts in their field versus students as empty vessels to be filled” (Sonya). Armando also connected this
relationship to a panopticon setup, where the teacher serves as “the Overseer [who] can see everyone, and
this is the person with the knowledge, the power.” Because of this, he did believe he could see the
carceral system embedded in most common pedagogical choices. Armando noted, “I like being lectured
to. I want to sit there, I want to take notes, I want to focus, right? Because that’s the system I’ve been used
to all my life, going to K through 12.” Here, he points to how this unequal power distribution connects to
disciplinary conditioning that limits how we envision ourselves as learners.
This limited approach to learning was seen by many interviewees, not just in grading techniques,
but in how we can learn, the construction of boundaries on what we can learn, what counts as knowledge,
the disciplining of how academics must research and teach, and who gets to be a student/teacher. Nico
also brought up Freire, connecting his experiences with K-12 learning to the banking system and how
being treated as an empty vessel is not just about educational knowledge but behavioral knowledge.
Because of this, Nico sees clear connections to the school-to-prison pipeline, where the priority is not to
“teach you to be a critical thinker” but to “teach you to follow the rules” and “that there are consequences
if you break the rules.” He also highlighted that much of the results of this is to emphasize that “those
consequences get bigger and bigger” so that as you get older, you understand the consequences of your
education (or lack thereof) are tied to your ability to be successful. This, Nico points to, teaches us that if
“we want a better life for ourselves, for our family,” we must be educated. However, he notes that we are
also implicitly taught that our class or race may stop us from being successful, as he argues that the
system conditions students to believe that poor and Latine students end up without an education or in jail.
He notes that he was automatically put in remedial classes in high school because he is Latino and poor,
which meant “all of my teachers were coaches…that was their goal, and then they just taught on the side.”

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He remembers being very aware that he was not learning anything in these classes and begging an
academic counselor to switch him to something that would provide stimulation. One counselor advocated
for him, and without her advocacy, he believes he would have believed those remedial classes were “what
school is” and been conditioned to believe he did not deserve an education. Nico went on to argue that:
The thing is, it is 100% tied to the carceral system because if you end up not going to college, for
many people, you end up working minimum wage jobs, struggling to survive, and struggling to
pay rent. That’s what leads people to resort to crime in the first place. That’s what leads people to
be criminalized. Because in this country, just being poor, you’re already criminalized. And so, I
think with all of that, the system itself perpetuates that. It plays a fundamental role in perpetuating
that inequality amongst- to divide- what leads to the more significant problems in society.
Nico shared how this alienating relationship with education continued into college, where he “didn’t
really learn anything.” While he often found the college classroom the only space many discussions
happened within, he found conversations in those classrooms to be “still limited, you still can’t really
have those discussions, because again, the purpose isn’t for you to actually learn or to critically engage in
these themes, topics, ideas, it’s more just you’re measured with grades and how you do in grades.” Nico
argued that even within the college, the goal is not critical thinking or engagement but measuring notions
of success via grades. Grace described how because “grades are deemed as make or break to your career,”
bad grades can feel punitive, arguing that students often feel like their life chances are detrimentally
affected by a single assignment. Olivia also described many policies such as “failures, zeroes, absences”
as “codified forms of punishment” as they try to “quantify learning and education and then punish those
that don’t meet the mark on some of those expectations.” Here, she connects grades to forcing people to
conform to a specific structure of education and how failure to do so can result in individuals being forced
down an avenue that seems to ultimately lead to them being cut off from access to middle-class society.
This approach to learning, as grade and discipline-centric, was also highlighted by other students.
For example, Fiona shared that once when she was TAing, a student asked if they could work on their
project outside, but “the professor freaked out at them and said, ‘No, sit down with your work’.” She saw
carcerality encoded socially in this example, where a student is being controlled for the sake of being
controlled. Despite students possibly being able to learn better outside, the professor turned them down

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without being willing to experiment. Naomi also gave the example of her brother, who has a very hard
time retaining information in the traditional way that it’s taught, does not do well in extensive classroom
settings…[and] the moment that he strays away from what’s expected in a classroom setting, that is
demonized, he is seen as disruptive, he is seen as dumb or non-caring.” She noted that he is an excellent
student one-on-one but is rarely allowed to learn that way, as large group learning is the norm. Finally,
Avery highlighted that she sees a cultural norm around “thinking about mistakes” where it is “really easy
to just label and punish, as soon as you see a mistake, versus wanting to confront why that’s happening.”
Here, students connect the pedagogical approaches to learning within (and outside) our classrooms to
carcerality, where control and conformity are prioritized.
Limited Approach to Knowledge
Interviewees also saw a limited approach to what counts as knowledge, with Sonya highlighting
the relationship between disposability and “discarding indigenous knowledge forms, or lived experiences
of people,” Nico also brought up the discounting of lived experience, naming that he remembers when he
first started college, he would find himself “just being so bored sometimes and feeling like I’m not
learning anything” that he would go to the library and read whatever he could find, what he found most
impactful was “little snippets of interviews with real people that actually lived during this time, I could
just read in their own words what was going on or look at archival material.” However, he found that
classes rarely engaged with these experiences, focusing instead on theory. Grace tied this selectivity to the
construction of disciplines. Grace noted that “the way that knowledge is divided up” is rooted in the exact
mechanisms and systems that legitimize carceral punishment: Institutions produce ideas of what is or is
not knowledge, just as they produce ideas of what is or is not crime (Delgado & Stegancic, 2007; Polizzi,
2015).
Students also noted how disciplines created boundaries between what we each learn. Nico
highlighted that being “boxed into one of these disciplines” that are “grounded in their own ways and
their own ways of doing things, it’s hard to branch out.” He argued that doing so limits us to singular
interests and modes of learning. Sonya also brought up that while there is something “to learn from every

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field that will inform each other,” many disciplines fail to emphasize that, especially within the sciences,
and often look down “on other fields that aren’t science fields, especially in terms of who’s able to be an
expert on things or who’s able to hold knowledge.” Nico highlighted that “to compartmentalize the
university is a reflection of society as a whole.” He said this compartmentalization makes meeting other
people doing similar work or sharing similar goals challenging when we are siloed into a particular field.
This critique of the disciplines as silos has been long established by Campbell (1969), Foucault (1995 &
2013), Gilbert (2008), and Klein (1990). These critiques of disciplinarity have resulted in growing pushes
for multi-, inter-, trans-, or in/anti-disciplinarities (Cardoso, 2020), arguing the compartmentalization and
hierarchization of knowledge to be a European concept (Cardoso, 2020)14.
Students also mentioned that they saw academics being disciplined in researching and teaching.
Sonya named a conversation she had with a professor who told her she would hate graduate school
because “of the training. And it’s about training you into a field. And it’s not about creativity, or breaking,
or changing things. It is about “you’re going to be trained in this discipline.” Olivia brought up a similar
critique, of the “isolating impact of carcerality” and how she saw it in the individualism centered in
classes and teaching. Finally, Fiona named how she saw grades and investment in them as “a way that
people divide and choose to relate to each other.” As she has started teaching, she has begun questioning
the purpose grades serve, asking “is this actually how I want to communicate? Or evaluate?... I get that
this is maybe fast, but it seems ineffective and inefficient for what we actually want to be potentially
communicating.” Students thus connect the disciplining of academic training to the continued
maintenance of the status quo and current oppressive structures.
Finally, students noted how they saw carcerality when looking at questions about who gets
classified as a student or a teacher. In particular, formerly incarcerated students named their fights to be
recognized as students. Andy named that as soon as people found out he was formerly incarcerated, he
14 Multidisciplinarity: obtaining “information from two or more sciences or sectors of knowledge without the disciplines drawn
on thereby being changed or enriched” (Piaget, 1972, p. 136). Interdisciplinary: “linking two fields by their structures (Cardoso,
2020, p. 3). Transdisciplinarity: “interactions or reciprocities between specialized research projects” that places “these
relationships within a total system without any firm boundaries between disciplines” (Piaget, 1972, p. 138).
Indisciplinary/antidisciplinary: “an “inside-out” interdisciplinarity, an anarchist research momentum” (Cardoso, 2020, p. 5).

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saw a “carceral mindset” set in, where they immediately assumed “this person was bad, they went to jail
for a reason because they were bad” rather than “hey this system is totally fucked up, what if it wasn’t
even their fault.” He also highlighted that he found this much more common at university than back home
in his community, which had much more knowledge of how the criminal injustice system works. Sonya
spoke to her experiences as an “outside” student in Inside-Out classes, where she watched a lot of other
“outside” students realize “there’s so many systemic things that lead to people becoming incarcerated”
and how intelligent many “inside” students are. This experience, she says, “directly changes people’s
ideas of who is incarcerated.” She also went on to say that the existence of the university itself reinforces
ideas that only certain kinds of people (who get/have a college education) define: “who is able to pose
solutions, who’s able to hold knowledge, who’s able to be valued, who is deserving of a job with an
income that you can live on, all of these things: who’s disposable.” Thus, the interviewees reveal who we
view as individuals we can learn from and reflect broader structures of dehumanization and disposability.
No Real Accountability
Students tied these notions of dehumanization and disposability to an investment in and
willingness to practice punitive responses within the university. Grace noted that this punitivity was
applied differently to different students and that “when someone who is of more marginalized identities
does one thing, they frequently are punished more harshly than if a white man who is middle-upper-class
were to do it.” They saw that in particular with the university’s treatment of Black student-athletes, who
often receive punitivity from coaches, media, their team, the general student body, and faculty. Naomi
saw similar punitive dynamics as a peer counselor for her university’s Academic Advancement Program
and Student Conduct cases. When students were struggling, she named the university as tending to
respond to the student with punitivity by “put[ting] on academic probation or being dismissed from the
university” rather than an “outpouring of resources into people who are struggling.”
Avery also highlighted how the speed at which educational institutions respond with punitivity to
incidents that do not result in material harm, such as academic dishonesty, can also be seen in the lack of
commitment to any actual structure of accountability around what students view as material harm. This

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insight came up in particular regarding responses to sexual violence and the university’s responses to
Black students’ demands during the Spring and Summer of 2020, where Avery felt the university
committed to “performative listening” but “no real accountability to what students say.” Many students
named the lack of real commitment to responding to sexual violence on campus, and some named their
university’s complicity in it, citing examples of evidence that the university had protected faculty or staff
who had harassed or assaulted students.
However, the main issue for students, as it connected to sexual violence, was that faculty, staff,
and often other students–such as Resident Assistants and Teaching Assistants–were asked to surveil
students as mandated reporters. Elisa, Emily, Naomi, Olivia, Sonya, and Sophie discussed how this
affects their relationships with other university community members. Emily named that the power
dynamic of some faculty and staff being mandated reporters “makes it really hard for students to seek
support” when they experience a traumatic event, Sophie shared a similar experience of how mandated
reporting makes it hard “for students to always sincerely open up, or have a closer relationship to certain
staff and faculty because there is this clear link between faculty then having to be implicated in this
system of policing, of reporting, which then is also linked to policing and incarceration.” Naomi raised
that it also makes it difficult from the faculty/staff’s perspective, because as much as they may want to
provide support and protect students, they “have to turn over information and play into the systems or risk
their job.” Sonya brought up that it can activity “cause distrust” between students, staff, and faculty, Elisa
named that this relationship of mandating reporting to protect the university is “super invasive and not
survivor centered.” She believes it thus represents a “very carceral way of thinking” where the safety of
the institution is prioritized over the safety of the survivor.
Olivia, Elisa, and Armando presented other examples of staff being asked to surveil students.
Olivia returned to the conversation around COVID-19 and that, in particular, when students have been
placed in isolation, they have been “very carefully monitored” and punished when they “make a wrong
move” rather than offered “a response that would acknowledge the impacts of isolation, and the- maybe
centering what a student would need to not have to walk outside of their isolation housing.” In doing so,

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Olivia notes, she finds the school is “quick to punish…as opposed to centering the needs and trying to
understand some of the root causes that created the harm, or that created whatever conditions led to the
carceral response.” Armando again brought up how students are expected to surveil one another,
particularly regarding academic dishonesty. So many of them buy into it, willing to “snitch on each
other.” He says that in doing so, they fail to recognize that they are a “cog in the wheel.” Finally, Elisa
named how custodial staff are expected to report students. She named an example where she had left a
water pipe out in her room, and the custodial staff member who cleaned her campus housing told her “I’m
not going to report you. But if this was another staff member, I’m technically legally supposed to report
to you for that substance.” This idea that everyone on campus should be surveilling students at all times
and reporting them if they suspect they are breaking the law or campus rule reflects Foucault’s argument
that biopower requires a “compulsory visibility” from its subjects, that results in constant surveillance of
oneself and one another (1995).
Shaped by Funding
The final carceral relationship students named shaping the university’s pedagogy and
relationships is the role finances play in the decision-making of students, staff, and faculty. Andy and
Avery stated that the school’s priorities are shaped by “who has the most funding” and that when on
campus, you can see “what disciplines the university values” based on where that funding has been put.
Naomi also described the choice of “where resources are going to go” as reflective of the carcerality of
the university, “when resources are put towards STEM programs or engineering programs,” these are
often “programs that are going to help fund weapons of mass destruction or go and fund predictive
policing algorithms.” Thus, Naomi sees carcerality in a commitment to funding and supporting violent,
oppressive structures. Fiona also raised that not only do universities overfund harmful disciplines, but that
funding reflects a “hierarchization of knowledge” that goes on to shape “opinions about what forms of
knowledge are valued over others,” creating a cycle of which forms of knowledge get funded. This cycle
can be seen in the STEM versus arts and humanities divide and the lack of resources devoted to
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Many students named how much funding goes into campus police departments when that money
could be used elsewhere (SCU does not publicly share their budget and did not respond to my requests for
details of their budgets. CC reported an over $3.5 million “campus safety” budget,” LAC had an almost
$3 million “public safety” budget, and ULA had an almost $22 million “community safety” budget in the
2021-22 fiscal year). Nico also critiqued the overfunding of administration, such as the university
President and Board members who made nearly half a million dollars when he was a student at LAC.
These resources were money, that Nico argued, could go towards alternatives to policing, such as mental
health resources. Sonya highlighted the further connection between financial resources and carcerality,
stating that “so much of carcerality targets people who aren’t able to pay for things,” which means the
threat of losing housing or taking away financial aid affects poor and working-class students very
differently than middle and upper-class students. She went on to say they have a “completely different
impact.” She also highlighted how wealth building follows racial and gendered lines so that impacting
poor and working-class students also means differently impacting students of color, women, and
genderqueer students.
Racialization, Visibility, and Victimization
When discussing how carcerality impacts the pedagogy and relationships of the university, as has
been seen, interviewees highlighted the centrality of white supremacy, ableism, sexual violence, and the
othering of formerly incarcerated students to the on-campus relationships. Andrew spoke to his
experiences as a Latino student of being arrested, something he did not believe would have happened “to
a white dude that they thought was in a frat.” He is also currently a doctoral student at an Ivy League
school on the East Coast; he said that a woman on campus asked if he was a custodial worker, something
none of his white colleagues have experienced. Nico brought up similar experiences of being Latino on
campus. However, he noted he felt it was significantly shaped by how “white-passing” you are and that
other things, such as whether you have tattoos, how white-sounding your name is, or you are, can shape
those experiences of being “visibly Latino.” This visibility, he names, means that other people on campus
often “feel unsafe because of what they assume of me.” A feeling that then results in him feeling “unsafe

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in that environment because of what I assume they assume of me” and worrying that their criminalizing
him may lead to his safety being endangered. This racialization, he notes, results in “not feeling wanted
there.” Part of the carcerality to students like Nico and Andrew is the idea that only white students who
are wanted on campus deserve a higher education.
Armando and Derek spoke about their racialized childhood experiences that shaped their
relationship with carcerality today. Derek discussed that “being a person of color, brown, being from an
immigrant background, and being from a working-class family” meant he grew up not trusting the police,
and that inherent critique from childhood of an institution the university then asks you to put trust in, and
understand as a provider of safety, has allowed him to think “about the safety of the people who are being
terrorized by the police” and how, no matter how much power you hold at the university, “at the end of
the day, in any one on one encounter, the police will have the ultimate authority.” Armando said that he
was taught at a very young age, when he was in the fourth grade, “that men in my family that where we
come from, we’ll be incarcerated,” and that he was told that was tied to him “being Mexican and being a
male.” He was first arrested when he was 12. However, he notes that being “bald-headed and from this
community, I was labeled as a gangster before I even reached third grade,” so white supremacy and
carceral structures had created a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Nevertheless, Armando notes that the key to
this narrative was not just that he was Mexican and male but was “dumb.” His lack of education or failure
to work within the educational system was critical to his future incarceration.
Finally, as noted, all of the white participants named their whiteness as protecting them from
many of the more explicit forms of policing on campus, such as being stopped by officers or being at the
end of extra surveillance. However, significantly, Avery went a step further, saying that she receives
messages from her university that “wants to make me a victim and wants to make me someone who can
call out and punish.” She finds that not only has she never personally “had a reason to distrust public
safety” but that she is “the justification for public safety.” She believes the university uses the rhetoric of
protecting “these sweet white girls from the South that are coming to the big city for the first time” as a
pretense to justify an overreliance on carceral structures and policing, reproducing long histories of

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policing as a structure to protect whiteness (see Davis, 1983; Davis, 2003b; Davis, 2005; Dilts, 2021;
Harris, 1993; Hartman, 1997; King, 2020; Martinot & Sexton, 2003; Murakawa, 2014; Olson, 2004;
Wang, 2018; Wilderson, 2003).
Despite the underlying rhetoric of protecting white women who are so often centered in
discussions of sexual violence, many participants also pointed to the university’s failure to address sexual
violence on campuses. Elisa argued that her campus’s “punitive policies are not survivor-centered, not
abolitionist.” Emily raised the prevalence of rape culture “on all university campuses” and that at least
one study points to the fact that it is more prevalent at her university. She highlighted the “stress that you
carry with you knowing that statistic and having to navigate patriarchy at the university.” Emily sees not
just the potential violence of sexual assault but the institutional rhetoric that centers on victim blaming in
her university’s responses. Naomi named the violence she saw in the university’s refusal to believe or
protect women, particularly Black women, on her campus. Naomi argued that the university’s investment
in carceral responses made it particularly difficult within the Black community on campus to respond to
sexual violence as “there is the sense that when something bad happens to you, and it’s enacted by
another Black person, you’re less inclined to want to do something, you’re less inclined to want to report
it” because members of the Black community understand the disproportionately punitive responses justice
systems hold towards Black folk. However, she highlighted that the lack of other structural responses
meant very few Black survivors received the support they needed.
Naomi and Emily also highlighted the carcerality in the university’s dehumanizing commitment
to ableism. Naomi raised a time when she “had to 515015 a friend because I literally thought she was
going to kill herself,” she then found out that friend “was handcuffed and put into a cop car.” She wishes
she had had other less violent options. Carcerality, to her, is “all about having people backed into a wall
where they have no other choice, and they then have to rely on systems that do nothing to protect them.”
15 5150 is the number of the section of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code, which allows an adult who is experiencing a
mental health crisis to be involuntarily detained for a 72-hour psychiatric hospitalization when evaluated to be a danger to others,
or to themself.

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Collective Resistance
Students named some forms of resistance to these carceral relations during the interviews. Grace
noted that they partake in “copwatching.” Copwatching is a tactic of active citizenship that “actively
seeks opportunities to film police at work” (Bock, 2016, p. 14). They argued that their ability to
copwatch, film, or ask questions is rooted in “race privilege” as an East Asian person. Sonya and Sophie
raised the role collective organizing can play in resisting these carceral relations. Sonya highlighted that
while staff and faculty “may fear losing their jobs,” students, when looked at as a collective, “have a lot of
power over the university if they come together.” While she believed students who partake in collective
organizing might receive backlash or “possible punishment from the university,” she viewed the
responses to students as “not very extreme,” which, compared to the loss of livelihood, sat as a significant
difference to her. Sophie, also a student at CC, named a recent example of collective student organizing,
driven primarily by “first-generation students of color,” who organized during the pandemic to have a
pass/fail model instituted at their university instead of grades. This way, students could prioritize “dealing
with so many different health issues, housing issues, financial instability, [and] family life” during the
pandemic. They went on to organize that a passing grade would show up on transcripts as an A to validate
“the student’s efforts to learn and be present and do the best they could, under all the circumstances of the
pandemic and the different ways that was impacting different students.” Student power and resistance is
discussed more in Chapter 6.
Finally, students also noted how some relationships with faculty, staff, or other students served as
a structure of support and resistance within the university. Andy noted that connections with professors
are “how we get through academia” if some faculty “weren’t so flexible, so inspiring, sometimes, I don’t
think students will make it through academia.” He mentioned that many of the classes he is in now “have
an emphasis on self-care, on meditation, on clearing your mind before we get into some traumatic reading
or dramatic work or writing.” Nico shared similar experiences with having professors who “were
themselves first-generation scholars,” which allowed him to have “a really good relationship with

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faculty.” These experimental and critical approaches to pedagogy may be rooted in the fact that Andy and
Nico were in Latin American Studies, a discipline with a history of resistance (Soldatenko, 2009).
Interviewee Disagreement
There were two occasions when students disagreed with understanding one of the questions as
carceral. When asked about grading methods, Armando mentioned that prison point systems are primarily
based on behavior. So, while “at the K-12 a lot of grades are based on behavior points,” he did not see a
connection between carcerality, and the way grades are used in universities. Derek argued that he saw a
connection to Foucault’s work but believed the division of knowledge into schools/disciplines/fields was
Eurocentric, not carceral. My question, “Within the kinds of degrees handed out?” received the most
confusion from interviewees. The connection I saw when writing this question was that limiting education
to a two/four-year degree reinforced carcerality, by furthering the limiting of knowledge production
discussed in this section. While no interviewees made this same argument, many did connect this question
to the growth of higher education–particularly the growth of master’s programs–and the desire to grow
university finances. Olivia tied the question to the “strict and limited idea of who possesses knowledge.”
She noted that “the hierarchies of degrees, and certifications of knowledge, play a role in creating some of
these power dynamics and imbalances that can then reproduce and perpetuate some of these carceral and
punitive responses and practices.” Thus, they continue to maintain structures of oppression and control
access to different notions of the good life.
The Focus of the University
To determine if there was a difference in carcerality between private and public universities and
research and teaching-focused universities, I asked two questions: (1) How do you think the
public/private nature of your university affects its carceral structures/practices? And (2) How do you think
the research/teaching focus of your university affects the way it engages in that carcerality? Students at
public universities found that despite the university’s rhetoric as for the people, they found students held
little power, furthering their objectification. While private universities did not use this rhetoric, students
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further maintaining the status quo. Students at the CC saw some ways that their university’s private status
gave them more agency and flexibility but felt that this was rarely taken advantage of by the institution.
CC students also argued that the teaching focus of the university meant they were humanized more than
students at research universities. Students at teaching-focused universities saw their institutions as more
focused on real-world context and consequences than research-focused institutions. This insight was
backed up by research-focused university students, who argued that their institutions prioritized money
over knowledge and learning.
It’s The Students’ University, but the Students Don’t Really Have a Say
Interviewees who had attended public universities critiqued the false rhetoric of the university
being “for the people.” Andy argued that administrators make decisions for the students. They get to
choose where university resources go while claiming their choices benefit the public good because it is a
public university. Andy, a student at LAC, argued that if controlled by students, “the university could
definitely be redesigned in a way where students don’t have to pay that much tuition…instead of
funneling the money into public safety.” Armando, a ULA student, returned to the idea that university
resources often aim to reproduce violent structures. He noted that many of the people who created NATO
were at his university, and they used their knowledge “to create policies that are going to be detrimental
to communities of color, low-income folks.” So, despite the false rhetoric of being for the public,
Armando sees public universities as complicit in violence against communities of color (see also Gardner
et al., 2023).
Armando also highlighted that—as discussed in Chapter 2—Janet Napolitano was the United
States secretary of homeland security before becoming president of the University of California system.
Armando asked how a person responsible for Homeland Security could become the president of a public
university system. He said, “That really baffles me to know folks like that could easily come into a
position of power at a public university.” Armando argues that the Department of Homeland Security
does not play a role in upholding the public good. Similarly, Nico stated that as a state institution, the

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university was frequently complicit with other violent state institutions, such as having military recruiters
on campus.
Less Transparency, Less Accountability, Less Shared Governance
Interviewees at the private universities named the prioritization of wealth, the lack of
transparency and accountability, and the misuse of autonomy as specifics to the carcerality they saw
there. CC student Alessia stated that it often felt like the goal of private universities was “to get rich
people to come here” and then dispense public goods” for a cost. Emily and Elisa backed up these ideas,
with Elisa naming that because “private universities rely a lot on their donors and their connections” they
are willing to treat wealthy students differently. Emily stated she believed that the “nature of a private
university with higher tuition than [a] public university just makes it all the more inaccessible to
students…going here is also a matter of your privilege and whether or not you’re able to afford being
here.” Sophia also noted that “where the university gets its funding from and how” often drives the
investment or divestment from carcerality.
Andrew, Fiona, and Derek named private universities’ lack of transparency and accountability.
Andrew said that they will often “limit access to records.” Derek said they have “less transparency, less
accountability…there’s less shared governance.” In refusing to make decision-making accessible to all,
universities maintain the status quo. He brought up incidents of administrators protecting accused sexual
abusers at his university, and questioned the role of the lack of public accountability in allowing that
situation to go on as long as it did. Derek noted that “there’s really no public entity SCU is accountable
to. They’re probably accountable to the alumni and donors, which I get are all private individuals. So, I
think it just enhances the power of the university to maintain itself in whatever way possible, which is
certainly through punishing and detaining and arresting people. Grace noted that this lack of transparency
allows for many ways the university is maintained “to go unknown.” They see the university prioritizing
maintaining “this notion of the perfect university community” and that the university sees the surrounding
community “as a threat to its perfect community life,” thus, it implements carcerality to erase that threat
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A Little More Agency and Flexibility
Sonya said that because CC was a private university, it could and does “give a lot of leeway to
students.” Though she noted that while that was true of the university she was at, she was not sure it was
true of all private universities, so Sonya queried that “maybe it’s not about public or private, but about
who happens to be in leadership at the time, in that space? Or the policies in place?” Olivia saw
something similar in place, stating that because CC is private, “it has a little more agency around what it
considers acceptable.” Sometimes, she argued, it does this well, but at other times it does so very poorly
and reproduces carcerality. This flexibility, she points out, should come with “a lot more responsibility to
not reproduce those and…to create its own frameworks of what we deem okay, what we punish what we
don’t, how we punish.” Sonya and Olivia see a possibility for radical autonomy at CC that they rarely see
it taking advantage of in a liberatory manner.
Elisa connected the relationship between the teaching-focus, carcerality, and CC’s private status,
noting that as her university is a private liberal arts school, “most of the politics of the students are more
left-leaning,” which has meant many of her classes have had “an abolitionist focus.” Elisa feels this
means she has been able to push back and resist carcerality in ways she would not have if she’d “gone to
the public school in my hometown in Oklahoma.” However, she also noted that these left-leaning politics
did not mean an erasure of carceral behavior. As earlier discussed, she often saw an investment in limiting
conversation away from nuance in her classrooms.
Sonya and Olivia both chose their university because it was teaching-focused. Both noted that
larger universities “are focused on research, [and] there’s a lot less attention for the undergrads and less
nurturing of undergrads.” Sonya expanded on this to say that she felt the size of the university does
impact the level of carcerality it invests in, as “the bigger a system is, the easier it is to be carceral in it,”
because, as she noted throughout the interview “it’s easier to be carceral, in my opinion than it is to be
transformative, especially because we live and breathe in a carceral system currently.”16 Olivia noted that
16 While based on her own experience Sonya equated a teaching-focus to a small liberal arts school, this does not reflect how I
defined the difference. CC had approximately 8,500 students, whereas LAC had around 26,000.

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research-focused schools prioritize “extracting knowledge for production and commodifying knowledge.”
She was not as interested in the tangible outcomes of research when she was touring colleges. Returning
to Freire’s banking method, Olivia said that she had seen the focus on learning and creating together at
her school, “not in that dumping mentality of the professor with the knowledge dumps it into the open
head of the student,” she had seen in her high school experience. She felt this “dumping” approach to
learning was a form of disposability, as “they dump all this knowledge and then you go, and there’s no
relationship, which I think plays into that isolating carceral structure, and that you’re just a number as
opposed to you are a person and this centering of humanity within some of these teaching-focused
schools.” She sees the pedagogy of teaching-focused schools as potentially less dehumanizing than that of
research-focused schools.
A Real-World Context and Consequences
Nico, who had attended LAC and ULA, highlighted his different relationships with faculty at
these schools. He found that at “a research university, you can write about carcerality. But that’s the limit
of how you can actually engage with this idea.” In contrast, at teaching-focused schools, you can engage
with the idea itself in “a real-world context.” Specifically, when he came to carcerality, he noted that
some of his colleagues at the teaching-focused school had been to prison. In contrast, at the researchfocused school, “none of the students have that actual experience, so they’re outside observers into this
phenomenon that they don’t really have a stake in.” Andy made a similar argument, stating that teaching
universities are “more realistic…they encourage a lot of hands on, being out in the community.” He also
pointed that in his experience he found teaching-focused universities to be “more communal,” working
“for a group of folks instead for the individual person.”
Sophie also pointed to the stakes of the conversation. However, in her experience, it was not her
classmates from the university but her classmates in the Inside-Out program, who were currently
incarcerated, that provided that lived experience. She discussed a class she took called Power, Justice,
and the Environment, and that the “Inside” members of the Inside-Out class would discuss their own
experiences with “the water quality inside, the ways in which there was no AC and so, but it was super,

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super hot, they had- their bunk beds were made out of metal, how they had to literally dunk their shirts in
water to stay cool and keep their body temperature cool.” She noted that having access to this knowledge
changed her understanding of the course. However, she also worried that, at times, it meant the Inside
members of the class were doing far more teaching than learning, and thus, the class needed to create a
“more reciprocal learning environment.”
Alessia, a student at a teaching-focused university, noted the way she had seen research reproduce
carcerality at her university when computer science students had to partake in “a clinical” during their
senior year–essentially a year-long internship with an outside organization–the students were partnered
with an organization that works directly with a police department. The students rallied to end that
relationship. She also pointed to an incident when they were asked to work with Jeffrey Brantingham, the
inventor of PredPol17. Other students brought up Brantingham and PredPol as examples of the investment
in carcerality research-focused universities often provide. Naomi pointed to how the broken windows
theory of policing came out of her university, and Andrew pointed out the irony of Brantingham’s
University also tweeting about and using the Million Dollar Hoods project18 as an example of the
excellent work the university is doing. He argued that he did not “think the university is in a place to
pedestal these folks doing work, folks doing really good work, while at the same time allowing all this
fuckery to happen.” Armando pointed to similar issues, saying, “there’s been researchers at ULA that
have been proponents of the carceral system and how the prison industrial complex grows because of
their research.” He believed this was why “we need more folks of color” in the university, as this would
allow for “a top-down, a bottom-up, changing the makeup of the landscape.” He acknowledged this
change would be slow but believed it was needed to start “reversing some of these harsh policies and
practices that have been permitted to target folks of color,” especially as “we know that research is what
changes policy, rights, laws, and a lot of the resources have been used negatively.”
17 PredPol is the market leader in predictive policing, a practice that scholars have argued only reinforces white supremacist and
classist policing practices (Ferguson, 2017).
18 Million Dollar Hoods is a research project that maps and documents the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in Los
Angeles and beyond.

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Prioritizing Money Over Knowledge and Learning
Avery supported the belief that research-focused universities did not prioritize undergraduates,
noting that in her experience, there is a prioritization of “graduate students and their research so much
more than their undergrad,” which she feels “goes back to just kind of prioritizing money over knowledge
and learning.” Fiona backed this up, noting that when research is the prioritization, “the emphasis is on
bringing in grants and funding to support the research rather than students and learning.” Emily returned
to the role of funding, and that funding “will go to carceral studies, whether that has to do with military or
weapons defense, and tech and surveillance technology. And then other, arguably, more important
projects will receive less funding or be rejected with funding.” Grace brought in a similar idea, noting that
the narrative at their research university was implicitly rooted in the university’s success is tied to the
more it produces. So they feel “research definitely plays a huge role in terms of being able to control first
of all, someone’s life and income, and also therefore, the kind of information you produce tends to not
want- you aren’t able to be as successful if you’re probably producing things that sort of threaten,
undermine, and want to dismantle these very structures of violence” because those things rarely bring in
money.
Finally, Derek raised that there is often more “capital to protect” at a research university, which
impacts how it polices campus. He gave the example that at a previous research university he worked at, a
Muslim student was praying “too close to some nuclear lab,” she was detained by the police, who were
worried that someone who “looked overtly Muslim” was so close to the nuclear lab. Derek raises this
example of race and religion-based stereotyping by police to point to the university’s real purpose in
having police, “to protect that space, those materials, the laborers, the researchers who work there” and
not students, who can be viewed as potential threats to the university.
Conclusion
This chapter establishes the way abolitionist student activists see carcerality within their
universities. First, it established how they understand carcerality as a structure that involves controlling
people, forcing people to conform to the status quo, maintaining structures of oppression, punishing

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people, creating avenues to dispose of or eliminate people, and dehumanizing people. Then, it established
how interviewees see the university’s role as it currently functions as exclusionary, a gatekeeper of
knowledge, and conditioning students towards professionalism. Many students highlighted that the
university functions this way by serving as both a business and debt-maker, selling dreams to students for
high costs and prioritizing wealth accumulation. In comparison to this reality, interviewees believe the
university should be providing education, functioning as a site of autonomy and agency, protecting and
supporting students, providing resources–including both “knowledge-based resources [and] material
resources,” providing a university for all, and building community–including addressing current
displacements the university has caused.
I next turned to the specific methods of carcerality interviewees saw concerning space, place, and
location. Interviewees provided several recurring themes, which can be tied to David Sibley’s notions of
geographies of exclusions (1995). These included the effect of COVID on the carceral practices of the
university, carceral university practices of isolation, the role of funding and finances in the carceral
practices of the university, the entwined relations between gentrification and the university’s carceral
practices, and the treatment of unhoused people as it relates to this. Interviewees also highlighted the very
literal gatekeeping of their universities from the surrounding community, the over-policing of students
and communities of color, the framing by the university of the police as the only option to meet students’
safety needs, racial profiling in technology by police the mission of each police force and whether they
serve their institution or the people, the role of surveillance in modern day society, the active role the
university plays in dismantling protest, and how lack of access for people with disabilities plays a central
role in carceral ideologies. Throughout this section, we see Sibley’s argument that “the guardians of
sacred spaces” that reproduce structures of domination “are more likely to be security guards, parents or
judges” (Sibley, 1995, p. 72).
Alongside carcerality doing the ideological and material work of normalizing geographies of
exclusion, interviewees also named connections between carcerality, pedagogy, and the forms of relations
on campuses. These included framing the police as a “resource,” expansive surveillance, the maintenance

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of hierarchies, the unequal power distribution between different groups, the limited approach to learning,
the normalization of punitivity, a lack of accountability, and finances as a motivator. Students highlighted
the centrality of white supremacy, ableism, sexual violence, and the othering of formerly incarcerated
students to on-campus relationships. Finally, students noted a few methods of resistance they saw within
their universities: inverse surveillance, collective power, and supportive relations. These forms of
resistance will be expanded on in more detail in the next chapter, which looks at the use of media and
social media by abolitionist student collectives to resist the carcerality of the university. I attempt to
answer the question (5) Do abolitionist student activists use alternative media in their activism? If so, how
do abolitionist student activists use alternative media toward decarcerating the university?

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Chapter 5. Resisting the Carceral University
Introduction
A Virtual Walk and Talk Protest
On February 5th, 2021, alone in my Los Angeles apartment, following the mass rise of COVID19 hospitalizations, and with graduate school entirely online, a flyer for a virtual live stream of an
“abolition mapping walk and talk protest” at ULA came across my Instagram feed (Figure 1). I had not
yet decided on a dissertation topic other than knowing it would be about student activism, and having just
co-taught a course entitled Introduction to Abolition, I was intrigued. The following day, at 11:00 am PT,
I logged on.
Figure 1
ULA Instagram Post from February 5th, 2021
The video opens with a young Black gender non-conforming individual who identifies as a
Professor in the Black Studies and Gender Studies departments at ULA. Dressed in a well-fitted suit and
white sneakers and holding printed notes they read from throughout the video, they welcome the viewer
to “a socially distanced tour of key sites of carceral violence at ULA” and highlight that they represent a

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collective of California-based chapters of the Cops Off Campus Collective “who envision a world without
cops on any of our campuses and [the] abolition of police and policing from our world.” Three minutes
into the video and tying back to the arguments made by students in Chapters 2 and 4, they note that
“academia has long been a site of carceral violence that reproduces punitive surveillance and racist
frameworks. They’re called departments and discipline for a reason. Right? Police discipline.” While they
lead the tour, the camera moves to different members of the collective, who each give information about
the site of the tour we’ve reached. The tour starts at the site of 1970 protests against the Vietnam War,
which led to police arresting 74 students and injuring another dozen and Governor Reagan shutting down
all California colleges/universities for four days.
The tour then moves on to the site of a 2003 police shooting, where an unhoused man was shot
twice and then convicted of assaulting a police officer. As the tour guide takes us to the next stop, they
highlight that because the university is on stolen Indigenous land, “nothing here, on ULA’s campus, on
Tongva land, is free from violence.” The third stop tells the story of a student refusing to provide his ID in
2005 and then being tased and arrested by campus police in response, ultimately leading to the university
settling an excessive violence lawsuit for $220,000. The tour then discusses the location of a radical
Professor targeted by the university and state in the late 1960s/early 1970s, as well as a related historical
stop tied to the Black Panther Party.
The tour next stops at a building where a current professor does research enabling predictive
policing, which the video describes as “driven by historical crime data known to be deeply racially biased,
that only serves to reproduce racial biases. Because if you already police certain communities, the
artificial intelligence will continue to predict that crimes will occur in those same areas,” they highlight
that due to community organizing by Stop LAPD Spying, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) no
longer uses these tools, but other cities in California do. As the tour moves on, the camera bumps into the
leading tour guide, who states, “Just make sure we get my good side. This is the freedom side. The
abolition side is on the other side,” and you hear the person holding the camera laugh. Amateur

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camerawork reveals small moments of intimacy and joy between collective members throughout the
video.
At the next stop, the guide ties campus policing to carceral responses to campus organizing–
specifically the Ethnic Studies Movement and the Third World Liberation Front–since the late 1960s.
They then connect this history to recent student organizing that stopped the school’s decision to use
CCTV cameras to constantly scan people’s faces and check them against the campus database. At the end
of each stop, the guide will join the tour, walking with the leading tour guide. The tour then stops at the
Law School, noting that it has paid almost $600,000 to two legal companies–LexisNexis and Westlaw–
whose parent companies–Thomson, Reuters, and Relix–share personal data with ICE. This tour guide
highlights successful student organizing to end these contracts in 2020. The tour guide then asked the
members to discuss how they got involved in the Cops off Campus Coalition. A member names their
commitment as rooted in their experiences with family members being arrested when having mental
health breakdowns, seeing how policing impacts both their community “but also all communities,
including white communities,” and believing this moment offers an opportunity to do things differently.
We return to the leading tour guide who–a little breathless and walking backward–highlights that policing
and campus policing–are new and don’t need to remain. They then answer questions from individuals
watching the live video.
The tour stops at the School of Social Welfare and discusses a report of their Evaluation of the
LAPD Community Safety Partnership, which offered a positive evaluation and recommended more
money be given to the LAPD. The leading tour guide then highlights that the report was “then
immediately used by the father from Jordan Peele’s Get Out, and Voldemort from the Harry Potter series
turned L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti to justify millions of dollars directed towards the LAPD during the
Summer of 2020 when the massive uprising for Black life was calling for precisely the opposite:
defunding and divesting from policing and investing for once and finally in Black communities.” The tour
ends with the argument that “Imagining a [university] system without a dedicated police department is
work, but it’s work that we must do.” This video, like much of the media and social media produced by

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campus collectives, focuses on using political education, capacity building, and resisting traditional
narratives of institutional temporality to resist the carcerality of the university. After making this
argument for systemic change, the video ends with a quote from Assata Shakur’s autobiography: “It is our
duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We
have nothing to lose but our chains.” Then, the video pans back to the group, and they collectively shout,
“COPS OFF CAMPUS.”
Media use here is very much rooted in the conjunctural moment–the pandemic shapes the choice
of a live stream rather than an in-person tour. Still, it also enables a posterity of the work that would not
have been possible had it not been recorded, uploaded, and shared by the collective. It engages with
historical facts and references to popular forms of culture, revealing the self-referentiality of media and its
changing temporality. As noted in Chapter 3, when defining media, I follow David Morley’s argument
that media is “closely linked to that of the process of dissemination, or circulation, of information by
means of some particular channel of communication” (Morley, 2005, p. 212). Fundamental to defining a
medium, Morley argues, is that it is “an intervening substance through which signals can travel as a
means for communication” (p. 212). My focus is specifically on the use of alternative media rather than
mainstream or legacy media by these student collectives.
Defining Alternative Media
The term “alternative media” as defined by Chris Atton (2002) is generally understood to include:
activist media (Waltz, 2005), citizens media (Rodriguez, 2001), community media (Howley, 2010),
critical media (Fuchs, 2010), grassroots media (Teixeira, 2020), oppositional media (Badran & Smets,
2018), radical media (Downing, 2001), social movement media (Atton, 2003), and underground media
(Duncombe, 1997). As noted by Atton, “alternative” does not always imply the media to be concerned
with “revolutionary social change” in the same way “radical” might (2002, p. 9). However, he argues that
alternative allows for the inclusion of other genres and forms within the media, such as “alternative
lifestyle magazines, an extremely diverse range of zine publishing and the small presses of poetry and
fiction publishers” (p. 10). Within the context of this research, the use of “alternative” allows for the

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inclusion of art, poetry, and essays within the media produced, as well as an expansion of form to include
video and websites alongside traditional document-based format. Atton situates his definition of
“alternative” in the work of Raymond Williams (1983) and his distinction between alternative and
oppositional practices, arguing that alternative practices attempt to exist and resist from within the
existing culture. In contrast, oppositional practices try to replace the current culture.
Atton shows that alternative media must be understood as alternative through four key areas:
content, the aim of the media, production, and distribution. The idea of alternative content is not a new
one, as noted by Atton. In 1977, the U.K. Royal Commission on the Press defined an alternative
publication as one that: (1) “deals with the opinions of small minorities,” (2) “expresses attitudes ‘hostile
to widely held beliefs’,” or (3) “‘espouses views or deals with subjects not given regular coverage by
publications generally available at newsagents.’” (2002, p. 12) But scholars including Atton contend,
ending this definition here, remains vague, or as noted by Richard Abel the term is then “so elastic as to
be devoid of virtually any signification” (1996, p. 79). Atton argues that alternative media must not only
be alternative in terms of its content but must be “allied to the promotion of social change” (2002, p. 14):
the aim of the media. Atton ties this to Tim O’Sullivan’s 1994 argument that alternative media must
“avowedly reject or challenge established and institutionalized politics, in the sense that they all advocate
change in society” (p. 10). O’Sullivan goes on to argue that this challenging of institutionalized politics
must happen in the production process of the alternative media via “a democratic/collectivist process of
production” and “a commitment to innovation or experimentation in form and/or content” (1994, p. 205).
Thus, Atton argues alternative media performs prefigurative politics (2002, p. 21). As it should involve
imagining a changed society and practicing the kind of relations one hopes to see in that changed society.
Leah Lievrouw, looking specifically at alternative and activist new media, defines alternative
media through its ability to “reconfigure artifacts, remediate practices, and re-form social arrangements,
to challenge or alter dominant, expected, or accepted ways of doing society, culture, and politics” (2023,
p. 25). She defines artifacts as the “devices that enable and extend people’s abilities to communicate and
share meaning” (2023, p. 13), practices as the communication activities “that people engage in as they

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develop and use those devices” (2023, p. 13), and arrangements as the social and institutional
“organizational forms that people create and sustain around the artifacts and practices” (2023, p. 13). All
three of these frameworks can be used to expand Atton’s ideas of production and distribution in
particular. Atton notes that this prefiguration mainly shows up in methods of production and distribution,
which should be “allied to an activist philosophy of creating ‘information for action’ timeously and
rapidly” (p. 12) so that they can respond to issues swiftly. Atton names three elements to understand the
production process as alternative: (1) the use of “reprographic innovations/adaptations” such as
mimeographs, IBM typesetting, offset litho, and the photocopier; (2) the transformation of “social
relations, roles, and responsibilities” via the inclusion of “reader-writers, collective organization, [and]
deprofessionalization” and (3) the transformation of “communication processes” via “horizontal linkages,
networks” (p. 27). These will be discussed in more detail concerning the collectives’ media items.
Stephen Duncombe’s work on zine culture19 is provided as an example, where “the medium of zines is
not just a message to be received, but a model of participatory cultural production and organization to be
acted upon” (Duncombe, 1997, p. 129). Here, Atton argues that zines are doing prefigurative work of
enacting “social change through their own means of production” (2002, p. 18).
Finally, Atton argues that these transformations of “social relations, roles, and responsibilities”
and the transformation of “communication processes” via “horizontal linkages, networks” (2002, p. 27)
should also show up in the “distributive use” of alternative media (Atton, 1999). Distributive use in
alternative media, he argues, can mean “alternative sites for distribution, clandestine/invisible distribution
networks, [and] anti-copyright” practices (2002, p. 27). Atton highlights that alternative media must thus
integrate active audiences and “mobilized audiences” (p. 25).
19 Understood as “characteristically difficult to define” (Kempson, 2015, p. 460), zines are generally tied to DIY culture (Baker
& Cantillon, 2022; Creasap, 2014; Honma, 2016; Radway, 2011; Scheper, 2023; Watson & Bennett, 2021), self-publishing and a
rejection of mainstream (publishing) culture (Baker & Cantillon, 2022; Buchanan, 2018; Brager & Sailor, 2012; Fife, 2019;
Freedman, 2005; Hays, 2020; Radway, 2011; Watson & Bennett, 2021), cultural, political, social, and subcultural movements
(Baker & Cantillon, 2022; Bell, 2002; Radway, 2011; Scheper, 2023), and prefigurative world-making (Bell, 2002; Buchanan,
2018; Scheper, 2023). Scholars have highlighted, in particular, their ability to offer marginalized communities methods of
information-sharing, archiving cultural memory, and organizing against power structures (Baker & Cantillon, 2022; Chidgey,
2013; French & Curd, 2021; Honma, 2016). Watson and Bennett (2021) offer two further properties of zines: intimacy (in both
content, form, and distribution) and intensity (in form and production).

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Analog versus Digital Alternative Media
This chapter also looks to understand the use of both analog and digital mediums to create
alternative media. As noted by Jennifer Rauch, digital media appears “to meet many long-held goals of
democratic communications, such as horizontal flows of information, nonhierarchical relationships, ease
of participation, open access and interactivity” (2016, p. 756) leading to individuals such as Micah Sifry
to proclaim that “The old notion of creating an “alternative” media in opposition to the “mainstream” has
become meaningless” (cited in Hamilton 2008, p. 94). Rauch, however, shows, and I agree, that
alternative media still holds value as a category. Rauch finds alternative forms of media “persist in being
less commercial, producing more critical content and being more committed to social change than their
mainstream counterparts” (2016, p. 757). Rauch also highlights audience studies that have found users
understand alternative media through “content such as information that mobilizes participation, coverage
of events ignored by mainstream media, and criticism of corporations—and that the credibility of
alternative content rested partly on nonprofit form and independence from advertisers (2016, p. 763). As
will be argued throughout the chapter, despite some scholars seeing the digital as an end of alternative
media, in the 2020s, alternative usages of digital and social media have adapted to use them toward
“reprographic innovations/adaptations” and “alternative sites for distribution, clandestine/invisible
distribution networks, [and] anti-copyright” practices (Atton, 2002, p. 27).
Figure 2
Media Items Produced by Abolitionist Student Collectives Grouped by Medium

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In looking at the twenty-two pieces of media produced at the four universities where I
interviewed students, I found that while collectives create more digital media overall than analog media,
the most popular media item was zines (see Figure 2). The rest of the chapter will look first at three of
Atton’s key areas: the form, production, and distribution of media produced by abolitionist student
collectives, before spending more time on the collectives’ aim of the media. I put these in conversation
with Mike Mowbray’s taxonomy of four “alternative logics” to understand why student activists use
alternative media rather than mainstream media. I look first at the content and its use of “heterodoxcreative logics” before turning to the “participatory logics” of production and how distribution is used to
center “logics of (counter-)public-formation and facilitation” (Mowbray, 2015, p. 21). Finally, I turn to
look in more detail at the aim of the media and its ties to Mowbray’s “critical-emancipatory logics,”
arguing alternative media better suits their aims of capacity building, political education, and resisting
institutional temporality as part of a broader media ecosystem that reaches outside of the individual
universities.
Heterodox-Creative Logics: Alternative Media Form
Mowbray argues that logics of heterodox-creativity are rooted in “questions of aesthetic form”
(2015, p. 27), which involve paying attention to “intersections between (innovative) aesthetic practices
and progressive or radical politics” (2015, p. 28). While the possibilities of form depend on the medium,
Atton defines form as “graphics, visual language; varieties of presentation and binding; aesthetics” (2002,
p. 27). Mowbray offers two examples of heterodox-creative logics that I’ll be looking at concerning the
media and social media: montage–the “cut-and-paste assemblages of photographic fragments and snippets
of text” (2015, p. 28)–and culture jamming–which uses montage-esque techniques to “shroud itself in the
very language, symbols, and aesthetics of its intended target” (Nomai 2008, p. 31). I found that 20/22 of
the media items used heterodox-creative logics. The two items that did not attempt anything innovative or
experimental were Zoom recordings featuring academics. Both were shared by the collective at Los
Angeles College. The first was an 84-minute “Mass Incarceration and Higher Education” panel where
four researchers shared 10-minute presentations and hosted a collective discussion. The second was a 26-

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minute presentation entitled “Policing the People’s University” that utilized a slideshow with a small
video of the presenter. The lack of engagement with heterodox-creative logics seems rooted in the
medium and the prioritization of distribution over production, where some aesthetic changes could have
been made. For example, a collective at the University of Los Angeles also posted a recorded Zoom
meeting. Still, theirs included discussion and presentations from abolitionist artists, a voice memo from
Mumia Abu Jamal, and a video clip of Eric Revis & Orrin Evans’s “Piggly Wiggly” (found at
https://vimeo.com/521064678). In integrating different forms of recorded media, they engage in
assemblage that the other meetings do not.
Assemblage
The centrality of the “cut-and-paste assemblages of photographic fragments and snippets of text”
(Mowbray 2015, p. 28) to alternative media is rooted in the ways that production informs aesthetics
through prioritizing D.I.Y. and collaboration, which historically assemblage has lent itself to. James
Hamilton has argued that it emerged alongside “capitalism and commercial media production” (2000, p.
371), first as a folk art and then as a means of critique. These practices can be seen in the media produced
by student abolitionist activists. For example, in the media piece “Art, Abolition, and the University,”
examples of visual art, video, and writings are put together on a website to document two collectives’
commitment to creating “a pathway for incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and system impacted
individuals into higher education.” Further examples can be seen in the covers of zines produced by a
collective at SCU (Figures 3 and 4) and a poster for the Organizing for Abolition in CA Higher Ed Virtual
Gathering (Figure 5). While all three designs have been digitally created, the collectives have emulated
assemblage style–this is particularly clear in Figure 4, which features images of torn edges.

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Figure 3
Front Cover of Zine Produced by A Collective At SCU

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Figure 4
Front Cover of Zine Produced by A Collective At SCU

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Figure 5
Organizing For Abolition in CA Higher Ed Virtual Gathering Poster
I also found abolitionist student collectives engaging with assemblage in their social media.
Backing up Leah Lievrouw’s findings that “the availability of easy-to-use digital technologies has

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encouraged the sampling, fragmentation, juxtaposition, and recombination of disparate elements of text,
image, sound, and performance” (2023, p. 32), which she places as “hallmarks of contemporary media
and so-called ‘remix’ culture” (2023, p. 32). Figures 6 and 7 offer examples of this remix culture in
abolitionist student collectives’ social media. Mowbray traces back the use of assemblage in alternative
media to twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Dadaism in Berlin, which used “cut-and-paste
assemblages of photographic fragments and snippets of text pilfered from popular media (newspapers,
magazines, print advertisements, and propaganda posters)” to question the war propaganda of the German
state and the ideological claims of wartime reactionaries and Weimar capitalists” (Mowbray, 2015, p. 28).
Similarly, in Figure 6 we see an abolitionist student collective question the campus police’s rhetoric via
their assemblage of a photo of the campus police chief claiming “we can’t do more with less” and a
response from the collective telling the police chief to “do less.” The piece then encourages students to
“vote YES on the referendum to reallocate 25% of [university police department] funds to resources for
students, workers, and community members via participatory budgeting!”
Figure 6
Screenshot Of a Student Government Campaign Shared on An Abolitionist Student Collective’s Instagram
Page

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Figure 7
Screenshot Of an Event Flyer Shared on An Abolitionist Student Collective’s Instagram Page
Culture Jamming
Culture jamming, which has been explored more in-depth within scholarship on alternative media
(see DeLaure et al., 2017; Downing, 2010; Langlois & DuBois, 2005; Lievrouw, 2011), takes images
produced by its target and uses assemblage-esque techniques to “shroud itself in the very language,
symbols, and aesthetics of its intended target” (Nomai 2008, p. 31). Generally tied back to neo-situationist
practices (Mowbray, 2015), culture jamming does not directly target its object of critique in the same way
assemblage work by Berlin Dadaists did. Instead, viewers “are first confronted by what seems on the
surface to be an original, until further inspection reveals it as a copy that is a repudiation of the original”
(Nomai, 2008, p. 31). Culture jamming can be seen in both medium and aesthetic choices by abolitionist
student collectives. For example, as to form, some of the media items include a newspaper, a map, a
course list, a workbook, and a research report. Others have the detournement of university crests across
the collectives (see Figures 8 and 9). Another common form of culture jamming seen was the use of the
university’s colors in the work produced by the collectives.

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Figure 8
Crest Used in ULA Report
Figure 9
Crest Used in ULA Zine
Regarding social media–Instagram in particular– collectives also engaged with culture jamming
around corporate culture; two collectives utilized the format of “Spotify Wrapped,” a tool annually
released by Spotify that shows a user their “year in music.” Figure 10 uses the imagery of “Spotify
wrapped” to remind students of decisions made by their university leading to spreading structural
violence on campus; these include: “mass covid outbreak,” “inefficient responses to emergency threats,”
“ableism,” “only ONE psychiatrist for the whole student body,” and “anti-Semitism, racism, and more!”
While they also highlight university administrators’ role in this fight, they include a slide highlighting the

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importance of joy and resistance to this structural violence, noting, “Still, we danced. We found joy in our
community and hope in our resistance” before listing four protest songs.
Figure 10
Culture Jamming Carousel Using “Spotify Wrapped” By One Collective
Figure 11 shows the same strategy utilized by a different abolitionist student collective,
highlighting the university’s priorities by comparing its spending on athletics, policing, cultural centers,
inclusion and intercultural relations, and minority student affairs. The implication is that the university
cares more about athletics and policing than it does about racialized student populations. They then utilize
two other rhetorical strategies, critiquing system-classed issues on campus that result in high parking
rates, overpriced meal plans, and expensive housing options, and, finally, the collective points to growing
tuition increases as part of the problem. In connecting overspending on policing to extracting money from
students and the lack of resources provided to students of color, this collective uses culture jamming to tie
the abolition of the police to their ongoing objectification within broader sites of carcerality at the
university.
Figure 11
Culture Jamming Carousel Using “Spotify Wrapped” By A Different Collective.

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In reviewing the use of assemblage and culture jamming by abolitionist student collectives, we
can see ties in the aesthetic and form of alternative media they’re producing, and that whether they know
it or not–no interviewees brought up these purposeful aesthetic choices during interviews–the
“intersections between (innovative) aesthetic practices and progressive or radical politics” (Mowbray,
2015, p. 28) have been passed down to them.
Participatory Logics: Alternative Media Production
Mowbray argues that participatory logics can most obviously be seen “in Clemencia Rodríguez’s
description of the “polymorphic ensemble” of so-called citizens’ media” (2015, p. 23), where she
understands citizens’ media as individuals “attempting to break into the established mediascape” (2001, p.
165). This conceptualization, Mowbray argues, is rooted in “access to the means of media production and
to the terrain of media representation” and “implies capacity-building or empowering effects” (2015, p.
23). He cites James Hamilton’s argument for three critical dimensions of democratic alternative media.
Alternative media, Hamilton argues (2000), should “(1) have barriers to participation-such as time,
distance, money, and training-as low as possible; (2) strive for an everyday, spontaneous, noncorporate
mode of organization that requires little if any capital outlay; and (3) should be a part of other realms of
life instead of divorced from them” (pp. 370-1). In doing so, Hamilton argues, the strict division of labor
between producer and consumer that we see in mainstream media can be erased. In a later text, Hamilton
argues that erasing this division can lead to understanding media as a site of education, research, and
experimentation (2008).
Mowbray also notes that participatory logics can be thought of at two levels: superficial and
intensive modes of participation. Superficial modes, he argues, “end up reduced simply to the possibility
for each and all to circulate contributions to an imagined communicative agora” (2015, p. 24). Mowbray
argues that under the current abundance of communication options technology has enabled for us over the
last 150 years, many of these allow access to “a fantasy of participation” (Dean, 2005, p. 60), which
makes us believe we are actively participating, when in fact we are partaking “in the circulation of content
online works to displace real world struggles” where technology simply serves as a fetishized tool under

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communicative capitalism (Mowbray, 2015, p. 24). Intensive modes of participation, on the other hand,
he argues, “imply relatively direct, reciprocal and dialogic relationships and communicative exchanges
among those involved in media production – an emphasis on concrete, collective interactive processes
characterized by agonistic exchange and by process-based anti-oppressive practice in the context of
particular (often small-scale) projects” (2015, p. 24). Thus, the key to understanding how abolitionist
student collectives use social media in alternative fashions is whether it serves as a tool for intensive
modes of participation.
Reprographic Innovations/Adaptions
Writing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Atton offers the “use of mimeographs, IBM
typesetting, offset litho, [and] photocopies” (2003, p. 27) as examples of reprographic technologies.
Reprographic technologies have changed and grown since Atton was writing, particularly with the growth
of personal computers and the internet (Borschke 2017). As noted by Nicholas John (2014), “One of the
most popular uses of the internet today is to copy and distribute, or to make available for copying and
distribution, digital media files” (p. 198). Rather than understanding social media and digital technologies
as separate mediums from analog media, I found that student activists tend to understand them as
reprographic innovation/adaptation tools. As can be seen in Figures 3, 4, and 5, student activists use
digital tools to emulate assemblage-style media; they simply cut out the labor of printing, cutting, and
pasting, instead using software to do the image reproduction and editing for them.
Some of these reprographic techniques exist through genre. For example, one of the media items
produced by ULA is entitled “Abolish the University of Los Angeles: A (Dis)Orientation Guide.”
Disorientation guides as a genre of publication have existed since at least the 1970s and are generally
written to “educate students on the less sunny side of their institution by introducing them to campus
activism” (Hayssen, 2022). The Disorientation Guide thus reproduces and counteracts the institutionally
produced Orientation Guide. Another media item from ULA, an “abolition map” subtitled as “a spatial
and temporal journey towards a campus and a world without cops,” as seen in Figure 12, reproduces maps
from Google and overlays them with photos of the campus and histories of police violence and campus

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resistance. While not as grounded in the definition of assemblage, as say, Figures 3 through 7, there is an
element of the “cut-and-paste assemblages of photographic fragments and snippets of text” that Mowbray
argues are at the center of alternative aesthetics and form (2015, p. 28).
Figure 12
Screenshot From ULA Cops Off Campus Abolition Map: A Spatial and Temporal Journey Towards a
Campus and A World Without Cops
The work on the website “Art, Abolition, and the University” includes reproductions of already
created/published works, such as photographs and screenshots of art pieces, digital video artworks, and
writings from the Abolish the University newspaper, class papers, and poetry. Some of these pieces, in
turn, also use reprographic adaptions. For example, as can be seen in Figure 13. This piece includes
official court documents (themselves reproductions) of the artist’s time in solitary confinement. These
documents have been wheat-pasted onto a piece of cardboard the same size as a solitary confinement cell
door.

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Figure 13
“Solitary Confinement” By A Member of The Ongoing Project On “Art, Abolition, And the University”
Some of the zines utilize a more traditional reproduction style, as can be seen in Figure 14, where
photos of well-known abolitionists Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis and the organization Critical
Resistance’s logo have been cut out, pasted, and had speech bubbles with quotes from each of them
defining abolition added. The zine itself, entitled “Coffee Not Cops,” references a common trend in
“community policing”: Coffee With A Cop (Coffee With A Cop, Inc., n.d.), where police officers spend
time in a public space (usually a cafe) and community members are “encouraged to stop by and talk to
police” (O’Reilly et al., 2022, p. 80), despite mixed opinions on the efficacy of coffee with a cop
programs, many university campuses continue to host similar events.

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Figure 14
Page 6 Of “Coffee Not Cops” Zine
As in Figure 14, while few of the zines explicitly stated an “ethos of anti-copyright” that scholars
have shown was at the center of zines in their heyday (Scheper, 2023, n.p.), there is an explicit
engagement with critical citational practices that put forth the belief that “ideas are not possessions, but
rather are shared inheritances: collective archives, bits and pieces meant to be freely ‘stolen’ and made
available to others or repurposed” (Scheper, 2023, n.p.). For example, they will provide the source of
images produced by artists and community members but not those that appear to be from official
university publications. Here, sourcing seems to serve as a citational practice that, Sara Ahmed has
argued, is “a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain

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bodies” (2013, n.p.). It engages with a politics of refusal to recognize the institution and a commentary on
whose work it wishes to reproduce.
Transformation of Social Relations, Roles, and Responsibilities
Most of the media items have been produced by collectives. For example, four zines by the same
collective have “About” sections that note, “We are a collective of abolitionist students at Southern
California University.” The course list includes a description stating, “We are a student organization at
California College supporting prison-industrial-complex abolition through political education, direct
action, and community engagement,” another piece is a recording of a Los Angeles College community
picnic. In centering collective knowledge and media production, these media items reflect Hamilton’s
argument that alternative media should “(1) have barriers to participation–such as time, distance, money,
and training–as low as possible; (2) strive for an everyday, spontaneous, noncorporate mode of
organization that requires little if any capital outlay; and (3) should be a part of other realms of life
instead of divorced from them” (2000, pp. 370-1). One media piece, posted on the website of a collective
tied to ULA, is an individually authored paper, and one other media piece tied to ULA appears to have
been led by an individual Ph.D. student but created with others: the Abolition Map. Otherwise, all pieces
were created by collectives.
Most important to Atton’s definition of transformed social relations, roles, and responsibilities
within the production process is the fact that amateur media makers produced all media items and that all
have been done for free–or if in the case of some items which may be tied to academics’ research, all 22
media items have at the very least been produced without advertising. Other traditional relations have
been visibly resisted in the production process. Most items do not name an author or editor and are
produced by collectives. Some (a zine by SCU and a zine tied to ULA) feature pieces written by named
individuals, but the item as a whole is collectively produced.
Accessibility
When addressing the barriers to participation, Hamilton names time, distance, money, and
training; it’s clear that the digital plays a crucial role in making these collective processes accessible. All

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22 media items appear to have been produced between May 2020 and August 2022, meaning many were
created during lockdowns and stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital technology
not only served as a tool in producing media via sites such as Google Docs, Canva, Adobe, and Github,
but software such as Signal, Skype, and Zoom allowed collective members to meet and collaborate in
real-time virtually. Many of these tools are free, or interviewees noted their universities collaborated with
the software for institutional purposes, which the collectives then repurposed toward their organizing. No
collective mentioned requiring any training for members to collaborate on their media. However, during
interviews, many individuals highlighted utilizing their previously held skills as artists, coders, or
researchers in creating the media produced by the collectives.
Transformation of Communication Processes
In discussing what it means to have transformed communication processes, Atton offers examples
of “horizontal linkages” and “networks.” As noted, most media items were collectively produced. It is
unclear whether any hierarchies existed within the media-making process, but many interviewees
highlighted a lack of hierarchy as part of their overall organizational structure. One of the zines produced
by SCU notes that it invited “educators and community members to submit proposals for workshops,
demonstrations, activities, exercises, and playful interventions that can help us to realize pedagogical
techniques towards abolition.” And that all of these submissions were produced into a series of
workshops, and then each contributor was asked to write something based on their workshop for the zine.
All of SCU’s zines also include the sharing of information on mutual aid groups either in Los Angeles or
relevant to the issue’s theme, and one of their zines that looks at sexual violence in the university offers
an online version of its resources for the “harmed or harmers” of sexual violence. It also notes that if the
reader has “a resource [they] would like to see added to this document or know of any of the information
on it to be incorrect, please email us at [collective’s email address].”
Social media also played a crucial role in creating networks within the collectives’ work. Eleven
out of the twelve collectives looked at mentioned and tagged other collectives/organizations, either at the
university level, local/city level, nationally, or internationally (see Appendix B). They also all allowed for

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comments on their social media; during coding, these comments were classified as “critical,”
“supportive,” “sharing,” or “question” based. Critical comments included those critiquing the collective
or the post, and all collectives had left these critical comments visible on their social media pages—some
collectives actively engaged with these comments, all offering care and more information. Notably, many
collectives used repost apps that allowed them to share posts from other users on Instagram quickly. The
one collective that did not mention or tag other collectives/organizations was one of the two rural
collectives. Thus, it is possible that given there were far more local/city collectives tagged by other
collectives than national or international, this may reflect a lack of potential collaborators, as opposed to a
lack of desire to collaborate.
Logics of (Counter-)Public-Formation and Facilitation: Alternative Media Distribution
Public formation and facilitation logics, Mowbray argues, generally promote “a focus on media
projects which seek to account for diversity, polysemy and contention in the construction of mediated
publics, and upon fostering attention, engagement, and public dialogue among sectors of the nominal
community, typically with an emphasis on working within existing political structures” (2015, p. 25). Or,
in the case of the possible logics of counter-public formation and facilitation, they rely on “individuals’
activity rather than any ascribed characteristic or ‘objective’ social status or position, and their continued
existence depends upon the voluntarily deployed attention and activity of members” (2015, p. 26).
Understanding how abolitionist student collectives use media in alternative fashions requires a connection
between their media practices and action.
All collectives used media items and social media to share events and calls to action. There was a
clear connection between the collective’s online social media presence and events happening off of social
media. For example, one collective had five posts referencing calls to action, four to car caravans/rallies,
one to a celebration, five to conferences, three to discussions, one to letter writing, one to phone zaps, one
to a march, one to a sit-in, one to a day of refusal, one to a survey, sixteen to talks/panels, seven to teachins, one to a town hall, three to trainings, one to a vigil, and three to workshops. In displaying this
repertoire of tactics, this variety of events reflects a broad organizing strategy and precise use of social

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media toward in-person/community building. As noted by Earl and Kimport, this reflects the overall
repertoire of contention, wherein “activists don’t just make up new tactical forms every day, they choose
from a limited set of available options” (2011, p. 16). As can be seen, by the use of similar media and
social media distribution tactics, the abolitionist student collective repertoires influence one another not
only through their tactical repertoires but also “collective identities, frames, and shared networks” (Taylor
et al., 2009 p. 868). Notably, according to Poelle and van Dijck, “community formation has always been
considered a central objective of alternative activist communication” (2015, p. 532). Some of the
distributive repertoires activists use toward this goal include alternative (non-institutional) sites for
distribution, clandestine/invisible distribution networks, and anti-copywrite practices. I situate these
alongside Atton’s argument for transforming social relations, roles, and responsibilities and transforming
communication processes within the facilitation of distribution (2002).
Use of Alternative (non-institutional) Sites for Distribution
In 1977, the Royal Commission on the Press argued that “distribution is the most difficult
problem to be overcome” for alternative press (p. 63). In 2002, Atton still seemed to believe this to be the
case, offering open distribution as an example of alternative distribution. While he doesn’t provide a clear
definition of open distribution, he offers the example of the anarchist news sheet Counter Information
encouraging its readers to make free use of its contents “as required, or for reprinting” (Counter
Information, 1984), Atton goes on to specify that it “offered electro stencils or duplicate printing plates”
(quoted on Atton 2002, p. 44). He then gives the slightly more recent example of Earth First!’s Do or Die
magazine, recommending readers who have “got access to cheap photocopying facilities, print up copies
of this yourself, we don’t mind, we are not capitalists” (Earth First, 1992). This open distribution reflects
a version of “publishing” and “distributing” that does not require a professional press. Instead, it uses
“skills and sites belonging to groups and communities normally excluded from mainstream modes of
distribution in an alternative public sphere” (Atton, 2002, p. 28).
The digital and internet played a clear role in changing forms of distribution. As noted by Bart
Cammaerts, the internet–and specifically social media– “increasingly constitute[s] an alternative channel

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of distribution, instrumental in their efforts to bypass the oligopolistic grip of the mainstream media on
the public space” (2016, p. 2). This bypassing can be seen in that all 22 media items created by
abolitionist student collectives used non-institutional social media and websites to distribute their media
objects. One video item also used an institutional site (specifically a university website) to share the
video. Physical copies of one of the newspapers entitled Abolish the University: Building A Prison To
School Pipeline have been handed out at multiple art shows, including at the San Jose Museum of Art and
John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Berto, one of the involved artists, also noted in his interview that he
offers copies of the newspaper “as a positive takeaway at all my art shows,” when his collective tables or
holds events, they also share copies of the newspaper. Notably, prior to beginning this research, I was
given a copy of the newspaper in the Summer of 2021 by a friend who attended an art show at the
Torrance Art Museum. Members of other student collectives also highlighted their ability to give out
copies of their media at events. This is, of course, not to imply that these platforms and technologies are
inherently alternative. As noted by Cammaerts, while they can reduce production and distribution costs,
lessen time and space constraints, and provide “direct access to audiences worldwide” (2016, p. 1),
ultimately, these tools and platforms are “an intrinsic part of the mainstream” (2016, p. 2).
Clandestine/Invisible Distribution Networks
Atton’s argument for clandestine/invisible distribution networks comes from Curran and Seaton’s
work on the legacy of underground distribution networks used by radical reformist papers in England
from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. As previously addressed, all analyzed media items
were distributed via social media and websites. The individuals behind these distributions are rarely
invisible, so while they may not be “clandestine/invisible” in the way Atton meant when publishing in
2002, the internet lends itself towards functioning as such. As will be discussed, much of their work
involved an awareness of oversight and/or surveillance from campus police, and their decision to function
as a collective or with a pseudonym was often rooted in a desire to remain less visible/invisible to the
institution. Similarly, one essay–The University and the Prison: A Dialogue–was published on e-flux in

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their architecture section. e-flux is a for-profit publishing, archive, artist project, and curatorial platform
founded in 1998. As a for-profit platform, e-flux serves as a visible site of distribution.
Anti-Copyright Practices
Atton names anti-copyright practices as a developing ideology in the alternative press of the
1990s working against intellectual property rights. Grounded in the belief that there should be the “widest
possible dissemination of unorthodox, dissident ideas using the smallest amount of resources” (Atton
2002, p. 42), Atton notes that many authors and publishers began to “encourage the free circulation of
their material” (2002, p. 42) via anti-copyright or open copyright statements in their publications that let
the reader know they were “free to copy as much of the document as they wish, provided that it [wa]s not
for commercial purposes” (2002, p. 42). Atton also ties this work to the Situationist International’s
theorizing around “détournement”, which involves “taking elements from a social stereotype and, through
their mutation and reversal, turning them against it… [to produce] a parodic destabilization of the
commodity-image” (Bonnett, 1991/1996, p. 193).
Explicit “anti-copyright” calls to “Copy and Distribute at will. Share information” (Earth First,
1992) have become rarer with the internet in part because the assumption is that media is being copied
and distributed/shared digitally (Klein et al., 2015). This call can be seen explicitly, for example, in the
work of Aaron Swartz. Swartz, in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, argued that “The world’s entire
scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being
digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations” and thus those with the access to
knowledge, “have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues,
filling download requests for friends” (Swartz, 2008, n.p.). Swartz called on individuals to use the internet
to “oppos[e] the privatization of knowledge” (Swartz, 2008, n.p.). As noted by Margie Borschke in This is
Not a Remix. With the digital, “the creation and movement of copies is ubiquitous, practically effortless,
and…even unconscious or unintentional. Digital technologies depend on replication to perform everyday
activities.” Perhaps this ubiquity leads to so few collectives calling out the freedom to copy the media.
While only one of the 22 media items explicitly references the free circulation of their materials, all the

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media items studied for this chapter were available online. A zine by a collective affiliated with ULA
notes that its zine is “for use on campuses & in communities anywhere.” Returning us to the idea that
abolitionist student collectives use social media as a tool of media creation.
Transformation of Social Relations, Roles, and Responsibilities
As noted in the discussion of production, the key to the transformation of social relations, roles,
and responsibilities is the unrestricted use of content, so while this may mean that collectives charge for
their media items–though this was not the case for any of the 22 items studied here–they encourage
copying and sharing of that media. Notably, a zine made by collectives affiliated with ULA included a
segment encouraging readers to cut out, copy, and use the page–as seen in Figure 15–to create masks for
themselves and their community.
Figure 15
Screenshot From Zine by Collectives Affiliated With ULA

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Transformation of Communication Processes
Here again, the transformation of communication processes during distribution overlaps with the
production mentioned above elements, as alternative media blurs the lines between who counts as a
producer versus distributor versus consumer. Returning to Atton’s examples of “horizontal linkages” and
“networks.” As noted, all social media posts and most media items were shared on social media sites,
allowing for public conversation and responses via comments, stories, reels, and other sharing features.
Others are a little more explicit in their engagement. The SCU collective’s zine on pedagogy writes, “We
hope our workshop facilitators’ insights can serve as an entry point and inspiration toward envisioning
liberation pedagogy in your own work.” Highlighting the expectation that the reader will think about the
zine content and practice it. The ULA collective discussed in the opening is purposefully similar to a
campus tour but offers examples of sites of violence and resistance on the campus. It ends with the call to
map campus investments in violence. It invites viewers to “join the movement,” noting they can get
involved via weekly meetings, coffee not cops info sessions, commitments to mutual aid, “and so much
more.” In interviews with student activist members of abolitionist collectives, they brought up using
media in events as a conversation starter and a physical object that individuals can take home to
remember the collective. In Alternative Media, Atton makes the argument that “the zine may be chiefly
constructed as promoting sociality. It is dialogical in intent and offers itself as a token for social relations”
(2002, p. 55) Arguably, this sociality comes up within much of the abolitionist student activist media,
wherein the collectives use media and social media to engage with a community outside of their
collective.
Critical-Emancipatory Logics: Alternative Media Content and Goals
Mowbray argues that critical-emancipatory logics function “primarily at the level of content and
form” and are “characterized by an alternative political vision” (2015, p. 26). Similar to Atton’s
relationship between content and aim, Mowbray views this “alternative political vision” (p. 26) in
opposition to those involved in “mainstream” media, where they seek to be “media ‘agents of social
change’” rather than the “media ‘agents of social reproduction’” of status quo mainstream media (2015,

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pp. 26-27). Thus, critical-emancipatory logics are rooted in “ideology critique and expressions of radical
imagination,” serving as “resources for a counter-hegemonic project” (Mowbray, 2015, p. 27). I will
briefly discuss how some of the media content is tied to providing these “resources for a counterhegemonic project” (2015, p. 27) before returning to the interviews to discuss the aim of the media and its
ties to Mowbray’s critical-emancipatory logics. Interviewees believed alternative media better suited their
purposes of political education, capacity building, and resisting institutional temporality as part of a
broader media ecosystem outside the individual universities.
Resources for a Counter-Hegemonic Project
As previously noted, Atton offers a few examples of how media can serve as a counterhegemonic project. It can (a) express the opinion of a small/minority community, (b) express an attitude
“hostile to widely held beliefs,” (c) express a view not given regular coverage by mainstream publication,
or (d) express a desire for revolutionary social change. Almost all media and social media items were
produced by a small collective. The vast majority of media items included the collective naming
themselves as a minoritized community, e.g., the disorientation guide included a note that “[collective
name] is a formation of BIPOC, queer, and first-generation graduate student workers and our
accomplices, drawn together by shared visions and antagonisms.” Abolition can be–and often is by
mainstream media–understood as inherently hostile to hegemonic beliefs, in particular, the idea that
police and prisons hold a purpose/are necessary for our society. Alongside this, media items offer specific
rhetoric hostile to mainstream ideology. For example, the disorientation guide notes, “The end of the
world is coming. The ULA will have no place in it…the University must come to terms with its own
negation”; a zine produced by a collective also tied to ULA uses the acronym “FTP” generally used to
reference the phrase “Fuck tha Police” made famous by the N.W.A. 1988 song of the same name, though
the zine gives it subsequent meanings, writing: “FTP: for the people / fuck the patriarchy / free the
prisoners.” Here, and throughout the media and social media, we see strong language (both negatory and
cursing) to emphasize a hostility or refusal to engage with current systems and beliefs.

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Figure 16
Page From A ULA Zine On the Normalization of Policing in The U.S.
As shown by researchers (Herman and Chomsky, 2002; MacLeod 2019), mainstream
publications are drastically more likely to express hegemonic views; thus, counter-hegemonic ideas, such
as those represented by abolitionist movements, are rarely acknowledged by mainstream publications (see
Figure 16), or, as many of the collectives make clear, by the educational institutions themselves. For
example, an SCU zine notes that “the university’s “listening sessions” and “advisory boards” are little
more than a ploy to suppress real demands for radical change.” Here, we see the naming of the institution
itself and the argument that its methods of communication via listening sessions and advisory boards
serve to maintain a hegemonic structure. In a report associated with ULA, they share information on
arrests by campus police that breaks the data down by race (see Figure 17) and compares it to the same
demographic information for the surrounding community. The report makes visible public details not
previously reported on by mainstream publications. The report, as a whole, uses conventional methods of
information sharing, e.g., graphs and tables, to reflect on an issue not previously given institutional
attention.

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Figure 17
Image From “Policing ULA: ULA PD Arrests (2013-2018): A [Collective Name] Report”
Finally, if, as discussed in Chapter 2, we understand abolition as an inherently revolutionary
ideology, we can also point to specific rhetoric used by the collectives to signal the desire for
revolutionary social change. For example, an SCU zine notes, “A better world is possible”; in a
newspaper associated with ULA, one of the interviewees states, “I think the whole system needs to go.
And when we’re talking about abolishing the university, we’re talking about destroying the university as
the gatekeeper to knowledge…I’m weaponizing my mind. I’m learning about these systems, how these
systems work, but also how to abolish them, which also means how to create alternatives that don’t
depend upon all of this.” Or, in a video associated with LAC, one individual states that “the structure of
power in university governance needs to be overturned.”
When it came to using social media, all collectives shared resources, critiquing and offering
alternatives to what they were critiquing. As can be seen in Appendix B, codes for this section resulted in
general themes as well as university-specific themes. General themes included the following codes:
Alternatives/Solutions, Critique of System - Role of Race/Racism, Critique of System - Class/Capitalism,
Critique of System - Colonialism/Imperialism/Migration, Critique of System - Violence, Engaging
Current Political Systems/Institutions, “Issue” Police/Prisons Attempt To Address, Issue: Policing, Issue:

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Prisons, Issue: Courts/Legal System, Gender/Sexuality, Health, Media, Role of History, Role of the State,
Role of Education, and Other. All of which are tied to either a critique of mainstream ideology or–
particularly in items coded Alternatives/Solutions–expressions of radical imagination
University-specific themes were categorized into Classroom/Role of Education, Financial,
Administrative, Resistance, Alternatives, and Other. For example, as seen in Figure 18, one collective has
reposted a graphic by Stop LAPD Spying20, which shows how facial recognition technology works. Other
images in the carousel show how the LAPD uses facial recognition technology, how facial recognition
technology is inherently biased, and why the use of facial recognition technology by the LAPD should be
banned. The post encourages viewers to “sign the petition telling LA Police Commission to REJECT
LAPD’s latest proposal for facial recognition surveillance.” Here, the post first critiques the normalization
of facial recognition, using a technique of defamiliarization to have the reader engage before pushing for
an action item.
Figure 18
Screenshot From One Collective’s Instagram Account
20 The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a community group building power towards the abolition of the police state, founded in
2011, they are based at the Los Angeles Community Action Network in Skid Row.

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Figure 19
Screenshot From One Collective’s Instagram Account
Figure 19 shows a call to attend an on-campus “GBM” (general body meeting) focusing on the
connections between Marxism and abolition. While the post itself does not explicitly critique mainstream
ideology, the use of constructivist design references a 1920s movement associated with Soviet socialism,
which believed art should serve political agendas (Rickey, 1967). Not only did the media advocate for
“change in society” (O’Sullivan 1994, p. 10), but it also advocated for change by offering explicit calls to
action. For example, the disorientation guide includes “skill shares from comrades, accomplices, and
homies across ULA (and beyond).” Its introductory piece ends with the call, “Out of the seminars and
into the streets!” CC’s Abolitionist Course List encourages readers to take “courses on abolitionist topics,
and/or taught by abolitionist professors,” and the website Art, Abolition, and the University tied to ULA
includes examples of “prison readymades” (as seen in Figure 20). In presenting these readymades as art,
by publicly sharing them, the collective offers an example of how they can promote social change through

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“rais[ing] questions about what art can be, and how art can raise awareness of different issues in
contemporary society, in this case, mass incarceration.” Finally, we also see in the SCU zine responding
to sexual violence on campus that it “is designed as a toolkit to serve SCU students, though we hope it
can also support other university students, and others trying to address sexual violence in Los Angeles.” It
thus presents actionable items university students can take when dealing with systemic and individual
experiences of sexual violence.
Figure 20
A Prison Readymade Presented In “Art, Abolition, and the University” A Website Created by SystemsImpacted Scholars/Artists/Activists
Political Education
The “alternative political vision” (Mowbray, 2015, p. 26) offered by the media and social media
primarily can be seen through the collectives’ political education goals. Defined as “the teaching and
learning processes that compel individuals to reflect on the nature of power and its connections to the
range of forces shaping both individuals and institutions” (Maton & Stark, 2023, p. 292), political
education is usually researched in two places: formal schooling (Callan, 1997; Fairbrother, 2003; Ichilov,

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1994; Sant, 2021; Wringe, 2014) and experiences outside of institutions, such as involvement in social
and political movements (Choudry, 2015; Herzing, 2020; Judson, 2021; Rogers et al., 2023; Willis,
1976). As discussed in Chapter 4, abolitionist student activists found the university’s primary political
education as grounded in carceral ideology, working to control people, force people to conform to the
status quo, maintain structures of oppression, and punish, dispose of, and dehumanize people who do not
adhere to the status quo that allows capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other
systems that reproduce domination to objectify and control people. Their definitions of political education
thus center their experiences outside of formal schooling.
This second definition ties to Rachel Herzing’s argument, mentioned in Chapter 2, that political
education is “the practice of studying the history and analysis of struggles for social, political, geographic,
and economic power with the explicit purpose of strengthening political organizations and movements for
social change” (2020, n.p.). I tie this definition to the field of “social movement learning” (Hall 2006) and
“organizing pedagogies” (Pham & Philip 2021; Rogers et al 2023), but as the term “political education”
was the one used by interviewees it is the one I shall use in this section. Willis goes on to note that in
political education “there is a stress on people actively listening, carrying on a dialogue, and learning
from each other and then translating suggestions into meaningful action” (1976, p. 6). In Willis’ work and
most political education discussions among activists, there is frequently a connection between the work
and Paulo Freire’s work on conscientização (critical consciousness). Willis speaks to how Freire
understood political education through consciousness-raising “as a social intervention strategy, as a way
of enabling poor and disenfranchised people to work constructively toward the social change” (p. 34).
Thus, returning to Meyerhoff’s [ref] concept of “modes of study,” political education within activist
spaces can be understood as a mode of study that raises one’s consciousness through listening and
dialogue to put what one’s learned into action. The centrality of exchange makes it an inherently
collective process, where participants are both the students and the teachers. While political education
may happen in formal education spaces, it rarely does.

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As discussed in Chapter 2, political education is also connected to social movement learning, and
organizing pedagogies. Organizing pedagogies–or pedagogies of organizing according to Pham and Philip
(2021)–are “methods and practices used by activists to seed and nurture diverse groups’ learning about
social issues impacting their communities and themselves, and to emerge as local social movement actors,
with common causes and identities, who have the resources and power needed to make the change they
want” (Pham & Philip 2021, p. 29). Pham and Philip put these pedagogies alongside processes of
organizing to “forefront the teaching and learning dimensions of organizing” (p. 29). Organizing
pedagogies look to the microscale learning happening alongside the macroscale learning of social
movement learning. Rogers et al. look at the pedagogical strategies activists use “to advance freedom
struggles through educational practice within and beyond the contested boundaries of the campus” (2023,
p. 146). They center their own experience of organizing pedagogies focused on the authors claiming, “our
power as historical actors (Tivaringe & Kirshner, 2021) and space-making agents who contest the antiBlack spatialized violence of the university” (2023, p. 147). They note, as many of the interviewees do,
that while this work is often counter-institutional, it relies on many similar skills as the classroom, e.g.,
“group facilitation, instruction, curriculum development, oratory, and participatory learning” (2023, p.
147), which is perhaps why so many individuals within the university are drawn to political education as
a site of organizing. As Rogers et al. note, “the most critical aspect of organizing pedagogies” is “that
learning must catalyze transformative action” (2023, p. 162).
Changing Campus Discourses.
Interviewees understood the relationship between political education and action, viewing political
education as a strategy for changing campus discourse around policing and changing campus practices
around policing. While often dismissed as a lesser goal, in The Politics of Common Sense: How Social
Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance, Deva R. Woodly highlights
the importance of changing discourse as a necessary step in organizing work to change institutional
practices. Specifically, Woodly argues that “the way that we talk about issues in public both reflects and
determines what solutions are considered desirable or plausible in the commonplace logics that shape the

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politics of a particular moment” (2015, p. 19). So, changing discourse can lead to different practices and
what practices are imagined as “desirable or plausible” (2015, p. 19). Woodly notes that it can be easier to
change public discourse before we change individual attitudes, as acceptance of something as an issue
worthy of discourse “acknowledges that the topic is both public and political and understands the topic as
a problem to be solved” (2015, p. 151).
Despite the long history of abolitionist and anti-police/prison organizing in the U.S. (Davis,
2003b; Thuma, 2019; Williams, 2016), there was a general understanding among interviewees that the
Summer of 2020 was the first time in their lifetime they had seen the issue receive mainstream attention,
so while many of the interviewees did hold the goal of convincing others to become abolitionists, mostly
they seemed interested in getting other people to take abolition seriously. Particularly in their reasons for
producing media, this was a high priority. For example, Avery argued that there are a lot of students who
resist or have a “lack of knowledge on abolition in general,” so she hoped the zines and social media
graphics her collective produced can inform other students and, in particular, break down the theory of
abolition to make it less overwhelming. Grace, a member of the same collective, argued that the media
they create includes “educational information that either is printed or just a few slides of infographics that
are meant to bring awareness to issues that might not be taught in school” to similarly be accessible to
individuals new to abolition.
Alessia named political workshops her collective has adapted from Critical Resistance–a national
grassroots organization working to end the prison industrial complex–as a critical resource for their
political education. She named media, such as their PowerPoints, integral to this political education. But
as seen in Figure 21, the collective also used interactive media such as whiteboard diagrams and post-it
notes during their workshops. Elisa, a student at the same university, brought up a semesterly document
they made and circulated “about the classes that are tied to abolition” or taught by “professors who are
aligned with abolition,” allowing students interested in learning more about abolition or who want to take
classes that align with their politics to professors teaching those classes. In the Fall semester of 2022, this
expanded into a “Community Restorative Justice Multi-Class Project” that includes nine different courses

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across eight departments. This project combines the two definitions of political education, using an
activist collective to highlight spaces within formal schooling where individuals may receive a political
education in line with the collective’s priorities.
Figure 21
Instagram Post of a Workshop Held by CC Abolitionist Student Collective in November 2018
For many other students, these political education dialogues either happened among members
creating the media or were welcomed and encouraged as a response to the media produced. Naomi said
that her collective’s goal when organizing a campaign around ULA’s 100th anniversary was to “show
people that this isn’t- it’s not what you all think it is. It’s a game in the university. Our goal was to inform
people, to educate, to just kind of upset people too, and move them towards action.” She goes on to note
that while their primary target audience was students, it was also:
Anyone who was really willing to care to read it. It was professors, it was administrators, it was
anybody who was willing to read our very thoughtful analysis and be like- and ask questions,
even if the questions weren’t questions we agreed with or questions that we’re trying to get
answers that we weren’t going to give. We were okay with that. We just wanted people to ask
questions.
Naomi highlighted that graphics, in particular, seemed to receive the most attention. Thus, there appeared
to be an appetite for easily digestible and accessible information. Avery noted something similar for her
collective, stating that on their social media, “people love infographics…we definitely get the most
engagement with those easily digestible four or five slides with I don’t know less than a paragraph on
each, which I understand they are really helpful if you’re brand new to a topic.” Though she referenced,

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this presentation of easily digestible content appeared to be a general trend in social media engagement
with activism. Derek, a member of the same collective, highlighted the accessibility of the media they’ve
produced via zines and social media, noting that many of the members writing the information are in
graduate school, “so it’s academically sound, well written, but accessible in an accessible format for the
layperson.” Derek refers to these as an “alternative format,” assumingly alternative to more traditional
academic presentations of research and information sharing such as research papers. He stated that the
goal has been to have the zines and social media serve as “another form of public education so that people
can learn about this issue from an abolitionist perspective.” Andy also noted that his collective used social
media to promote events and “ideological stuff” at LAC. Examples of this ideological work can be seen in
Figures 22-24 from LAC collectives’ Instagrams. In these posts, the collectives spend time connecting
policing to fascism, defining abolition, and connecting their activism and the work of activists in Greece.
Promoting events that do political education work also seemed crucial to social media usage, with
Alessia, Emily, Fiona, Sonya, and Sophie all naming it. Andy said their collective’s most popular social
media post was one advertising a Zoom panel, which over 100 people attended.
Figure 22
Example Of Political Education from A Collective at LAC’s Instagram

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Figure 23
Example Of Political Education from A Collective at LAC’s Instagram
Figure 24
Example Of Political Education from A Collective at LAC’s Instagram

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In her Introduction, Woodly writes that “the way that we talk about issues in public both reflects
and determines what solutions are considered desirable or plausible in the commonplace logics that shape
the politics of a particular moment” (2015, p. 19). As will be discussed with Capacity Building, student
activists felt they could not rely on institutional or mass media to lead the conversation on policing or take
abolition seriously as a solution. Instead, they create their own media and social media posts to challenge
the discourse and offer abolition as a plausible solution.
Changing Campus Practices.
Abolitionist students clarified that, while they believe their media will play a role in changing the
general discourse around abolition, they are also actively looking to change campus practices. Campus
practices here refer to the application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to the theory
relating to it, so abolitionist student activists are not only looking to inform the discourse around campus
policing and abolition but also see changes in the campus practices around policing and abolition. For
example, Andrew noted that “the explicit goal was just to abolish campus police; that was the goal from
the beginning.” He went on to say that the report his collective produced on campus police arrests was
designed to “show the detrimental impact and racialized policing that goes on that the regents support and
prop up.” He notes that despite receiving many responses from representatives within the university, no
institutional change was made due to the report. Grace and Nico also name the use of media as a call to
action, with Grace highlighting using social media to share things individuals can do “like sign a petition,
but also, if we have a meeting, here’s information about our meeting.” Nico noted that his collective used
media to organize meetings, protests, and teach-ins, social media allowed them “to make it more
accessible to people and reach a wider network,” including members of other universities across the State
who traveled, in one case close to 400 miles, to join the protests. This tracks with Lievrouw’s findings
that small activist movements use social media to create mediated mobilization (2023), alongside mass
movements (as discussed in detail by Manuel Castells, 2012).
Emily also named social media to offer “deliverables that are catered to a general audience that’s
maybe not familiar with the way people are exploited and with abolition and carceral structures.” She

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gave the example of a call to action during COVID-19 about “remote and hybrid accommodations for
disabled students” by one of the abolitionist collectives she’s involved in. Olivia noted that one of the
goals of the collective is “policy-based,” as they are working to get a transformative justice practitioner at
their college. She described this as a “tangible ask” alongside the goal to “disrupt some of the nonrestorative spaces on campus and really shift that culture.” Their internal documentation and media
production are being used to change institutional practices further. However, as discussed below, Olivia
also notes that part of this discussion is centered on avoiding the co-optation of transformative and
restorative justice practices.
Naomi also spoke to one of the issues with her collective’s centering of political education,
stating that often they tried to move people towards action “without trying to organize them in.” Notably,
as a result of the Summer of 2020, where “thousands of people were out to protest…and then there’s no
way to organize them in, there’s no way to- not initiate them, but to just to bring them into the fight. Now,
they’re just observers; now they’re just participants in the movement.” This difference between observers
and participants, while not always the language used by interviewees, was repeatedly named as an issue
with organizing, mainly as we got further away from the Summer of 2020. Arguably, this is one of the
potential issues with focusing on changing discourse as a tactic without tying it to a long-term organizing
strategy.
Two critical narratives appeared in interviews with students involved in creating the media: a
desire for direct engagement and community building with other students and a strategic attempt to avoid
co-option of their work. The willingness to engage directly with their audiences was noted in two ways:
firstly, using digital media via social networks allowed interaction through comments, shares, and direct
messaging. Secondly, there was an understanding that sharing physical objects such as newspapers and
zines could be done in person and allowed for–even enabled–conversation between the sharer and the
receiver. For example, members of SCU, who had produced a zine each semester for four semesters, held
a “release event” for their new zine each semester. They had done so in a few ways that engaged with
tabling: hosting a community dialogue, leafleting with a bullhorn, a picnic-themed end-of-semester event,

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and tabling at the university’s org-fair. These events were to distribute the zine and invite other students
into conversation on the zine topic.
Sonya noted two key ways to engage with social media: educational and engagement goals, and
she recommended using short-form videos for educational work, as she said TikTok has been so
successful that “every other platform is copying it. And it’s the same thing with Snapchat stories,
Instagram Stories, Facebook stories, YouTube stories.” These similarities across platforms mean that with
a single video, collectives can share it across multiple platforms. Sonya argued, “People are much more
likely to watch videos than read infographics.” Thus, short-form videos can allow you to “reach a wider
audience,” precisely, a niche activist audience. She noted that “short-form video is most effective when
it’s relatable and it seems like you’re speaking to a friend,” so she highlighted the performance of
authenticity within educational media creation. She advised using other platforms like Facebook,
Instagram, and Twitter/X for engagement. For example, she noted on Instagram that you can have “a
close audience…because you can follow, and you get curated content based on what you’re following.”
This audience, she argued, makes Instagram and other engagement-centered platforms particularly
effective for sharing events with a student-body population. She also noted that Instagram’s collaborative
posts feature, while designed for brand sponsorships, can be “co-opted” by organizers to reach a larger
audience for coalitional events21.
Alongside social media, interviewees named analog media central to engaging with people.
Alessia highlighted a pamphlet called “Intro to PIC Resources,” which her collective handed out at their
first semester meeting so interested members could read it between meetings and come to the second
ready to discuss the pamphlet. Sonya also noted that her collective was making a “walking video tour of
reading the campus through the lens of historical student activism.” She went on to note that some of the
conversations they wanted to include in the video, were informing students that “a lot of the beds of the
colleges are made, or were made from prison labor,” or the “drop Sodexo” campaign the campus won a
21 Launched in 2021, initially these posts allowed two users to share a post, as of July 2023 you can now have up to three
collaborators, possibly furthering their coalitional reach (Hutchinson, 2023).

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few years ago “that went through generations of students.” Here, Sonya understands media as being able
to do both the educational and engagement work with students, providing a history of organizing and
inviting them to join the future of organizing.
Capacity Building
Capacity-building has been explored by social movement scholars for decades (Downton &
Wehr, 1998; Fernandez & McAdam, 1988; Klandermans, 1984; Klandermans, 1993; Klandermans &
Oegema, 1987; Lim, 2008; McAdam, 1986; McAdam 1988; Muller & Opp, 1986; Oegema &
Klandermans, 1994; Schussman & Soule, 2005; Schwartz 1976; Snow et al., 1980; Somma, 2009; Tilly
1978), and is often understood as growing non-members to become passive members of a collective,
inactive members to become active members, and active members to become core organizing members
(Han 2014; Leading Change Network et al., 2014; Merriman & Barrach-Yousefi, 2021).
Membership Growth.
All the students interviewed named other university students as their primary audience. Reaching
people outside that audience was generally seen as a positive effect, though rarely a goal. There were two
exceptions. Fiona named a broader target audience for their collective’s media: “students, other students,
undergraduate and graduate students, staff, faculty, people on campus, people off campus, people
interested in the things that we make.” However, she noted collective membership was restricted to
students, and the physical media sharing had been centered on/near campus. Armando’s collective, which
exists for formerly incarcerated students and/or systems-impacted students, had a slightly different
intended audience for their media. He said that he first heard about the collective “through the media,
through YouTube…showing people who look like me, who talk like me, who are from Boyle Heights”22.
Avery also spoke about the role of media in educating her on abolition. When she was “starting
off,” she found “things like zines and social media were extremely important [for me] to not be so
overwhelmed that I backed off” when entering abolitionist organizing spaces. One of her goals with the
22 Boyle Heights is a predominantly Latine neighborhood in Los Angeles, with a per capita income of $12,476 in 2017, $16,285
below LA City’s per capita income at the time (LURN, 2018).

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collective’s media and social media creation is that it “does that for other people,” by “that” Avery means
making things accessible rather than “overwhelming.” Derek, a member of the same collective at SCU,
noted that their zines are used “to bring people in, who may want to join because they’ve read what we’re
trying to do,” highlighting that they “have a call of like ‘please join us’” within each zine. Here, we see
how the political education provided by the media is used to change campus discourses and find likeminded individuals to get more involved with the organization. Emily, also at SCU, stated when
discussing a different collective, she’s involved in that they’ve been using social media to “recruit and
attract new people and continue to build a larger community.” But the collective often found it a
balancing act “because it requires labor to make posts and create infographics. So, it’s weighing whether
or not that effort is worthwhile and would bring about change.” Fiona highlighted that she often took up
the design elements of tasks to utilize her background in media arts. This act reflects similar findings in
other social movements where individuals with backgrounds in visual arts and media take up the related
responsibilities in the collective (Reed, 2019).
Emily did note that her collective’s primary audience was students “who are similarly minded
trying to find sort of leftist spaces at SCU” and that while they had previously tried to advertise events for
a larger audience, they hadn’t found it very successful. Naomi also saw this issue in her organizing,
noting that while “one of the things that we always talked about was: how do we build capacity?” they
struggled to convert participants of events into members of their organization. Olivia agreed that her
collective used social media to build “up our group’s capacity.” She was looking to “expand our media in
an attempt to bring other folks in who are doing this similar work and create more of a collective.” Olivia
highlighted that, while her collective is in the early stages of media creation, much of the discussion
understands media and social media as “a great way to bring people in and really update people and have
this like history of work that our collective has done.” Like Derek, she also noted that, in particular, the
media should be accessible to those with different knowledge on the topic.
Naomi also noted that while their target audience was primarily students, they produced the work
for “anyone who was really willing to care to read it; it was professors, it was administrators.” Derek

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similarly noted that his collective’s audience was students, “but I think we’d be open to working with any
other allies in the university.” As previously discussed, we see here how the media produced by these
collectives functions simultaneously to address multiple forms of power within the university: growing
the collective’s capacity while doing political education work to push for campus practices to change via
those in differing positions of power. Within the university, Andy and Nico, both students at LAC, which
is part of a broader system of public education across the state, named that not only were they trying to
engage with students at their campus but with students across the state, their hope “was to branch it off to
have different chapters” across the system.
When discussing their engagement with digital media, and social media in particular, Grace noted
their collective’s goal “to create spaces that new people feel comfortable coming to, because I know with
a lot of organizations it can be daunting to enter a new space and not really know if you’re welcome or
not.” They noted that social media allows them to make the “space” (meaning collective) accessible.
Grace pointed out that the organizations they’re a part of use social media “to be able to engage with
people more directly, rather than creating only in-person spaces. They then went on to define accessibility
as the notion that “everyone is welcome, we want new people to come, it’s okay if you don’t really have
the capacity to do anything, we still want you to feel safe in this space.” In defining space accessibility
this way, Grace hints at a desire not to gatekeep the space from people who may not have the resources to
join the collective in person or know the normative language of activist spaces.
Coalition Building.
The possible expansiveness of coalition building among abolitionist collectives was repeatedly
discussed concerning the role media, and social media, in particular, can play. As mentioned, Nico
highlighted students traveling from other campuses across California to attend their protests, meaning
social media functioned as “a way to make it more accessible to people and reach a wider network.”
Avery and Grace also referred to the network-building element of social media. Avery spoke to social
media’s ability to “not just get quick interest, but form connections with other people,” and that that
networking element is something she wishes to prioritize in the collective, as she feels the collective has

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“a better idea now of what gets attention, and we can do more of that. But without the network, it doesn’t
have any long-term turnover.” Grace also discussed their personal social media on which they create and
share mutual aid graphics, they noted that they’ve built a network where they “can tag these certain
accounts that will share it, and then they’ll push it out as well.” Fiona also argued that the media serves to
build connections with individuals and organizations. She highlighted that their zines include mutual aid
pages that “give space to other orgs or collectives” who may not have “the exact same focus” but whom
they “can share that space” with.
Alessia, Olivia, and Sonya, all members at CC, highlighted that their collective serves as a
“liaison” for other organizations who want students to offer support. Alessia described their collective as
“always flooding” their Instagram “with things,” but those things are rarely done within their collective.
Instead, they are “often helping promote other people’s” content. Sonya said the collective also helps with
graphic creation or written media for outside organizations. Olivia argued that central to the internal
conversations they had been having around their collective is that while the collective’s work is centered
on campus, “there’s also a whole community, and the whole world that needs- or that we’re trying to get
to.” She used the metaphor of concentric circles to understand their target audience as expanding in nonlinear ways. In these ways, we see abolitionist collectives using their media to connect students–their
primary audience–to other abolitionist organizations and collectives off-campus.
Avoiding Co-option.
The third key reason for collective’s choice of mediums was a desire to avoid co-option from
their institutions. In Janice Radway’s article “Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of
Social and Political Change” (2011), she says zinesters (makers of zines) chose zines as a medium as they
were “wary of the dominant culture’s power to co-opt” and commodify (p. 141). In her interview, Olivia
said that while her collective was still in their “research phase,” this phase was partly to ensure the work
was “done the right way.” She went on to specify that this meant that it would be sustainable and could
“yield good non-co-opted work.” Co-option has been defined within social movement literature as “a way

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of diverting or quietening oppositional struggle and activism” (Baldry, Carlton, and Cunneen, 2015, p.
173), generally via the institutionalization or incorporation into the status quo (Touraine, 1981).
There is historical precedence within the university to this concern. Roderick Ferguson’s books
The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012) and We
Demand: The University and Student Protests (2017) look at institutions’ co-option of student activism to
create a new order of “minority difference” within the academy. Ferguson focuses on the relationships
between the state, capital, and the university and how the university has integrated marginalized
communities into the neoliberal order. As has since been backed up by other educational literature (Chun
& Feagin, 2022; Ferguson, 2012), Karen Umemoto argued in 1989 that goals of diversity and inclusion
were designed to usurp student goals of self-determination, meaning today, “the right of a group to
decision-making power over institutions affecting their lives has been gutted to the level of ‘student input’
by campus administrators” (p. 26). Other scholars have taken up this appropriation of diversity, equity,
and inclusion rhetoric, most notably Sara Ahmed’s 2012 book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity
in Institutional Life. In the book, Ahmed critiques the idea of diversity as a solution to the university’s
violence, especially given that universities care much more about the perception of diversity than its fact.
Thus, she argues that diversity work often becomes public relations work and prioritizes generating the
“right image” (2012, p. 34). The logic of diversity then reproduces institutional whiteness, and notions of
inclusion serve as a technology of governance for the structures of violence, “making strangers into
subjects, those who in being included are also willing to consent to the terms of inclusion” (2012, p. 163).
Ultimately, Ahmed argues, diversity thus functions as a strategy of academic containment (2012).
The co-option of organizing is also an ongoing struggle within the movement for police and
prison abolition (Anderson, 2021; Dobchuk-Land & Walby, 2022). Olivia pointed to the “very large
history of co-option,” particularly within restorative justice and transformative justice movements, where
“radical and abolitionist ideology gets dulled down to make it a little more palatable.” This argument has
been backed up by scholars such as Masahiro Suzuki & William R. Wood (2017) and Brian Williams
(2005). Nico noted that alongside co-option, his collective was also looking out for discrediting and

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infiltration. For example, they had the campus police department’s Instagram page following their
collective. While they “tried blocking them as much as we could every time we would see it,” they
understood the “inherent risks” in their work and felt social media’s benefits in accessing a broader
audience outweighed those risks.
Fiona also noted the ways institutional and traditional mass media in Los Angeles portray the
police, highlighting her university’s ties to both Hollywood and the Los Angeles Police Department.
None of the students interviewed named mainstream media, or even traditional campus media such as
newspapers or radio stations, as mediums they engaged with in their organizing. All four universities’
campus media had engaged with abolition as a concept, often contacting the collectives to be interviewed
or quoted. Still, campus media was never considered a strategic choice for the educational or engagement
work collectives did. This lack of engagement with campus media may tie to Coyer et al.’s 2007
argument that Western student media today functions “first and foremost as a training ground for future
professionals,” centering “the increasing pressure on students to graduate with competitive industry skills
and top grades, leaving them less time to engage in radical activity” (p. 232). Similar to Poelle and van
Dijck’s findings around activism generally (2015), this means students are much less likely to find
traditional media welcoming to radical activity and perspectives, altering the “the ‘power-dependency’
relationship between media and the social movement actors” (Tufekci 2013, p. 867). This dependency
leaves student activists to produce alternative media alongside broader media ecosystems outside their
universities.
New Temporalities
Interviewees also made two critical temporal arguments for their work. Firstly, they resisted
institutional control over narratives of the institution’s past by using media to create an archival record of
student resistance to/within the institution. Secondly, they argued the media served prefigurative work by
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Counter-Archive.
In his article “(An/)archival commons,” Paolo d’Urbano argued that contemporary social
movements treat “digital commons as archives and digital archives as commons” (2020, p. 28). The
digital, d’Urbano argues, presents real-time techniques “to record, store, and process information” (2020,
p. 28). A traditional understanding of the archive can be seen in Derrida’s Diacritics piece “Archive
Fever: A Freudian Impression” where he turns to the etymology of “archive” in the Greek word
“arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons,
those who commanded” (1995, p. 9). He thus argues the archive is a place where “official documents are
filed” (1995, p. 10) and guarded under “house arrest” (1995, p. 10). In The Archaeology of Knowledge,
Foucault argues that the archive should be understood not just as a physical space but as practices, as “the
law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” and “that
which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass” (2013, p.
145). The archive, to Foucault, is a system of organizing discourse to “produce a notion of history”
(McKinney, 2020, p. 14); Foucault argues that archives define what can or has been said and how these
statements relate to one another. Archives thus reflect systems of power and “structure how the past is
encountered” (McKinney, 2020, p. 15). Interviewees reflected this understanding of the archive in their
argument that their work served as a counter to the dominant narrative of the university (Chew et al.,
2018). Chew et al. argue that counter-archives “have explicit intention to historicize differently, to disrupt
conventional national narratives, and to write difference into public accounts” (2018, p. 9).
Fiona was the clearest about understanding the media her collective produced as a counterarchive, arguing that “for me, there is something important about leaving traces, whether you want to use
the language of ‘an archive’ or whatever…I think it’s important to me that the work we do is not just in
the moment or momentary.” In her reluctance to use the word “archive,” I situate the work as a counterarchive. Fiona continued that the counter-archive was needed because their collective must address the
fact the work they are doing “is part of work that has been going on for hundreds of years that is not
always documented or recognized or acknowledged.” Here Fiona situates the collective’s work in both

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the legacy of abolitionist work in the U.S. (Abad, 2023; Abolition Collective, 2018; Berger, 2016; Berger
& Losier, 2018; Chua, 2020; Critical Resistance, 2008; Herzing & Ontiveros, 2011; Kaba, 2021;
Lamusse, 2018; Mathiesen, 2015; Rodríguez, 2007; Saed, 2012; Williams, 2016; Zurn & Dilts, 2016) and
the legacy of student organizing (Ahmed, 2021; Aptheker, 192; Bailey & Freedman, 2011; Bhambra et
al., 2018; Brax, 1981; Broadhurst, 2014; Chang, 2016; Conner, 2020; Ehrenreich & Ehrenreich, 1969;
Ferguson, 2017; Interface Archive, 2020; Kendi, 2012; Nkomo, 1984; Rhoads, 1998; Trask, 1999;
Umemoto, 1989; Vellela, 1988; Zhao, 2001), as well as suggesting how to provide a record for future
abolitionist student activists. Olivia expanded on the role of the counter-archive, explicitly addressing
that, as one of her co-organizers told her, this documentation allows them to address that this work has
often been done before, either at their own university or at other institutions. She stated that:
A lot of this work already exists, and we need to find better ways to build upon the work that
people have already done. So, we’re not just restarting every time people have the same ideas
over and over again, and really like- And I think that’s why we focused on really documenting
what we’ve done, so that people who are coming to this work for the first time, don’t have to
restart everything, or don’t have to rebuild those connections.
The difference between Fiona and Olivia’s documentation of their organizing was that Fiona’s collective
externally shares the media they produce as documentation, whereas Olivia’s collective currently keeps
their documentation internal. Part of this logic, Olivia argued, is per their desire to “yield good non-coopted work,” as previously discussed. However, Olivia noted that this documentation creation for their
collective looked like “writing up some of our conversations, taking really thorough notes, having a very
cohesive and accessible resource to look back on.” She went on to note that one student partaking in a
collective independent study for credit with her and others is “making a big resource” as the final project
that will serve as “an archive of the work that we’re doing that can help us in the next semesters look back
and be like: ‘Oh, this is what we did. These are some of our strategies. These are like the conversations;
we had the work we did’.” She considered that there also have been discussions about making more
publicly accessible archival media, either via zines, “filming some of our conversations, and sharing
them, photographing trainings, etc.” Olivia believed that expanding the media the collective produces
allows them to share their thinking with outsiders and, ideally, grow the collective.

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Armando similarly argued for creating a counter-archive, though he wished to use the counterarchive as an organizing tactic “to document the oral histories of folks” disproportionately affected by
campus police rather than to archive the collective’s work. Armando, Emily, and Naomi also spoke to this
tactic of using the counter-archive as space to respond to the university’s discourse around campus
policing and abolition and present historical evidence of disagreement with the university’s campus
policing policies. For example, Naomi mentioned letters her collective wrote addressed to the university
that were used “to historicize what was going on, so that way people could go back and try to figure out
what was the issue at hand? And what was the university’s responses? Whenever the university would
give us a response, we would respond back.” Naomi played a leading role in the collective’s letter
writing, and names that her “intention in some of the stuff was to document,” knowing she would soon no
longer be around to tell the story herself, that her “time here is short, and I know that the university’s
patience is longer, it’s deep, it runs deep. And their ability to erase collective memory is very interesting,
too.” Multiple students brought up, throughout the interviews, that universities often rely on the systemic
turnover of the student population to outwait student activism.
Emily noted an abolitionist collective she was in at SCU “created their list of demands in spring
2020 and circulated them and got several organizations to sign on, and that living document is still out
there.” The document is on Google Drive and archived digitally on the collective’s website. The living
archive (or document in this case), Jason Buel argues, “adds a temporal dynamism to the archive, no
longer treating it as a physical space bracketed off from time and instead seeing it as a constant process of
re-creation” (2018, p. 289). Emily’s use of “living document” speaks to Buel’s argument that the living
archive/document allows for “a constant process of re-creation” (2018, p. 289). This process is beneficial
for social movements whose membership changes over time, as it gives the organization’s documentation
the ability to grow and change as the organization does.
Prefiguration.
Finally, interviewees understood media as a site for imagining alternative futures for themselves and other
university members. In doing so, they gestured towards what I refer to as the prefigurative role media can

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play in their organizing. Coined by Carl Boggs in 1977, prefigurative politics refers to that “which
expresses the ultimate ends of the revolutionary process itself” (p. 359), or as explained by Yates, “the
future-oriented construction of political alternatives, or of attempts to reflect political goals or values in
social movement processes” (2021, p. 1033). It is generally considered in opposition to the vanguardist
understandings of revolution offered by Trotsky or Lenin, which prioritize “above all the struggle to
conquer and maintain political power” (Boggs, 1977, p. 359). Prefigurative politics use “imagination and
practice” to tie the present to alternative futures (Yates, 2021, p. 1041). In his 2015 article “Rethinking
Prefiguration: Alternatives, Micropolitics and Goals in Social Movements,” Luke Yates argues that
prefiguration uses five processes to combine present realities and alternative futures: experimentation,
“critical political perspectives,” the establishment of “new collective norms,” the consolidation of the first
three processes, and the demonstration and diffusion of the consolidated processes. Through these five
processes, activists attempt the “construction of alternative or utopian social relations in the present”
(Yates 2015, p. 1). Of particular note is that Yates highlights the role of alternative media in both the
second and fifth processes.
Three variations of prefiguration as it relates to media came up in interviews. The first is that
media can allow people to see alternative futures for themselves. Armando said that his organization
created media of formerly incarcerated individuals at university and that doing so
creates awareness and representation, right, it shows that ‘oh, if homie could do it, I could do it.
The homies was in a gang, poverty, trauma, mental health, drug addiction, made it through
incarceration. And now is at ULA, Berkeley, like man I could also do it, too.’
He noted that giving people the ability to envision themselves in higher education was one of his
collective’s critical uses of social media and video media. Unlike many of the other collectives discussed,
their collective highlights the individuals involved, with social media posts introducing members and
videos offering tips for incoming students. Berto, a member of the same collective, also brought up the
collective’s short films, highlighting that they use the media to recruit formerly incarcerated students into
college. This recruitment seems to me to be different from growing the collective, as it is about
addressing the material and psychological barriers formerly incarcerated individuals face before entering

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university. He also noted that “the tactics we use are working” because the formerly incarcerated
population at his university has grown. Berto also noted that media sharing is often done by “word of
mouth” via a network of individuals. This network he likens to the Underground Railroad and highlights
that as “another example of the abolitionism happening” within the collective, where these alternative
futures are simultaneously being experimented with, where “critical political perspectives,” establishing
“new collective norms,” and then diffused throughout the networks (Yates 2015, p. 1).
The second prefigurative variation that frequently emerged was the relationship between the
media and mutual aid. As noted with their work in coalition building, Grace, Fiona, Alessia, Olivia, and
Sonya, all highlighted that their collectives–and they, as individuals–use media and social media to
promote the needs of others, primarily by sharing mutual aid posts such as the one seen in figure 25. In
his book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), Dean Spade defines mutual
aid as the “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems
we have in place are not going to meet them” (2020, p. 7). Thus, in the coordination by the collectives and
their efforts to resource-raise for those in need, the students create a world in which people collaborate to
meet one another’s needs rather than rely on institutions to meet them. For example, in Figure 25, one of
the collectives is sharing a request to donate money towards a Black mother and her children’s travel
funds to visit their incarcerated grand/parent.
Figure 25
Instagram Post of Mutual Aid Request in March 2021

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Emily noted that throughout the pandemic, mutual aid requests shared by one of the collectives
she was involved in “got a lot of traction.” She chalked this up to the fact that in the Summer of 2020
when responding to both COVID-19 and the uprisings against the systemic murder of Black people,
“people were looking for ways to help them get involved.” The specific mutual aid request, she brought
up, was one to raise money and resources for custodial workers who had been laid off during the
pandemic. Here, the collective recognizes the university (the system in place) as failing to meet the needs
of its community members. Thus, the students are utilizing collective coordination to address those
needs.
As previously noted, the other collective Emily was involved in included mutual aid pages in
their zines, highlighting either collectives and organizations that people could donate money to or get
involved with by donating their time and labor. Grace, who, as mentioned, uses their personal Instagram
to create and share mutual aid requests via an online network, noted that they felt mutual aid posts not
about university students/employees got less attention among university students. To them, this lack of
attention reinforced the divide discussed in Chapter 4 between the university and the surrounding
community regarding who gets included in a collective worthy of being viewed as mutual.
Finally, the third variation of prefiguration enabled via media is envisioning the university’s
future. When asked about the role activism can play in creating an abolitionist university (see Chapter 6
for further discussion), Fiona noted that “political education and media projects” play a key role in
shifting someone’s worldview and “creating opportunities to undo some of this stuff.” Berto highlighted
his role in producing the newspaper “Abolish the University: Building A Prison-To-School Pipeline.” He
offers the newspaper as a “positive takeaway” at all his art shows. Imagining a solution in the media he
produces is vital to Berto’s understanding of the artist’s role. He notes that he does get a lot of pushbacks
on the topic from other artists, but to him, political art requires a solution and naming a problem. He gives
the example that his collective is working to reverse the school-to-prison pipeline and is “developing a
prison-to-school pipeline.” He notes this is one of the critical parts of experimentation in the prefigurative

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work his collective does when understanding the relationship between abolition and the university, as
“it’s very hard to just destroy something, you’re just gonna destroy it and walk away or what happens
after you’ve destroyed this university.” Before destroying the university, Berto wants to experiment with
decarcerating it: keeping it and trying to “find a way to reverse the problem, which I think could work just
as much as burning it to the ground.”
Media for these collectives thus functions as the consolidation site of experimentation via new
practices, “critical political perspectives” via political education, and the establishment of “new collective
norms” through creating an archive to resist systemic turnover of student activists and coalition-build with
other organizations (Yates 2015, p. 1). The consolidation of these processes is then demonstrated and
diffused in the media created by the collectives. Thus, they use media to challenge the carcerality of the
university and question and imagine where knowledge and study happen within the university.
As discussed, abolitionist student collectives engage critical-emancipatory logics “primarily at the
level of content and form” to put forward their “alternative political vision” (2015, p. 26). They use media
to (1) perform political education work in the hope of changing both campus discourses and campus
practices around policing, (2) build collective capacity through growing membership, building coalitions
with other collectives, and avoiding institutional co-option, and (3) they resist the temporal structures of
the institution by offering counter-archives and alternative futures to the narratives presented by the
institution. Ultimately, the media is a resource for their broader abolitionist counter-hegemonic project.
Abolitionist Student Activist Ecologies
Alongside this temporal work, these organizers also make a clear spatiotemporal argument
around creating and partaking in media and social movement ecologies that expand outside their
universities. Both media studies and social movement studies have taken up the metaphor of ecology.
Media Ecologies
Barbas and Treré define a media ecology approach as one that “aims to disentangle the
‘communicative complexity’ of social movements by focusing on how activists engage holistically and
critically with a wide ecology of media technologies to organize, mobilize, influence public opinion and

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pursue radical change” (2022, p. 5). It looks to how activists engage in “movement-related practices,
make sense of, navigate and merge newer and older media formats, physical and digital spaces, internal
and external forms of communication, as well as alternative and corporate social media” (2022, p. 5).
Abolitionist student collectives are purposeful in their media decision-making; they do not trust
mainstream or institutional media, they create their own alternative media, and they attempt to engage
social media for alternative practices–whether they are successful in doing so requires further research.
Barbas and Treré say that the media ecosystem can be defined by the following common
elements: “the existence of synergies and mutual support; the fundamental role of the community of
subscribers and users; an educational agency with a public service orientation” (2022, p. 14). The focus
on sharing the work of other collectives and organizations through their media and social media, the
engagement with their specific community–both on and off campus; and the commitment to doing
political education work with both media and social media reveal a clear media ecosystem at play on each
campus, as well as across campuses, mainly led by collectives like the Cops Off Campus Coalition. As
discussed in Chapter 1, the Cops Off Campus Coalition is “a network of local, regional, and transnational
coalitions and collectives of students, educators, other workers, and all other community members
impacted by police and policing at all levels of education (K-12, universities, vocational and professional
schools, colleges, seminaries, etc.)” (Cops Off Campus Coalition, n.d.).
As noted by Matthew Fuller in his book Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and
Technoculture, we should also approach an understanding of a media ecosystem from the perspective
that, like natural ecosystems, they are “dynamic systems in which any one part is always multiply
connected” (2005, p. 4). This understanding means that while abolitionist student collectives may not be
creating media ecosystems, they certainly exist within one. Their ecosystems may all reflect slightly
different climates depending on location. Still, they’re broadly interconnected and can share media
produced by one another and extract the applicability of each piece for their campus. Alongside following
each other on social media, reposting each other’s work, and sharing resources other collectives have
produced, they learn from each other’s repertoire of tactics around organizing and media decisions.

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Social Movement Ecologies
In social movement studies, Zhang & Zhao offer a theoretical background of ecological
perspectives, noting that they can be divided into two camps: the first provides a “Spatial Ecology of
Movement Mobilization” (2018, p. 98) and the second a “Social Ecology of Movements” (p. 103), the
latter of which begins a discussion of using frameworks of ecologies to analysis social movements. In
recent years, the framework of Social Movement Ecology (SME) has come out of the Momentum
Training project–now a subset of the Ayni Institute–founded in 2014 by Carlos Saavedra and Paul Engler,
they offer “training and support to movement organizers” (momentumcommunity.org, 2023). They break
down SME into three approaches to social change: personal transformation, changing dominant
institutions, and building alternative institutions (Hayes et al., 2016). The content of media and social
media by abolitionist student collectives reflect all three approaches: political education targeting personal
transformation, campaigns to eliminate campus police attempting to change dominant institutions, and
mutual aid efforts trying to build alternative institutions.
According to the Ayni Institute, a SME requires all three theories of change to be present “to
create diversity and create health within an ecology” (momentumcommunity.org, 2023. n.p.). In a
webinar from 2016, Engler asks, “What’s the interchange that allows for the health of everyone to be
successful, everyone to create a healthy ecosystem, so that we can help each other? What are the types of
relationships? What are the types of exchanges?” They thus argue that all social movements are
interconnected, and therefore, no particular collective or organization has to “do it all. “They fit into an
ecosystem of SMEs. As seen by their engagement with other historical and present collectives, locally and
globally, abolitionist student activists understand themselves as interconnected with broader on and offcampus struggles throughout history.
In his 2017 analysis of SMEs, Benjamin Case notes three critical issues with the metaphor of
ecologies as it applies to social movements: the boundary problem, the agency problem, and the
interaction problem. The boundary problem, he argues, is that when viewing “social movements in
isolation from all of the other social phenomena around them,” choices of collectives and individuals

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cannot be fully understood (2017, p. 78). The agency problem looks more deeply at population ecology,
noting that “if we want to understand why forms of organizations “live” or “die” or how they change, we
do not look at the decisions of their members or leaders, we look at the constraining factors of their
environment” (2017, p. 79), while this allows us to see “how external constraints limit organizational
forms or push them to adapt” it also functions to ignore the agency of individual members (2017, p. 79).
Finally, the interaction problem notes that ecologies have limited resources (discussed in much more
detail as it relates to Social Movements by Resource Mobilization Theory. See: Jenkins & Perrow, 1977;
McCarthy & Zald, 1977; Oberschall, 1973), meaning SME theory must ask “how do we distinguish
between groups that are damaging to the health of the entire social movement environment and those that
are serving a vital function in the creation of an overall healthy movement ecology that happens to come
at the cost of another organization?” (Case 2017, p. 82) While elements of all three problems apply to
looking at abolitionist student movements as part of an SME, looking at them as part of an SME provides
some responses to these issues. Especially as it comes to addressing the movements in relationship to
“normative evaluative logics of success” (Davis et al. 2022, p. 161).
Logics of Success
In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D. G. Kelley argues that “too often
our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they ‘succeeded’ in realizing
their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves” (2002, p. ix). Traditionally,
social movement outcomes literature has understood success as “obtaining access to the structure of
political bargaining and/or changing laws and policies (Bernstein, 2003, p. 354)23, though in the past few
decades, there has been recognition that social movements may have and achieve “both political and
cultural goals” (Bernstein, 2003, p. 354). Suzanne Staggenborg has provided a three-pronged framework
for broadening notions of social movement success: political and policy outcomes, mobilization
outcomes, and cultural outcomes. Staggenborg defines political and policy outcomes as “steps in the
23 See also: Gamson [1975], 1990; Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; McAdam, 1982; and Tilly, 1978.

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process of bringing about substantive changes through the political system” (1995, p. 341). Mobilization
outcomes she understands as “organizational successes and the ability to carry out collective action,” and
cultural outcomes as “changes in social norms, behaviors, and ways of thinking among a public that
extends beyond movement constituents or beneficiaries, as well as the creation of a collective
consciousness among groups” (1995, p. 341). To this list of cultural changes, Mary Bernstein adds “shifts
in belief systems, the creation of new master protest frames, collective identities, and tactics, as well as
changes in institutional cultures and practices” (2003, p. 357) and discursive impact (as discussed in this
chapter via Woodly’s definition of changing discourse).
From my informal conversations with abolitionist student activists to this list, I also note that
often publicly stated movement goals function as a discursive strategy rather than a practical goal. For
example, in conversations with abolitionist student activists at SCU, we discussed that while their website
names the collective’s “priority is to abolish policing as it exists at SCU,” few members saw this as a
possible outcome of their organizing. Instead, they believed it served as a vision, or as discussed in
Chapter 2, an abolitionist horizon to work toward. In part, because of goals serving as discursive
strategies and my wariness of assigning notions of success to political and policy outcomes, mobilization
outcomes, or cultural outcomes, I did not ask questions about the “success” or “outcomes” of their
collectives, or the media produced. In doing so, I follow a long tradition of scholars who understand that
when it comes to political activism, “the immediate benefits are often hard to see and impossible to
measure” (Speed, 2008, p. 229).
An Ecology of Abolitionist Movement
In refuting empirical measures of success, I instead turn to understand the abolitionist student
collectives within an ecology of movement. Ecologies of movement here refers to both the
communicative complexity of social movements, the media practices of social movement actors, and the
three approaches to social change within SMEs. Abolitionist student activists exist within multiple SMEs,
including ecologies for police and prison abolition, access to higher education, ethical commitments
within higher education, anti-racism movements, anti-capitalist movements, decolonial and anti-imperial

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movements, anti-violence movements, disability justice, and the LGBTQ+ movement, among others. The
abolitionist student movement ecology is connected to different organizations and campaigns addressing
these issues across the U.S.–and, as we have seen, beyond. Media practices are primarily used to draw the
connections between these different movements and theories of change to support a healthy movement
ecology working towards a changed world. Case highlights that one of the reasons empirical measures of
success fail to address the complexity of social movements is that for social movement groups, “the
ultimate goal is (presumably) not longevity but to change society” (Case 2017, p. 80). However, I also
push back against Case’s equating changing society to “winning” in the abolitionist movement (2017, p.
80). If abolition’s goal, as posited in Chapter 2, is to “change everything” (Gilmore 2018, n.p.), then this
means changing anything is a step toward the abolitionist horizon.
Returning to Cases’s three problems within the metaphor of ecologies can help us see the
limitations and extensions the analogy offers to understand abolitionist student organizing. Regarding the
boundary problem–viewing “social movements in isolation from all of the other social phenomena around
them” (2017, p. 78), choices made by collectives and individuals cannot fully be understood. The
metaphor of ecologies asks us to consider organisms/organizing at levels of the individual, population,
community, ecosystem, and biosphere. I also resist the idea that we must entirely understand choices
made by collectives and individuals. As discussed in Chapter 3, we can look at the different and similar
ways sites engage and are engaged, but every decision is made within its specific unreproducible context.
The interaction problem asks how to “distinguish between groups that are damaging to the health
of the entire social movement environment and those that are serving a vital function in the creation of an
overall healthy movement ecology that happens to come at the cost of another organization?” (Case 2017,
p. 82) But again, this is not how ecologies or movements (or ecologies of movement) function. Ecologies
may respond in the short or long term to things damaging the environment’s health. Still, these are not the
entire ecology’s decisions; only individual organisms within the ecology make them. As Speed notes in
Engaging Contradictions, “an outcome that seems negative in the short run [might] contribute to a
situation that generates a positive result in the medium or long run (or vice versa for that matter)?” (2008,

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p. 229). We do not know whether an organism/organizing is harmful to the ecology as a whole, only if it
is harmful to another organism/organizing. The interaction problem, when addressed by conscious beings,
requires us to engage with other organizing spaces. As previously mentioned, the possible role of
engagement via coalition building was seen as central to the ecology of movement. Nico highlighted
reaching out via social media to students who traveled from other campuses across California to attend
LAC protests. Avery and Grace highlighted the network-building elements of their work. This networkbuilding allows them to build connections, think long-term, and think about whom, as Fiona noted, they
“can share that space” with.
Finally, Case’s agency problem argues that we look to “how external constraints limit
organizational forms or push them to adapt” (2017, p. 79) rather than members’ decisions. These
constraints are the results of individual members of organizational forms the collectives resist and thus
respond to members’ decisions, so looking to the constraints does not ignore agency but provides context
for it. Organisms/organizations exist within an ecology of other organisms/organizations; decisions are
always responsive to some part of the ecology but rarely the whole thing. Individuals make decisions with
the information they have, and sometimes, those decisions are made strategically as part of long-term
goals, and sometimes, they are made simply to resist the constraints they see. This resistance was
highlighted in Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, where when in discussion with community
elder Mrs. Biona MacDonald, Bell asks her why she fought for civil rights in the face of consistent and
terrible retaliation, and she responded, “I can’t speak for everyone, but . . . I am an old woman. I lives to
harass white folks.” Bell highlights that she did not believe her harassment would topple the wellentrenched power of the local white community. Instead, she “avoided discouragement and defeat
because at the point that she determined to resist her oppression, she was triumphant” (1992, p. xii). This
decision-making behind organisms/organizations is rarely visible, but the resistance itself signals the
agency to have made the decisions.

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Conclusion
In this chapter, I have looked at the ecologies of movement performed by abolitionist student
collectives in their work to resist carcerality. Media and social media are at the center of their work,
sharing events, information, and practices that members and outsiders can engage in when working
towards abolition and resisting carcerality. In looking first at the content and its use of “heterodoxcreative logics” before turning to the “participatory logics” of production and how distribution is used to
center “logics of (counter-)public-formation and facilitation” (Mowbray, 2015, p. 21). Finally, I turned to
look in more detail at the aim of the media and its ties to Mowbray’s “critical-emancipatory logics,”
arguing alternative media better suits their aims of capacity building, political education, and resisting
institutional temporality as part of a broader media ecosystem that reaches outside of the individual
universities. I saw that abolitionist student activists, in part, turned to alternative media without ever
considering using traditional media. As Hamilton notes, both advocates for and critics of alternative
media make four assumptions:
(1) that effective social movements are mass movements (widespread and generally uniform in
agenda, tactics, and goals), (2) that mass movements require mass-produced and mass-circulating
media products to create, maintain, and assist them, (3) that producing such mass-media products
requires a centralized, corporatized mode of organization to carry out mass-scale production and
distribution, and finally (4) that the largest possible size of the media organization and the widest
possible distribution of its products equals maximum social impact. (2000, p. 359)
Understanding a collective as part of an ecology of movement points to the false dichotomy of mass
participation versus smaller collectives but also reveals how alternative media can perform a triumphant
resistance in ways that may better suit a collective’s goals than mass media. The ecology of movement
use of media and social media by student activists requires future work, particularly in figuring out their
engagement with local versus national versus global collectives and members of the public, but
ultimately, I found that while abolitionist student collectives may not be creating their own media
ecosystems, they exist within local, national, and global ecologies of movement, and the potentials and
pitfalls of such must be considered.

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The goals and methods of these movement and resistance is explored in the next chapter, which
returns to the concept of abolition democracy to understand what institutions and resources abolitionist
student activists see as being built in the ruins of the university, or if they see the university as holding an
institutional or resource role in the elimination of prisons. I attempt to answer the questions (6) Do
abolitionist student activists believe the university can be decarcerated? (7) What practices do abolitionist
student activists believe a university can enact to decarcerate? (8) What role do abolitionist student
activists believe student activism can play in developing and practicing an abolitionist university? (9)
What alternative modes of study do abolitionist student activists envision both outside and within the
university? And (10) How do universities enable or disable learning toward enacting social change?

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Chapter 6. The Abolitionist University
Introduction
In this chapter, I return to abolition democracy, as discussed in Chapter 2. If, as Davis argued,
abolition democracy requires the creation and availability of “new institutions and resources” to eliminate
prisons (2005, p. 93), I am interested in understanding what institutions and resources abolitionist student
activists see as being built in the ruins of the university, or if they see the university as holding an
institutional or resource role in the elimination of prisons. This chapter examines what abolitionist student
activist ecologies are being built or planning to be built. Importantly, while I engage the growing field of
abolitionist university studies, I focus on the role of the student in the development of both an abolitionist
university and the field. In their piece “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” Abigail Boggs, Eli
Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein write that “an abolitionist approach unearths the
counter-memories of people who have been buried in the dominant histories, people who have resisted the
dominant worldmaking project and created alternatives” (2019, n.p.). This chapter looks specifically at
student activists as “people who have resisted the dominant worldmaking project” of the university. To do
so, it draws on four pieces of data: (1) an interview with the co-authors of “Abolitionist University
Studies: An Invitation”: Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein; (2)
texts from growing field of AUS–including academic publications, webinars, and zines; (3) 17 interviews
with individuals who self-identified as “current or former students involved in abolitionist activism” at
universities in Los Angeles; and (4) zine pages (created media) from the media-making workshop I
hosted in January 2023.
As discussed in Chapter 3, higher education literature on the neoliberal university often ignores
students’ voices in their reflections on the university. Throughout this project, I prioritized focusing on
students’ voices as a potential remedy to the neoliberalization of higher education (Watts, 2022). As
explored by Sara Ahmed in her 2015 essay Against Students, rather than being understood as central to
education, students are frequently positioned as “a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization”
(2015, n.p.). Student as a problem, Ahmed argues, is a “constellation of related figures”: student as

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consumer, student as censorer, student as over-sensitive, and student as complainer (2015, n.p.). This
rhetoric, Ahmed argues, makes students the problem–the student killjoy (Ahmed, 2010; Bunjun, 2014)–
rather than the situation. As Ahmed goes on to note, like the feminist killjoy (Ahmed, 2010), this means
students “are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional” (2015, n.p.). So,
when students offer critiques of the neoliberalization of the university, it is easier to understand them and
dismiss them as consumers, censorers, over-sensitive, and complainers (2015). These related figures,
Ahmed highlights, present students as having “all the power to decide what is being taught as well as
what is not being taught, what is being spoken about, as well as what is not being spoken about” (2015,
n.p.). This power is framed by scholars as having been taken from academics. Ahmed rejects this
narrative, arguing that the institution is hostile, and scholars should “support, stand with, and stand by”
students rather than their institutions. This chapter thus positions students at the center of abolitionist
university studies, looking at how abolitionist student activists are central to the conditions for abolitionist
universities and futures.
I look at the work of abolitionist student activists in the context of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s
argument that “we create the conditions for our everyday lives by organizing ourselves and materials and
environmental resources” to create a place (2023, n.p.). That place, I argue, is the abolitionist university,
and as abolitionist student activists prefigure the abolitionist university within the academy as it currently
exists, they make it more livable. In this chapter, I first explore the role of “the student” in the
development of Abolitionist University Studies, what it might mean to define an abolitionist university,
and then dig in depth the four critical kinds of changes needed for an abolitionist university to exist:
rhetorical, structural, epistemological/pedagogical, and those in the community.
The Student in Abolitionist University Studies
As noted in Chapter 2, around 2018, a call for “Abolitionist University Studies” arose among
those doing Critical University Studies. The phrase “Abolitionist University Studies” (AUS) was first
published in Meyerhoff’s Beyond Education, where he called for “going beyond critical university
studies” toward “not only an abolitionist university studies but also an abolition university, one that aligns

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itself with modes of study in abolitionist movements within, against, and beyond the university as we
know it” (p. 31). But the phrase itself was mutually coined by Meyerhoff, Abigail Boggs, Nick Mitchell,
and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein (Meyerhoff, personal communication, September 21st, 2021). Boggs,
Meyerhoff, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein then expanded on his call for AUS in their publicly
published piece “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation” and the associated conference “Whose
Crisis? Whose University? Abolitionist Study in and Beyond Global Higher Education” in October 2019.
Hosted October 11th-12th at Duke University, the conference featured four sessions: (1) Beyond
Nostalgia and Nationalism: Expanding the Spatiotemporal Borders of University Studies; (2)
Grounding/Grounded Concepts/Keywords; (3) Bringing Abolitionism to University Studies; and (4)
Using University Resources / Inhabiting the University24.
In the invitation, the authors invoke six pieces as making core connections between abolition and
universities including Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and
Black Study, Dylan Rodríguez’s article “Racial/colonial Genocide and the Neoliberal Academy: In Excess
of a Problematic,” Angela Davis’ Abolition Democracy, Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy, Leslie
Harris, James Campbell, and Alfred Brophy’s edited collection Slavery and the University, and la
paperson’s A Third University is Possible. They also name the work many universities are doing to
reckon with their histories of slavery but note that “this work is not uniformly abolitionist” and that many
of these efforts “have taken the form of public relations campaigns” (2018, n.p.). AUS, they claim, is
“aligned the Left abolitionist tendency” tied most firmly to the abolition of slavery and its afterlives in
prisons and policing. Leftist abolition is “both destructive—dismantling racial capitalism—and
constructive, building alternatives” (2018, n.p.). Notably, this leftist tendency is not tied to political party
24 Session 1 featured five speakers: Sandy Grande, Vineeta Singh, Jess Issacharoff, Davarian Baldwin, and Isaac Kamola. Each
with a respective respondent: Bayley Marquez, Sheeva Sabati, Matthew Taft, Laura Goldblatt, and Neha Vora. Sessions 2, 3, and
4 featured five to six speakers each and no respondents. Session 2: Erica Meiners, Abigail Jin-ju Lee representing Strike Down
Sam and Take Action Chapel Hill, Sharon Stein, Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Jennifer Doyle, and K. Wayne Yang. Session 3: Eli
Thorkelson, Meghan McDowell, Morgan Adamson, Liz Montegary, and Lauren Hudson. Session 4: Dylan Rodríguez, Gillian
Harkins, Curtis Marez, Rana Jaleel, Max Haiven, and Erin Dyke. While I did not attend the conference, video recordings of all
but the first and second speakers (Sandy Grande and Vineeta Singh), and the first respondent (Bayley Marquez) in session 1 are
publicly available. This lack of recordings appears to be due to technical issues not a choice by the speakers.

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of narratives of progressivism. Thus, a left abolitionist university studies works to both reckon “with
universities’ complicity with a carceral, racial-capitalist society while creating an alternative, abolition
university” (2018, n.p.) It thus attempts to reckon with what role the university plays in the afterlives of
slavery and what role–if any–it can play in an abolitionist future. As shown in more detail below, the
student plays a surprisingly small role in these texts, primarily as a laborer, debtor, reminder, or resistant.
Student as Laborer
The concept of students as performing labor is not new, as seen in the 1975 pamphlet Wages for
Students and Tim Grant’s 1976 article “Student as Worker: Wages for Homework.” While worker and
laborer are often used interchangeably, I would like to note why I use the term laborer. Christian Fuchs
has argued that despite English translations using them interchangeably, Marx provided different
definitions for work and labor (2019). For Marx, work is “a process between man and nature” where man
“acts upon external nature and changes it” (Marx, 1990, p. 283) and while work is the “general process of
production” found within all societies, “labor means types of work that are organized in class relations,
where one class produces goods that another one owns” (Fuchs, 2019, p. 81). Meaning the structure of
capitalism is what differentiates work from labor. Kathi Weeks expands upon this, noting that work under
capitalism functions as a disciplinary apparatus, specifying that this relationship of discipline–where the
capitalist’s ability to determine how the labor of the worker has used functions as a political right of the
capitalist–is what enables exploitation, wherein the contract between employer and employee that grants
the employer the right to direct the employees’ labor “is not so much a byproduct of exploitation as its
very precondition” (Weeks, 2011, p. 21).
Caffentzis et al. and Grant tie their arguments to the Wages for Housework movement (see
Toupin 2018), which campaigned for recognition and payment for all caring and reproductive work. With
Caffentzis et al. arguing in their 2016 Introduction to the piece that just as the Wages for Housework
Campaign “saw ‘welfare benefits’ as the first form of wages for housework, Wages for Students activists
saw the many forms of student financial aid as first forms of wages for students” (2016, p. 10). Both
require understanding how we have structurally tied ideas of social worth to that of paid labor, which

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Weeks refers to as “the legitimizing discourse of work” (2011, p.13). For example, as noted by Heather
Berg, when we make rights entitlement dependent on worthiness via labor, we reinforce “a work ethic
discourse that locates personhood in one’s contributions to systems of value production” (2014, p. 696).
As discussed in Chapters 2 and 4, this narrative of worthiness reproduces the carceral worldmaking
Meyerhoff sees in our current carceral mode of study that normalizes some individuals as always “most
susceptible to violence” under the carceral state (Annamma, 2016, p. 5), rendering people as disposable
objects (Giroux, 2014).
Both “Wages for Students” and “The Student Worker,” published in the mid-1970s, have argued
for understanding the student as a laborer. Wages for Students, a pamphlet written and published
anonymously during student strikes in Massachusetts and New York in the Fall of 1975 by three activists
associated with the journal Zerowork–later revealed to be George Caffentzis, Monty Neill, and John
Willshire-Carrera. They make the argument that while schoolwork requires both skilled and unskilled
labor, it is ultimately understood as labor through a common characteristic: “Discipline, i.e. forced work”
(Caffentzis et al., 2016, p. 17). They argue that while some of this work is disciplined through teachers,
principals, and guards, much of it is self-disciplined. Self-disciplining “is cheaper and better for Capital”
(Caffentzis et al., 2016, p. 18) and means students perform “the double task of doing schoolwork and
making ourselves do it” (Caffentzis et al., 2016, p. 18). Thus, per Weeks’ definition of labor, and as
discussed in Chapter 4: discipline can be found at the center of schoolwork. Echoing arguments discussed
in Chapters 2 and 4, Caffentzis et al. go on to argue that “schools are factories” and that “grading and
tracking are ways of measuring our productivity within the school-factory” (Caffentzis et al., 2016, p. 18).
In the school-factory, individuals are trained for their future position in society “that will send some to
sweep the streets and some to supervise the sweepers” (Caffentzis et al., 2016, p. 18). This argument not
only mirrors the arguments of the Critical Sociology of Education (Mehta & Davies, 2018) but also those
of Foucault (1995), Giroux (2014), and Meyerhoff around disposability politics and the production of an
“obedient, governable subject” (Meyerhoff, 2019a, p. 205).

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Tim Grant’s essay “Student as Worker: Wages for Homework” was initially published in The
Chevron–a student newspaper of the University of Waterloo–on March 5, 1976, and republished in The
Sheaf, the student newspaper of the University of Saskatchewan on March 26, 1976. Grant looks at the
idea–also addressed by Caffentzis et al., that most economists understand schoolwork as “a consumption
and investment good” (Caffentzis et al., 2016, p. 19). Grant argues that schoolwork can no longer be
understood as an investment good given “the chances of getting a well-paying job at the end of our 20-
odd years of schooling have shrunk,” Grant and Caffentzis et al. were writing in the 1970s when tuition
and required fees averaged $253.57 in 1976 (Digest of Education Statistics, 2007), or $1,371.11 when
adjusted for inflation. In 2023, the average cost of tuition and fees is $19,806 (Hanson, 2023), more than
14 times as expensive. As discussed below, today’s students function as debtors and laborers
simultaneously, meaning they are not paid for their labor and are going into debt to perform wageless
labor. Grant argues that schoolwork is work because students “are actively engaged in producing a very
important product —ourselves — as a specifically trained segment of the future labor force” (Grant,
1976, n.p.). Students produce themselves as future laborers–reflecting an enforced class relation–for the
benefit of future employers more than themselves.
Therefore, students function as both workers and commodities under capitalism. Some of them,
particularly those who go into debt to gain their education, will become workers in the more traditional
sense, but others will “become capitalists or managers” (Fuchs, 2019, p. 113). So, while students may be
laboring in hopes of becoming members of the managerial or capitalist class, given their relationship to
wageless labor and thus exploitation, as students, they are laborers. Fuchs notes that Marx’s notion of the
collective worker can help theorize the role of the student as part of “the working class as a class that not
only works in factories and offices but in social spaces all over society” (2019, p. 124). Regardless of
whether a worker directly produces a material product, if capitalist society requires their labor to function,
their work is a form of labor production. The existence of student strikes as a form of resistance reifies the
student’s role as a laborer; a strike functioning as a “mass refusal of labor” (Fuchs, 2018, p. 270)
recognizes the student’s ability to labor. The earliest recorded student strikes are at the University of

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Oxford (in 1209) and the University of Paris (in 1229). At Oxford, the strikes began with almost all
students and masters leaving the university after three students were hanged for a crime they did not
commit, and these strikes led to the founding of the University of Cambridge; in Paris, they were a
response to the city accidentally killing students as punishment for their partaking in a riot, and the strike
lasted two years (Bailey, 2009; Rashdall, 2010). Strikes remained a key tactic of student activists, and in
the early 1930s, Communist and Socialist students led over 25,000 students to partake in a nationwide
anti-war strike. (Brax, 1981) The Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front struck from
November 6th, 1968, until March 21st, 1969, at San Francisco State College, and another student group
named the Third World Liberation Front struck from January 22nd, 1969, until March 8th, 1970, at the
University of California, Berkeley (Umemoto, 1989). In 1990, Mills College Students struck for two
weeks to respond to the possibility of their college-going co-ed (Rhoads, 1998). More recently, the
University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus shut down for eighty days in 2010 in response to a
student strike and half of Quebec’s students struck in 2012 (Cave, 2010; Curran, 2012). Finally, returning
to Roderick Ferguson’s work (2017), we can point to how the university has used police and incarceration
against students in their disciplining against strikes. These examples tie to Grant’s argument that “the
state intervenes and manipulates the structure, format, costs and working conditions of schoolwork in
much the same way it does in other workplaces” (1976, n.p.).
While they do not cite this history of understanding the student as a laborer, Boggs et al.
reference it in “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” arguing that the student’s “wageless
labor” is tied to the university’s dominant modes of accumulation through “the non-circulation of wages”
(2019, n.p.). They also point back to the rhetoric of schoolwork as “a consumption and investment good”
(Caffentzis et al., 2016, p. 19) when they state that this non-circulation of wages is “endlessly recast in
rose-tinted hues—as self-development, societal improvement, the fulfillment of the promise of
citizenship, the propertied acquisition of privilege” (2018, n.p.). The conference did not reference the
student as a laborer. However, Jess Issacharoff discussed her experience as an exploited and underpaid
graduate student worker and the subsequent importance of graduate student unions.

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Student as Debtor
The student as debtor was discussed in both Chapters 2 and 4, where I highlighted debt as a
relative experience structured by class and race (McMillan Cottom, 2017), maintaining a disciplinary role
in the move from understanding higher education as a public good toward a consumer privilege (Giroux,
2014), controlling a student’s labor post-graduation (Marez, 2014). Through this maintenance of racial
capitalism, student debt increasingly comes to “shape and limit how [students] imagine the future”
(Marez, 2014, p. 265). Importantly, as noted in Chapter 4, debt has also been tied to the subversion of
student resistance, when in the late 1960s, Reagan justified growing tuition fees at the UCs under the
belief that tuition would help “get rid of undesirables” (Zeman, 1967, p. 1). As noted by Jackie Wang in
Carceral Capitalism, student debt is part of a more extensive predatory state relationship to debt, where,
in the U.S., indebtedness serves “as a generalized social condition” (2018, p. 18). Harney and Moten’s
The Undercommons highlights the relationship between debt and study, where they argue that “students
must come to see themselves as the problem” (2013, p. 29), partially through embracing debt through a
“fugitive public” (2013, p. 61). They argue that “credit is a means of privatization and debt a means of
socialization” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 61). By embracing the mutuality of the social offered by debt,
we can reject the privatization of education. Ultimately, they argue, the student can study by incurring
debt they never intend to pay—an argument furthered by organizations such as Strike Debt or the Debt
Collective. At the 2019 conference, Curtis Marez and Morgan Adamson both discussed the role of
student debt, with Adamson noting that it produces “forms of indenture, isolation, [and] psychological
terror” in students, and disproportionately students of color, “who become entangled with it as they try to
seek what we call an education” (2019), but the forms of resistance debt may lead students to was not
mentioned.
Student as Reminder
In many AUS key texts, students seem to remind faculty of the need for AUS, or the violent
histories universities stand for. For example, in his article “Racial/colonial Genocide and the Neoliberal
Academy,” Dylan Rodríguez writes that students have reminded him of both his university’s ongoing role

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in desecrating Indigenous burial grounds and of the ongoing hyper-policing of Black students, leading
him to question the ethics of recruiting Black students to the university. Angela Davis’ Abolition
Democracy–the only text in Boggs et al.’s list not explicitly about universities–discusses the student the
least, pointing only to the murders by police of students at Kent State and Jackson State as examples of
state repression.
Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy (2013) and Leslie Harris, James Campbell, and Alfred
Brophy’s edited collection Slavery and the University (2019) frequently discuss students, but primarily as
historical figures. Wilder points to the role of whiteness in the creation of a student body in the U.S., the
gradual admission of Native students to colleges as an assimilation technique, the recruitment of sons of
plantation owners to be students, that students brought enslaved people with them to serve them, the
abuse of enslaved people by students, and gravedigging by students.
Harris et al.’s collection also points to the histories of students owning enslaved people or coming
from families who did. Hollander and Sandweiss’s chapter, alongside Oast, Fuller, and Edwards-Ingram’s
chapters, argue that even students who did not own or come from slave-owning families often had
individuals enslaved by the university or other students work for them and would enact violence against
them if they perceived a flaw or resistance in their work. Oast et al. names, particularly the “psychological
need to dominate” that arose among students (Oast et al., 2019, p. 85). Alongside these chapters,
Brophy’s and Jamieson’s chapters and Higginbotham’s afterword (2019) chart the ideological movement
of students for or against slavery and how that changed throughout their time at college. Here, students
serve as reminders of the broader ideological discussions on slavery happening inside and outside the
university. Two chapters by Diane Windham Shaw and William B. Hart remind us that enslaved youth–
David and Washington McDonogh in Shaw’s chapter–and Freemen–Martin Henry Freeman in Hart’s–
also attended universities.
At the 2019 conference, Rana Jaleel discussed her perception of students’ experiences with
gender, sex, and consent in the classroom. Gillian Harkins focuses on her work with incarcerated students
in her talk entitled “The Relationship Between Carcerality and Education,” and Erica Meiners argued that

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mainstream media’s reporting on the college student does not account for the kind of students she works
with, such as “a 28 year old single mother who cares for her grandparents or a person in a maximum
security prison” and thus reminds us there is “nothing coherent about the university or the student”
(2019). Here, the faculty brings students in as part of a broader argument.
Student as Resistant
Students’ primary role in the conference discourse was through their histories of resistance. For
example, Eli Thorkelson pointed to her experiences doing ethnography at a “left-wing French university
department of philosophy,” where she noted the more utopian elements of the experience included the
lack of language policing, the openness of the norms of writing, the usage of direct democracy, seeing a
student-run for the department chair, regularly produced manifestos “about how there should be kind of a
beautiful university outside the police outside the state outside kind of the bounds of nationality and, and
disciplinary culture” (2019). This example is the most prefigurative of the mentions. Student organizing
was discussed by Morgan Adamson, K. Wayne Yang, Abigail Jin Ju Lee, and Sheeva Sabati’s response to
Vineeta Singh. At the time, Lee was a member of the Strike Down Sam and Take Action Chapel Hill
collectives. Lee told of how organizing at Duke to take down the “Silent Sam” statue–a bronze statue of a
Confederate soldier at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that was pulled down by protestors
on August 20, 2018–could be traced back to the 1970s. Sabati also highlighted student resistance at
Harvard, noting that while Harvard has “temporarily privileged its memorialization of slavery,” they have
continued to deny “student demands to divest from international land and investments” (2019). Yang
discussed two students who organized to have an on-campus mural created by a Kumeyaay sculptor. He
noted that the process has led to efforts to create a campus garden, where they will be rematriating the
land of that garden to the Kumeyaay, the people indigenous to the land his university is built on. Finally,
Adamson brought up the Chilean student movement centered around Francisco Tapia’s burning of student
debt promissory notes as part of the Chilean Winter protests.
Wilder’s book and Harris et al.’s collection also point to white abolitionist and antislavery
movements by college students throughout the U.S. Wilder highlights the faculty, institutional, and other

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student resistance to such movements. In Harris, et al.’s collection, many of the chapters show that much
of the work done to address the relationship between slavery and universities has been led by students.
Such as in 2000, when Emory students worked within a class to “document and restore the historically
African American cemetery in Oxford, Georgia” (Harris et al., 2019, p. 278); in 2002, when graduate
students at Yale published a report exposition Yale’s racist history; or as Beckert et al. show when in
2007 Harvard students began leading research into Harvard’s ties to slavery (2019).
Under the pseudonym la paperson, Yang centers the student’s role in his text A Third University
is Possible, placing students within first, second, and third-world universities. According to Yang, the
Third World University “defines itself fundamentally as a decolonial project-as, an interdisciplinary,
transnational, yet vocational university that equips its students with skills toward the applied practice of
decolonization” (2017, p. 36). He notes that the first world university accumulates–understanding the
student as debtor, and the second world university critiques, but like the first world university, it relies on
the maintenance of “the material conditions of higher education-fees, degrees, expertise, and the
presumed emancipatory possibilities of the mind” (2017, p. 42). A third-world university references the
student activism “by the Third World Liberation Front in the late 1960s and early 1970s to found a Third
World College, “including the longest student strike in history at San Francisco State (2017, p. 35). The
third-world university student, Yang argues, can serve as a scyborg. They can be disloyal within the first
and second-world universities.
Returning to the Abolitionist University Studies invitation, Boggs et al. highlight university
divestment movements such as “the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement called for by
Palestinian civil society,” “against university investments in private prisons,” “against fossil fuels,” and
sanctuary movements against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) led by student activists. The article includes “A Non-Exhaustive
Periodization of U.S. Universities from an Accumulation Perspective” table (as seen in Figure 26) that
lists student activism under its “Modes of Resistance / counter accumulation” for all periods. As with the
invitation of the piece, this table critiques the periodization of Critical University Studies (as discussed in

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Figure 26
A Non-Exhaustive Periodization of U.S. Universities from An Accumulation Perspective Table from
Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation

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Chapter 2). Instead, they start their history of U.S. universities in 1636. The table points to six periods of
U.S. universities: (1) British → U.S. state Planter College Era (1636-1862), (2) Land Grant I/Capitalist
Reconstruction Era (1862-1890), (3) Land Grant II/Corporate Liberalism Era (1890-1928), (4) Military
Keynesian/Cold War Era (1928-1960s), (5) Neoliberalism I (1970s-2008), and (6) Neoliberalism II
(2008-Present). For each period, the table shows 1. Who rules the university? For whom/for what? 2.
Modes of Accumulation, and 3. Modes of resistance/counter accumulation. Boggs et al. are pointing to
the relationship between accumulation and the university, arguing that
tying our understanding of the university to different regimes of accumulation offer[s] a more
precise mode of accounting for the history and historicity of the university, its usefulness also
consists in the way that it frees us from the conflation of universities with education, study, and
the production of knowledge and, instead, to see universities as complex terrains with many
conflicting and intersecting modes of world-making (n.p.)
Student resistance is the only kind of resistance named in every periodization, with faculty and staff
resistance only happening within some periods, returning us to the broader argument of this chapter of the
need to place student activists at the center of our understanding of an abolitionist university and AUS.
Student as Laborer/Debtor/Reminder/Resistant
As discussed in Chapter 3, wanting better to understand the role of the student in AUS, I
performed an hour-long group interview with the co-authors of “Abolitionist University Studies: An
Invitation”: Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein. I saw the
interview as a response to their invitation to discuss the relationship between student activism and AUS.
In my interview on July 26th, 2022, I first asked them to discuss their relationships with student activism
and AUS. Dr. Mitchell placed their interest in the university as a site of inquiry via their parents’
experiences of being uprooted as part of “the first generation of affirmative action kids in Ivy League
schools.” They also named their experiences in graduate school during the Great Recession, where
student anti-austerity activism “made the university into a certain kind of object that I was interested in
studying.” Dr. Boggs said that she and Dr. Schwartz-Weinstein both went to graduate school–at the
University of California–Davis and New York University, respectively–“with the intention of writing
about- building on undergraduate work that had come out of activism on our campuses.” Dr. Schwartz-

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Weinstein highlighted the organizing he saw between the university and its already unionized “food
service, maintenance, custodial, clerical and technical workforce” and the ability to connect those
racialized and classed struggles to the university’s “militarized gentrification of adjoining neighborhoods
of color.” Dr. Meyerhoff offered a different experience, noting that he “was a pretty non-politically
involved undergraduate at USC25.” It was not until he became a graduate student at the University of
Minnesota that he got involved in organizing, particularly “student solidarity organizing with a clerical
workers strike at Minnesota,” which inspired graduate students to organize a union. Later, he partook in
collectively “organizing an alternative free university called Experimental College.” Meyerhoff noted that
he later got involved in prison abolition organizing in Durham, North Carolina and subsequently saw
intersections between Black Lives Matter organizing on campus and prison abolition work. These
intersections, he stated, had him “thinking a lot about how those kinds of struggles could come together
more, like thinking about how these universities control resources for studying, while incarcerated people
are separated from those resources and thinking of how to bring those kinds of struggles together in more
symbiotic ways.”
Boggs went on to name that the fact that organizing often “escalates to the point of causing
confrontations with police on campus” is a crucial factor in why abolition becomes a necessary
framework for student organizing; she also highlighted that police exist on a scale of campus security to
ICE. These moments reveal “how the police serve the interests of the institution,” which allows the
student activist to “extrapolate to other institutions, other questions of property.” Mitchell noted that the
police are often offered as a solution by the university “when student activism gets to a certain point of
militancy, or the tactics implemented stretch the university beyond the point where its basic protocols of
reformism can go by reflex.”
All four also noted that while student activism often “challenges the university’s carceral
relationship to space and cities and people,” it can also reinforce them. Schwartz-Weinstein gave the
25 The University of Southern California

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example that much of the “2015 wave of Black Lives Matter organizing on campuses…sought to frame
university administrators as a source of safety, of care, of a kind of institutional wellness.” Boggs pointed
to feminist organizing against gendered and sexual violence that has led “to heightened policing on
campuses.” In doing so, it presents the administrative apparatus of the university as a “salvific force,”
entrusting them to do the right thing. Mitchell noted that in this process, the student is often rendered as
“an object, an agent, an alibi, and, in some ways, above all a consumer” in that on campus they are
“interpolated in such a way that they are asked to both reinforce the carceral projects of the institution, but
they’re also to reproduce the various forms of institutional discipline to call the campus cops, to police the
distinction between who does and doesn’t belong on campus, etc.” Here they show how the university can
use the students’ existence as justification–an alibi–for their carceral decisions. This trust of university
administrators is something that I have seen less and less from abolitionist organizers, particularly the
further we get from Summer 2020, where many universities released statements critical of policing,
sometimes even coopting language of abolition, and student activists swiftly realized the statements to be
performative.
In the interview, Meyerhoff, Boggs, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein draw more precise lines
between the role of the student–as laborer, debtor, reminder, and resistant–and abolitionist university
studies than previously analyzed texts. All acknowledge their experiences as undergraduate or graduate
students as central to their interest in the university as a site of study and, for some of them, as leading to
their introduction to abolitionist politics and theory. Thus, the student (now faculty) experience is
revealed as central to the field of critiquing, knowing, and (re)imagining the university and the field of
Abolitionist University Studies.
In their invitation, Meyerhoff, Boggs, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein returned to Du Bois’
discussion of Reconstruction and abolition democracy (as discussed in Chapter Two), writing “the idea of
the post-slavery university is a mechanism for emphasizing the still unfinished work of emancipation and
the institutional epistemologies developed in slavery’s afterlife as an undertheorized watershed moment in
the history of the university”; the university they claim is part of “what Du Bois referred to as the

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Reconstruction period’s “counter-revolution” of capital and property” (2019, n.p.). During our interview,
Nick Mitchell highlighted that if scholars are “serious about being people who are moving through
universities in some way, shape or form” then they must pay attention to “the relationship between
knowledge and change” and reflect on the function of the university in this relationship without starting
“from this position [that] the fetishization of knowledge can be effective as mechanisms for
transformation.” This attention means, Mitchell pointed out, that to transform the university, we must
reflect on the following:
What are the ways that we can use knowledge? And what are the things that knowledge also can’t
necessarily do? What are the limits of an episteme-centered theory of social change, that is
oftentimes the implicit theory of change that people who go through graduate school especially
are educated into?
Meyerhoff added that this might involve expanding “who we consider a student in relation to the
university,” asking what might it mean for us to include people younger than those in post-secondary
education and, in doing so, pushing back against the university’s “hierarchical valorizing of that adult
representational agency over the inactive-relational agency of young people” as knowledge producers,
and that post-secondary students tend to view themselves “as the viewers and producers of knowledge so
that the output of their activism and can be a zine or a blog or knowledge products,” in doing so they
often reproduce “the hierarchical valuing of intellectual labors over manual labor.”
When asked about the possibilities for student activism in “an abolitionist university,” Meyerhoff
named how students have rejected the “alibi identification through organizing as workers” and thus have
drawn “lines of solidarity with other workers on and off their campuses.” Though despite many of their
own experiences in connecting student unionization efforts to abolitionist politics, Meyerhoff went on to
note that unionism is “not necessarily a revolutionary pathway,” so abolition has us ask “how the
conception of student as worker can be expanded in more revolutionary directions” such as thinking about
study as waged work. Meyerhoff notes that, like the wages for housework movement, it is “an impossible
demand to realize within capitalism, and so it’s about the effects of that demand for changing
consciousness or people’s imaginations of what’s possible.” Mitchell highlighted that an abolitionist

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university requires us to “experiment with new and innovative and creative forms of organizing,” which is
what they see the current turn towards unionism as, where, for example, unions have framed the abolition
of campus police as a health and safety precaution (Truong-Jones et al., 2022). Mitchell then highlights
that student activists should ask, “What is it in the relationships between us that the university depends
on?” that can undo carcerality. Meyerhoff offers some starting points for the classroom, suggesting
thinking about “how do professors normally relate with students in a way that reproduces carceral
passivity and conversely, how can professors and students collaborate to disrupt those relations and enact
alternatives,” and highlighted ungrading as one possible strategy to disrupt carceral relations in the
university.
Mitchell then brought up that one of the most complex parts of student organizing is that in our
current educational system, “the point of being a student is to not be a student, even if you’re paying
tuition every single semester a university is still going to kick you out eventually.” Part of this logic, they
note, is to “eliminate the accumulation of institutional knowledge among students.” Finally, Boggs
brought us to the “central contradiction or unresolved question of Abolitionist University Studies: is
abolitionist university studies about the abolition of the university? Or is it about creating a vision of a
university that is aligned with abolitionist schools?”
Defining the Abolitionist University
Wanting to address this contradiction in my interviews, I provided my interviewees with two
definitions of an “abolitionist university” and asked which definition they would like to use. The first was
whatever they envisioned higher education to look like when we “reach” abolition, and the second refers
to the abolitionist spaces that develop within higher education in our work toward the horizon of
abolition. As discussed in Chapter 3, for the media-making workshop, I did not provide a definition; I
asked individuals to create media that embodied/reflected “the abolitionist university.” Tellingly, every
interviewee picked the second definition. In contrast, my analysis of the media produced situates the
workshop’s definition of an abolitionist university as more fluid between the two definitions.

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CC interviewee Sophie said it was hard for her “to entirely envision an abolitionist university”
because of how deeply embedded carcerality is in higher education. She noted that while she can see “a
university with a lot of abolitionist practices, that is a site and space for people to organize for people to
do work centered around abolition and social change,” she felt an abolitionist university would be “a
radically different institution/higher learning space.” Olivia, also at CC, noted that she chose the second
definition because “it feels a little more tangible” and that while she would “love an abolitionist utopia. I
feel like the way to get there, it’s gonna be built as we go.” Many student activists said they were not sure
an abolitionist university was possible. Naomi brought up that to reach the abolitionist university means
reckoning with the struggle it will take to get there and that while many people “want it to come easy,”
the reality is that abolition will take work, given that all of us have “never seen a world without
carcerality.”
While arguing that the abolitionist university would “be built as we go,” Olivia noted that starting
this building work now was crucial, as her introduction to abolition was “dismantle-destroy focused.” It
was not until she was asked to reflect on “what are we fighting for?” that she began to think about the
building possibilities of abolition. She then brought up Mariame Kaba’s notion of “a million experiments”
in reference to a much-quoted tweet (see Figure 27) of Mariame Kaba’s from June 15th, 2020, where she
wrote, “We need a million experiments. A bunch will fail. That’s good because we’ll have learned a lot
that we can apply to the next ones.” The phrase has led to the podcast One Million Experiments, which
documents community-based safety projects to reduce harm toward a world without police and prisons.
Olivia believed that in an abolitionist university, “there would be a million different experiments and a
million different solutions” to build up and make space for while dismantling the carceral structures and
practices.

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Figure 27
Tweet By Mariame Kaba, June 15, 2020
As with the interviews, the media-making workshop raised questions about whether an
abolitionist university was possible. Nathaniel highlighted the performativity of our gestures within the
university, and Emily L. argued that she believed “abolitionist education” is possible but not an
“abolitionist university.” After the event, one participant reflected that “there’s tension between
‘abolitionist’ and ‘university,’” which caused them to question whether an abolitionist university is
possible; they went on to note that “the university is and has always been the intellectual arm of the
settler-colonial state” given its founding via land-grants, and training of “scientists, engineers, and [the]
policy-makers behind police, military, and prisons,” the abolitionist university “in this current society is a
contradiction.” They went on to state that despite this, universities have also always been sites of
development “in anti-war movements, ethnic studies, and other fights” in the U.S., and globally, students
“have fought alongside peasants and workers.” Because of this, “universities are a crucial place to fight
for the ideology of the future,” they saw that this was possible only through the integration of socialist,
decolonial, and abolitionist ideas and organizing.
They are not alone in questioning the university’s role in working towards abolition. Boggs,
Meyerhoff, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein return to this question in their 2023 chapter “Marx,
Critique, and Abolition: Higher Education as Infrastructure.” In the piece, they return to the use of
abolitionism “to position this project in relationship to and in continuity with the abolitionist movement of
the nineteenth century, which worked not only to abolish slavery but also to establish an abolition

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democracy” (Boggs et al., 2023, p. 520), this they note, results in both a desire “to destroy the capitalist
infrastructure of the university” and a desire “to use the resources concentrated in it” (2023, p. 514). This
idea is echoed across abolitionist spaces, including in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography,
where, building upon Audre Lorde’s statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s
house (1979, p. 110), Gilmore writes “the house must be dismantled so that we can recycle the materials
to institutions of our own design, usable by all to produce new and liberating work” (2022, p. 79).
Alternatively, Liz Montegary has argued that an abolitionist approach to the university understands it “as
a resource to be exploited” (2021, n.p.).
I ground this approach–and my interview questions: Do you believe the university can become
less carceral? What do you believe the university can do to become less carceral? – in André Gorz’s
concept of non-reformist reforms and Herbert Marcuse’s theorizing around reducing surplus repression.
As discussed in Chapter 2, an abolitionist approach rejects the possibility of reform, which views our
carceral state as at zero and then measures the costs and benefits of reform from that zero point (Dilts,
2020). Abolitionists understand that “the current state of affairs is, in fact, intolerable” (Dilts, 2020, p.
239), and we are already far below a zero point. Coined by Gorz in 1964, the concept of “non-reformist
reforms” addresses the possible utility of engaging with the institutions we believe to be intolerable. Gorz
argued that a socialist labor movement in overdeveloped countries could not wait for capitalism’s crisis to
bring “into the world the material means of its own destruction” (Marx, 1990, p. 928). Instead, Gorz
argues that we can use non-reformist reforms to build a more socialist structure that will welcome
revolution—Gorz positions non-reformist reforms in opposition to reformist reforms. A reformist reform
is that which “subordinates its objectives to the criteria of rationality and practicability of a given system
and policy,” whereas a non-reformist reform is understood “not in terms of what is possible within the
framework of a given system of administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of
human needs and demands”—it is “determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be” (Gorz,
1964, pp. 7-8).

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Marcuse discussed the concept of basic repression in relation to surplus repression in his 1955
text Eros and Civilization. Basic repression, he argues, refers to the type of repression of the instincts
necessary “for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization” (Marcuse, 2012, p. 35). In contrast,
surplus repression refers to “the restrictions necessitated by social domination” (Marcuse, 2012, p. 35).
Understanding a less carceral university as separate from an abolitionist university, but one which
implements non-reformist reforms to end surplus repression would leave the university less able to
control people, force people to conform to the status quo, maintain structures of oppression, punish
people, create avenues to dispose of or eliminate people, and dehumanize people.
Notably, while Gorz never explicitly applied the concept of non-reformist reforms to the
university, in a 1970 article for Les Temps Modernes entitled “Destroy the University,” he wrote, “No
reform of any kind can render this institution viable. We must thus combat reforms, in their effects and in
their conception, not because they are dangerous, but because they are illusory” (n.p.). Similar arguments
around the university’s relationship to abolition have been recently made by Abolitionist University
Studies (2023), Bain (2023), Clarke (2022), and Kauffman (2023). When asked if they believe the
university can become less carceral, sixteen of the seventeen student activists interviewed answered that
“yes” they believe it can. However, multiple highlighted that whether it will is a different question.
Andrew argued that as he has seen the university “become more carceral” over the past few years, with
COVID policies and policies “that streamline campus police access to surveillance footage,” he knew that
it could also become less carceral by simply reversing these recent policy changes.
Olivia stated that she felt it might be easier for private universities to become less carceral, given
that they have more flexibility over their decision-making processes. Though she noted that the university
is “built upon this intellectual elitism and these systems of domination and control,” the carcerality feels
both “foundational and structural” to the university. Thus, she is not sure it would be possible “to have a
university that’s not carceral in nature,” or at least, as discussed in Chapter 4, such a thing would not fit
within her conception of a university as it exists now. Given our understanding and expectations around
universities, she asked if a university became less carceral: “Would it still be considered a university?”

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Grace raised similar concerns, noting that “universities tend to be very directly founded on the same
notions of violence.” Thus, they wonder, “Can you reform something that is doing what it was built to
do?” Especially when that carcerality fiscally benefits the university. Alessia similarly shared some
trepidation, noting that “maybe the university is potentially more reformable than the prison industrial
complex. But right now, they’re intrinsically intertwined.”
Nico was the student activist who said he does not think “the university as it exists could ever
become less carceral.” This reasoning was because, sharing Olivia, Grace, and Alessia’s concerns, he
understood the institution “will never be accommodating to people that believe that the university as it
exists shouldn’t exist.” He argued given that the university makes people who “want to be in an
environment where they can learn” not want to be at university, universities produce and rely on an
environment where “you either follow the rules, go through it, conform, or you don’t, and you leave.”
Making a similar argument to Harney and Moten that prison abolition requires “the abolition of a society
that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p.
42), Nico tied his belief to broader ideas of needing to “fundamentally and radically change the way
society is” before we could change the university, policing, and the state. Despite this, when asked what
they thought the abolitionist university would look like, Nico and all interviewees offered tangible ideas
for how the university could function. Below, I categorize the changes needed for the abolitionist
university to exist into four categories: rhetorical, structural, epistemological/pedagogical, and changes in
the community.
Rhetorical Changes
Getting the Cop Out of Your Head
Interviewees brought up the importance of internally and externally critiquing mainstream
rhetoric of both carcerality and the university. Avery discussed how the most significant individual
change for her was “not believing the propaganda that I should be scared on campus and around campus
and just not seeing myself as a victim.” Similarly, Elisa named “knowing how to navigate situations
where I know I won’t be in positions where I’m interacting with campus security, or with administration,

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or with people that I don’t feel safe with” as central to her resistance. Sonya highlighted that she refuses
“to be put in situations where I only have one option.” If the university tells her there are only one or two
options, neither of which she feels comfortable with, she challenges herself to think of many more
options. Froggy argued that “acknowledging that there is this relationship that exists between carcerality
and the university, and how that relationship is being driven, and who it benefits and who it doesn’t
benefit” as well as “acknowledging that a lot of things that separate the community and the university” is
important abolitionist work, especially when combined with organizing against these issues.
Alessia noted that she tried to start this work as an Orientation Leader at her university, where she
used university resources to teach new students “everything that was wrong with CC, and what they need
to do as students to combat it.” Naomi brought up “getting the cop out of your head,” a commonly used
term in abolitionist circles coined by Paula X. Rojas in her chapter “Are the Cops in Our Heads and
Hearts?” from INCITE!’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded; Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
where Rojas reflects on organizing and the nonprofit industrial complex in the U.S. and Latin America.
Naomi noted that she was not always an abolitionist and used to think, “Maybe there are good cops out
there.” Getting to abolition for her was a process of getting “rid of the cop in your mind.” So, she believes
in not only doing the labor of changing your ideology but also extending “grace to people who also did
not immediately identify as [abolitionists] or still don’t.” This argument ties back to the importance of
changing campus discourses, as discussed in Chapter 5.
Humanizing Criminalized Individuals
During the media-making workshop, Berto highlighted his work attempting to counter the schoolto-prison pipeline by working with his collective on creating a prison-to-school pipeline (see also: Gary,
2014; Reese, 2014; Scott, 2017). Nathaniel also pointed to his choice to work with ULA’s Prison
Education Project, which is central to his understanding of changing rhetoric around carcerality on
campuses. Eight of the participants’ zine pages critiqued the current relationship between universities and
carcerality, with one page (see Figure 28) focusing entirely on the university’s relationship with prisons.
Featuring text from an Underground Scholars pamphlet, it puts the words “Have you or a loved one ever

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been incarcerated” and twice “Creating a Prison-To-School Pipeline” over the hand-drawn image of a
burning police helicopter and burning towers that simultaneously look like a prison and a university,
while a collaged crowd cheers in the foreground.
Figure 28
Zine Page From Media-Making Workshop
This highlighting of destroying prisons and carcerality can also be seen in other zine pages, which
featured cut-out language stating: “No cops,” “Carcerality fully encompasses disposability,” “Prison-toschool pipeline,” “The university and the prison: a dialogue,” “Firstly, no cops and I think an abolitionist
university,” “3) Interrupting the dominant discourse of formerly incarcerated people, and their place in
academia,” two pages featured the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Cops Off Campus Logo
(see Figure 29). Another zine page included an image from the University of California, Los Angeles’
Jackie Robinson Stadium in 2020 when protestors hung a sign reading “Prisoners Made Here” below the
“Champions Made Here” sign painted on the outside of the stadium (see Figure 30) referencing the LAPD
use of the stadium’s parking lot to detain individuals involved in protesting the death of George Floyd on
June 1, 2020. A final reference to the role of carcerality can be seen in one zine page’s remixing of
Alberto Lule’s artwork “Am I truly free?” (see Figure 31 for original and remix). In the original, Lule
references histories of criminal physiognomy by labeling his ears as “criminal,” his haircut as “gang
member,” his eyes as “terrorist,” his nose as “deviant,” his eyebrows as “killer,” and his mustache as “bad

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hombre.” In the zine, these negative associations are crossed out, so the image now reads “beautiful
eyes,” “caring nose,” “open ears,” and “loving eyebrows.” Just as Lule offers a critical history of
criminology and race, a participant replaces these associations with softer adjectives to continue the
refutation. In rejecting carceral rhetoric and narratives, the zines point to the importance of “dismantledestroy” work (as Olivia framed it) alongside the building work required by an abolitionist university.
Figure 29
UCSD Cops Off Campus Logo
Figure 30
Photo By Anika Chakrabarti/Daily Bruin Staff of Jackie Robinson Stadium in October 2020 After
Protestors Hung a Sign Reading “Prisoners Made Here” Below The “Champions Made Here” Sign
Painted Outside the Stadium

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Figure 31
Am I Truly Free? By Alberto Lule (Left) And A Close-Up of The Remix in A Zine Page from The MediaMaking Workshop (Right)
One page in particular, as seen in Figure 32, focused on rejecting carceral rhetoric and narratives,
including quotes from Steven Czifra in Abolish the University, where he explains that after learning about
“structural racism, structural patriarchy, structural xenophobia, structural disability oppression,” he
understood that we are in “a fucking class war!” Moreover, he is “just a little casualty in the big class war,
you know? That knowledge derailed my aspirations for becoming an English professor because, you
know, it’s really hard to be credentialed, powerful, firmly embedded member of the middle class while
shaking your fist at it. You’re not going to foment revolution from Westwood. That’s not how it works.
Like Fred Hampton said, you’re not going to burn down on Tuesday what you build on Sunday.” These
ideas can also be seen in two participants’ (including Figure 32) inclusion of the quote, “Things will go
away when something else emerges.” The participant’s page shown in Figure 32, also included the
handwritten message: “Future still loading, still loading, working learning. Future still loading. In minds,
hearts, souls. DON’T INTEGRATE. DON’T SELF IMMOLATE. STILL LOADING. STILL
LOADING. STILL LOADING. STILL LOADING. STILL LOADING. STILL LEARNING. STILL

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LEARNING. STILL LEARNING. STILL LEARNING. LEARNING STILL.” In their reflection, they
noted that they have been reflecting on the fact that the future “without oppression” they want “must be
actualized and created in the here and now, with our current difficulties and challenges.” They go on to
note that this future “can’t just be thought up in our minds, but different attempts much be tried and
tested, to better resolve conflict where it can, and to bring as many people out of cages as possible.” This
page also offers an example of the recurring theme of getting people free from prisons while we build a
world that does not need prisons. To this participant, the abolitionist university can and should mirror the
future-thinking and world-building work of abolition more broadly.
Figure 32
Zine Page From Media-Making Workshop

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These conversations and zine pages reveal that in developing the abolitionist university–be it
abolitionist spaces within higher education or the envisioning of higher education when we “reach”
abolition–abolitionist student activists understand a need for changes in our rhetoric. These changes
involve questioning university narratives around safety and victimhood, rejecting the idea that the
institution provides safety in the face of the surrounding community, and unlearning the socialization that
policing is necessary. It also means rehumanizing formally incarcerated students through viewing them as
equal students and educators and working to create a “prison-to-school-pipeline” that centers the formerly
incarcerated on our campuses and understanding getting people out of prisons as central to the work of
the abolitionist and abolitionist university.
Structural Changes
Changing Who Makes Decisions
The structural changes envisioned by abolitionist student activists included changing who makes
decisions, divesting from violence and investing in alternatives, financial investments in students,
rematriating land, and taking police off-campus and other carceral centers–such as Title IX–off campus.
The desire to change who makes decisions on university campuses has long been a demand of student
activists. For example, the B.S.C.-M.A.Y.A. demands for the development of the Third College at the
University of California, San Diego, in 1969 included the demand that the college’s governing body
“shall be the Board of Directors and shall consist of two students, one faculty member and the provost.”
They argued that this Board of Directors would “make the final ruling on all general college policy. It
shall dispense and fill all F.T.E.’s and approve all administrative appointments. It shall have the authority
to initiate any action or delegate that responsibility to any group it deems appropriate,” and “Each
member of the Board of Directors shall have one vote,” giving students equal decision-making power
with faculty over the college (B.S.C.-M.A.Y.A., 1969, p. 3).
SCU student Emily highlighted the importance of “building student power and not following or
adhering to what the administration wants you to do” in developing an abolitionist university. She
highlighted that a culture of student activism–ultimately a culture of student power–can support students

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as issues arise. She pointed to a 16-day Sit-In at UCLA in February 2022, partly organized by their
student government (Disabled Student Union UCLA and Mother Organizations of UCLA, 2022). Emily
argued that collaboration with student organizations and teaching organizing history would be vital in
creating an abolitionist university within our current university. Another example of organizing to change
who makes decisions on university campuses can be seen in the University of Toronto’s General
Assembly. Formed in the Fall of 2010, the General Assembly was “made up of students, faculty, staff,
alumni and community members targeting the corporatized and undemocratic governance structures
within the institution” (Thorburn, 2012, n.p.). All members were invited to attend assembly meetings, and
anyone attending was “able to vote on motions, and all become stakeholders in the project for the radical
transformation of the university” (Thorburn 2012, n.p.).
Erasing Police and Other Carceral Centers
Andrew, Avery, Derek, Elisa, Fiona, Froggy, Grace Naomi, and Sonya all named
divesting/ending the funding of police departments as an easy step that campuses can take towards
becoming less carceral places. Grace and Naomi both highlighted the possible reinvestment of campus
police funding. Naomi argues universities can replace police as first responders to mental health crises,
which she felt was “the low-hanging fruit” of the abolitionist movement because it is so easy to see “why
it’s so wrong for a non-medical professional to be interacting with someone in a very vulnerable
position.” Naomi argued that universities should “look towards where police are present on campus,
where they’re present in student lives, and then figuring out what their purpose is. What is the imagined
purpose? If it’s really to keep students safe, what are other ways that we could do that?” As discussed in
Chapter 5, Andrew also returned to the co-option of reforms we have seen throughout history, particularly
in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, where he saw “purposeful misinterpretation of some of these ideas
about reform,” prioritizing defunding meant these reforms could not be co-opted to bolster policing.
Avery noted that if divesting entirely from campus police was too big a first step for universities, many
police forces could be confined to campuses “and stop policing the outside neighborhoods.”

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Fiona argued that she would replace campus police with “more sustainable and all-around healthy
and compassionate systems of justice and care and accountability.” Naomi, too, brought this up, quoting
Ruth Wilson Gilmore; she recognized policing “as a death-making institution” and suggested that instead,
the abolitionist university would create “life-affirming institutions” (MPD 150, 2020). Froggy highlighted
that the abolitionist university could not exist without abolishing police and prisons, as “one complements
the other and then to be anti-incarceration, anti-prisons, you have to be anti-university.” Finally, Nico
highlighted that part of why there would be no cops on campus would involve there being “no need for
cops on campus,” this, he states, would be “because we would be a community…a real community, not
the community that the university does through its propaganda thing.” As discussed under community
changes below, this idea of community building as central to abolitionist practice repeatedly emerged in
the interviews.
As mentioned in Chapter 4, many students saw Title IX and other areas of the university outside
of police that, in theory, are designed to address harm as actually reproducing carceral logics. Both Avery
and Elisa named abolishing or changing the Title IX process as something the university must do to
become abolitionist. They both argued that there should be reporting options that are not tied to
punishment, and Avery specified that the evidence orientation of Title IX, in particular, can be “traumatic
for victims.” Elisa, Grace, Olivia, Sonya, and Sophie argued that the university could implement
transformative justice. Elisa said that her university already has a “Student Judicial Board” and has been
trying to “create a more restorative justice framework within the judicial board,” where instead of
suspensions, individuals are asked to do “community projects.” Sophie highlighted that universities often
already respond this way to underage drinking, so she wondered, “How can we apply similar logic to
people making mistakes… how can we build up these different responses to harm?” Both Elisa and
Sophie highlighted that universities are often already engaging in alternatives to punitive responses such
as when handling underage drinking, but these alternatives are selective rather than common. Defunding
police and other sites of carceral violence was viewed as the first step towards prioritizing safety and
wellbeing on campus but as part of a broader plan to invest in transformative justice structures.

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Divesting from Violence and Investing in Alternatives
Alongside divesting from campus policing, students also named divesting from private prisons
and fossil fuels as vital political choices universities should make with their resources to turn the
university into a “life-affirming institution” (MPD 150, 2020). Calls for divestment from structures of
violence have long been a tactic of student activists, most well known in the U.S. in the call to divest from
South African Apartheid. In her 1989 report on South African divestment for the Investor Responsibility
Research Center, Jennifer Kibbe defined divestment as “the ethically motivated sale of investments,”
noting that “a university that sells off its holdings in a South Africa-related company has taken a
divestment action, while that company, if it sold off its operations in South Africa, would be taking a
disinvestment action” (1989, p. 81). As a result of this movement, divestment as a strategy has continued
to be used by student activists, most notably by both the anti-fossil fuel movement and the Boycott,
Divest, and Sanction Movement against Israeli occupation of Palestine (Hunt et al., 2017; McMahon,
2014). In the 2010s, divestment frequently emerged as a tactic to address and change universities’
complicity in the prison industrial complex.
The first prison divestment campaign began in 2007 when a student campaign pressured
Farallon–a company managing part of Yale University’s endowment–to divest from the Corrections
Corporation of America (CCA) (Chan, 2015). In 2014, five University of California campuses’ student
senates passed divestment resolutions, though the University of California did not fully divest from
private prisons until 2015. Columbia University was the first to fully divest from private prisons when, in
June 2014, it sold its shares in both G4S and CCA. Hampshire College, the UCs, the CSUs, Georgetown
University, Stanford University, Princeton, and the University of Southern Florida followed shortly after
through active divestment or a commitment to not invest in the future (Freedom to Thrive, 2020).
Anthony Williams provides a timeline of the Afrikan Black Coalition’s (ABC) campaign at the
University of California to divest from prisons. They write that “as an organization fighting for Black
liberation, we [ABC] want to abolish the prison industrial complex,” going on to specify that ABC “seeks
the abolition of all forms of slavery in their entirety, and we believe that begins by recognizing that

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prisons are a form of legal slavery” (2016, p. 100). ABC’s understanding of divestment as a tactic was
thus explicitly tied to a desire for Black liberation and the end of slavery and its afterlives. Divestment
from private prisons was understood as the first step towards “a world without private prisons—and
eventually all prisons” (Williams, 2016, p.100) and the focus on the University of California is based on
an understanding of where, as students, they held leverage. After filing a public records request to learn
the University of California’s connections to the CCA, Geo Group, and G4S, they were brought in by the
University of California’s Chief Investment Officer–Jadgeep Bachher–to discuss the matter. Contrasting
with the more recent arguments for universities as amoral institutions discussed in Chapter 1, Bachher
agreed with them that the University had a moral and ethical imperative to divest from private prisons, a
stark difference to much of the discourse of the anti-apartheid movement, which claimed universities
should remain apolitical and thus implicitly amoral. At the time of the publication of Williams’ article, the
University of California had not committed to reinvesting the money they disinvested from private
prisons into “education and companies that are owned or controlled by the formerly incarcerated” per
ABC’s request. (Williams, 2016, p.102)
Another student movement for prison divestment is currently happening at Harvard University,
where the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign (HPDC) explicitly references anti-apartheid activism as
part of its justification for using divestment as a tactic against prisons. Their website states that
“Divestment is a time-tested form of political action. In the 1980s, activists forced states, municipalities,
corporations, and universities to stop doing business with apartheid South Africa and divest from all
South African companies” (n.d.). HPDC has also held events around abolition, including the June 22nd,
2020, event “Welcome BACC: Building Abolitionist Campaigns,” with abolitionist Mariame Kaba and
their weekly campaign planning events are called Abolition Action Assemblies. So, they tie their
campaign for divestment to an abolitionist framework.
One of the apparent differences between the divestment movement from Apartheid and the
abolitionist call to divest from police and prisons is grounded in Du Bois’ notion of abolition democracy;
abolitionists call for the resources currently invested in carcerality to be reinvested in life-affirming

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institutions (Dhaliwal, 2023; Kaba, 2021; McLeod, 2019; MPD 150, 2020). Grace argued that money
currently used for carceral purposes at SCU could go into mental health resources and other areas to
address “the root causes of social issues.” Sonya highlighted that the pandemic revealed class dynamics
among students for which students could/could not be suddenly forced off campus. Students responded
by forming a mutual aid group to address these issues, but, Sonya argued, it could have been an
institutional response using institutional resources. Andy, Emily, and Froggy named either making the
university tuition-free or providing drastically more funding to students–mainly to low-income students
of color from the communities the university is actively gentrifying as a reinvestment strategy. Emily also
raised that not only should the university provide more need-based financial aid, but that it needs to lessen
the “red tape when it comes to applying for grants and other funding opportunities” as often such
resources end up going to the students best able to navigate the bureaucracy as opposed to those who most
need it. Andy had a different perspective on how the university could change its relationship to financial
resources, noting that he believes “they need to just move away from the money in general,” specifying
that people would learn and teach for free. If the university did that, it could become a “safe space”
because there would be no profit from its work. This argument is a similar perspective to that which
emerged at Free Universities in the 1960s and 1970s (see Chapter 2). While at many of these universities,
individuals are doing free educational labor at a Free University while being compensated for educational
labor/research at a state or private university, there were also many examples of individuals teaching
classes alongside other full-time jobs.
Alessia, also at CC, discussed how her collective’s standing as an official student organization
meant they could access money “and lots of it somehow.” She discussed the downsides of this, often
involving mandatory security at events, but also offered the example of the university buying tickets “for
students” for an event and their collective, then being able to give many of those tickets to formerly
incarcerated people and their family members who otherwise would not be able to attend an event.
Notably, the student collectives that still exist at the end of 2023 both have official student organization
status and existed before 2020. As discussed in Chapter 5, I am not equating the longevity of an

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organization to success, but there does seem to be a correlation between institutional support and
longevity. Their university resource utilization returns us to Harney and Moten’s argument that the
undercommons “work within and against the institution” (2013, p. 147).
Similarly, Derek highlighted his dissertation research on the relationship between the carceral
state and higher education, allowing him access to information the university might not otherwise share
with the collective. Grace highlighted using university resources to access training on copwatching, harm
reduction, and mutual aid. One example they noted was students using leftover campus dining dollars to
buy pre-packaged meals that could then be stored in a local community fridge for the local unhoused and
low-income population to access. Finally, Naomi discussed her time as a peer counselor and
Undergraduate Students Association Council President. In both spaces, she attempted to divert resources
towards abolitionist work.
Figure 33
Mini Zine from Media-Making Workshop

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One participant did not make a zine page but a “mini-zine” (see Figure 33), where a single 8.5 x
11 page was folded to create a standalone exploration. Importantly, when folded up, this mini-zine does
not have a start or end page but can instead be read from any page. This participant described the minizine as “~things/words/ideas/??? I want to keep in mind/remember/practice/?, for the love of the people
and the world around me.” In the mini-zine, they give “complex movements (complex systems theory):
adaption, interdependence, decentralization, cooperative work, regeneration” and “taking inspiration from
permaculture: care build responsibility diversity abundance rethinking waste (i love the edible ornamental
gardens).” The same participant had brought two books with them to the workshop, which they described
as “for inspiration”: Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown
(2017) and Urban Permaculture: A Practical Handbook for Sustainable Living by David Watkins (1993).
brown writes about Complex Movements as “a Detroit-based artist collective supporting the
transformation of communities by exploring the connections of complex science and social justice
movements through multimedia interactive performance work” (2017, p. 32). brown also cites Nick
Obolensky’s argument that “emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a
multiplicity of relatively simple interactions” (Obolensky, 2010, p. 88). These systems, brown then
argues, are what become ecosystems and societies. The participant thus appears to be referencing a
theoretical take on community/society building and its connections to social movement building in their
reference to “complex systems theory.”
Watkins defines permaculture as encouraging “people to take responsibility for themselves, to
gain more control of their lives and to take positive steps towards achieving a sustainable future” rooted
in the fundamental twin principles of “people care and Earth care” (1993, p. 1). This idea can also be seen
in other participant introductions and zine pages, where individuals named “food sovereignty,”
community gardens, and community fridges. These ideas reflect an overall commitment to an institution
where “well-being is prioritized,” as noted by Emily in her description of an abolitionist university.
Similarly, Justin–referencing Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme–noted he wanted the university to
commit to building a society “to each according to their needs.” Other zine pages included references to

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“supportive services, housing, or education” and the changing relationship of “the university’s resources,
access and pathways [to be] be built back up in a different way, re-organized, distributed differently,” an
idea seconded by Grace, who when introducing themselves argued an abolitionist university would
require the redistributions of university resources.
Financial Investments in Students
As noted by many participants, redistributing university resources would require financial
investments in students and the surrounding community via free education, canceling debt, and/or paying
students. Paying for college has often been considered a form of racial or class reparations (Garibay et al.,
2022; Red Shirt-Shaw, 2020; Westley, 2009). Additionally, abolitionist students have argued to “pay
campus and student-workers a just, living wage, 12 full months’ of the year” (Rockrohr, 2021, p. 9).
Many interviewees pointed to the long history of demanding just pay for student workers and non-student
staff. Andrew argued that “we know what the issues are” at the carceral university, “students want
housing, students want to be compensated, students want food, students want to-, you know what I mean?
Students don’t want to pay a football coach $5 million.” Elisa specified that a university should be
“representative of the community that it’s in,” both in terms of student population and curriculum. Many
interviewees agreed with this sentiment, with Derek noting that in an abolitionist university, “anyone
should be able to be a student.” The university would be “recruiting and trying to have a more than just
proportional representation of groups that have been historically excluded from higher education,” and
once recruited, those students would be provided with “more than adequate resources to support their
growth and empowerment.”
Berto said that his vision for an abolitionist university is one where there would be “very little
bureaucracy,” bureaucracy, he highlighted, is often what makes change within institutions challenging.
He argued that you have “to learn to move different. You got to learn to fight without fighting.” The
bureaucracy, he argued, was rooted in the commitment to individuals within the university making vast
amounts of money, and as other scholars have argued, “bureaucratic systems often mask an underlying
threat of violence” (Schwoerer & Murray, 2022, p. 32). Learning to “move different” thus means

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attempting violence prevention work. Berto and other interviewees highlighted the considerable
overinvestment in athletics at many universities, particularly the overinvestment in often one or two
individuals: football and basketball coaches (e.g., Sumida, 2023). Berto argued that for these individuals
“to be getting paid the most money out of everyone in school” clearly reflects the university’s priorities26.
Finances were not only brought up concerning their overinvestment in certain areas, but many
interviewees argued that an abolitionist university should be free or, as Nico noted, part of a “system that
doesn’t exist for profit.” For Avery, this required being free financially and accessibly, where student and
community resources “are fully provided for.” Dillon Rockrohr makes a similar argument in their zine
“An Abolitionist’s Primer on the University,” listing one of their five abolitionist demands as to
“decommodify research and teaching, making their benefits available to the broader community apart
from profit incentive” (2021, p. 8).
Rematriating Land
Andy, Emily, Fiona, Froggy, Grace, and Sonya all raised the goal of better-utilizing resources
concerning funding. However, Alessia also stated that universities need to re-examine their relationship to
the land as a resource, stating that “so many universities have bought up so much land that they don’t
even have anything built on anymore.” she gave the example of an “empty pit” owned by her university
that the university has “done nothing with.” She suggested instead that universities can and should “give
up [their] land” either by returning it to the local Indigenous nation or they could “make it into a mutual
aid thing” with the surrounding community, similar to what Yang discussed students at the University of
California, San Diego doing in Student as Resistant. The necessity of decolonization in the process of
abolition was highlighted by Justin during introductions at the media workshop when he noted that
policing, prisons, and colonization of land are inherently linked. One of the zine pages also brought
attention to the role of land, with a word collage reading “American mentality, problematic, hands-on, co26 No interviewee mentioned games, recreation, or sports as part of the abolitionist university, though many highlighted the
importance of physical activity, and saw carcerality in the ways bodies are dismissed as part of the human experience in
academia.

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created, land” (see Figure 34), as well as the inclusion of Josh Solis’ quote from Abolish The University
“The barbed wire, you see the land that it’s on, but if you see from outside, or from a sky’s point of view,
you don’t see the chaos that is happening inside those walls. The same thing though, if you’re seeing from
a sky point of view, and you’re looking-” where he argues that when looking at both prisons and
universities when you only look from above, you are not able to see the individuals doing the work of
making change happen. This argument is not specific to interviewees and participants in this project; Red
Shirt-Shaw makes a similar argument in her policy and practice brief “Beyond the Land
Acknowledgement,” where she writes that the most essential thing universities can do if committed to
genuine institutional change, is “return institutional land back to Native nations” (2020, p. 2).
Figure 34
Zine Page From Media-Making Workshop

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As seen in Figure 35, one participant cut out individual words from interviews to create a new
piece of archival poetry, which reads, “challenge the way I see systems experience the land relationships a
movement learn from collective colorful one another a global horizontal space born to survive and feel
safe exist learning from here history storytelling centered grassroots justice dream practicing meditation
healing reflect fell in love liberation voice hypnotized connection fly notice imagine.” This single piece
reflects many conversations around the relationship to land, movement, collectivity, horizontalism,
survival, safety healing, and imagination throughout the zine pages. These show a desire from abolitionist
student activists to focus on “creating life-affirming institutions” (MPD 150, 2020).
Figure 35
Zine Page From Media-Making Workshop

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Epistemological/Pedagogical Changes
A Greater Commitment to Collective Learning
Collective learning at the center of an abolitionist university reoccurred throughout the
interviews. Alessia suggested that growing an abolitionist university could start with “your classic book
club” and committing to reading an abolitionist text together. Grace focused on the idea of collective
knowledge production given that “none of us form knowledge by ourselves,” noting that dismantling “the
individualistic mindset” we are all socialized into needs to be prioritized and replaced with an
understanding that “we’re all products of our environment, and of our community and of our ancestors.”
They stated that this was particularly true for “people who are marginalized” and whose knowledge has
been dismissed within educational spaces. Avery highlighted focusing on bringing in the surrounding
community into the university, and that–as is discussed more below–the university should be a “mini
commune-like Resource Center” for the community, where “it’s completely accessible” there are no
processes of enrollment or credit, as there are “an emphasis on teaching versus degrees.” Derek
highlighted his collective’s commitment to “political education and helping people develop
consciousness” as one of their greatest successes, particularly in creating tangible media products. He
noted that while organizing at SCU looked very different from organizing he had been involved in the
past–primarily in that it happened on a much smaller scale–he has come out of the process seeing an
accurate value in “even just the change that can happen within a small group of people who are trying to
help each other understand and work towards something.”
When asked about the role of activism in developing and practicing an abolitionist university, all
interviewees saw it as central to the possibility of an abolitionist university. Alessia and Andrew both
named the importance of activism in bringing people together into a collective and that that collective can
form the basis of community building and collective study. Nico argued that collective study was at the
center of an abolitionist university and the role activists can take towards its creation. He specified this
did not mean activists believed they were here to educate others, but that collectively, they could say,
“Let’s educate ourselves, let’s become educated together. Let’s engage in this type of knowledge-

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producing as a community.” Derek highlighted that the work should be done with community members
and “multigenerational” and “multi-role.” Armando similarly made an argument that in activism,
“everyone has a role.” we went on to discuss the necessity of exploring skillsets to figure out everyone’s
roles in the movement, that the work needs to be sustainable, or to quote Emily, it needs to fulfill the
“push-pull of continuing to participate” while “protecting yourself and staying safe at the same time.”
Grace noted that as a non-Black and non-Indigenous person, they felt non-Black and non-Indigenous
people had a particular responsibility to educate others as they experience “privilege a lot from our
proximity to whiteness and white supremacy.”
Kenia, in her workshop introduction, argued for the importance of “creating microcosms of safety
on campus,” and one participant reflected after the workshop that while currently, it seems as though
“learning exists in a separate realm from our mental wellbeing,” they imagine a space “where our whole
selves are brought to learn, and even learn to heal, through creatively and communally conjured
pedagogies that encourage an openness to sharing our resources, knowledge, and tools for survival with
each other.” Anahi argued in an abolitionist university she would like to see a greater emphasis on
curiosity, with individuals “doing something for the love of learning.” Emily also used the language of
curiosity and argued for “prioritizing a love for learning.” Notably, a few individuals named a love of
abolitionist learning in particular, with Madu envisioning physical locations where collectives could
engage in conversations around abolition; they offered the Noname Book Club as an example of an
abolitionist educational space. According to their website, Noname Book Club is an abolitionist “Blackled worker cooperative connecting community members inside and outside carceral facilities with radical
books” with a physical location–the Book Club Headquarters–in Los Angeles and twelve chapters across
the U.S. and the U.K.
Interestingly, Emily L. and Naomi noted that since graduating from ULA, they had started a book
club together, which Emily described as a “non-punitive book club,” and did community political
education work through the book club. One zine page tied these ideas together, including the quote: “So
I’m meeting other people–like-minded people–and building a coalition for gaining this knowledge, for

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community organizing and grassroots things, like building mutual aid and legal resources.” Political
education was raised again within the media-making workshop, with one participant reflecting that
“universities are a crucial place to fight for the ideology of the future,” requiring a purposeful reflection
on what future that educational institution is investing in. Another participant included a quote from MJ
Hart in Abolish the University, where they stated, “Personally I want to strive for transforming what
getting an education means, like Josh was saying. As for myself, I’m weaponizing my mind.” The use of
militaristic language by the participant and Hart reflects a politicized understanding of education, with the
potential to lose or win our futures.
Changed Curricula
This desire for education to hold particular ideological commitments could also be seen in the
arguments for changed curricula offered by interviewees and workshop participants. Armando, Derek,
and Emily all brought up how the possibilities of an abolitionist university are inherently tied to the long
histories of institutional organizing. Derek said his vision for an abolitionist university is “rooted in the
demands of the Third World Liberation Front of 1969.” The Third World Liberation Front (TWLF)
demands included ten from the Black Student Union and five from the TWLF. These demands were
primarily for Black/Ethnic Studies department, courses, and faculty; more Black/non-white students be
admitted into the institution; and the demand perhaps most clearly connected to abolitionist demands
around policing: “that no disciplinary action will be administered in any way to any students, workers,
teachers, or administrators during and after the strike as a consequence of their participation in the strike”
(Third World Liberation Front, 1969). Similarly, Armando pointed to the theory of carceral liberation,
naming the experiences of many incarcerated individuals as finding their liberation from exploring “their
Chicano identity, their roots, a lot of folks find out their African history or a lot of Native folks find out
prayer and their ceremonies.” In the here and now Armando argued, we can put those who have
experienced carceral liberation and other “folks who have traditionally been excluded from power” into
the university, and “at the forefront of those restructuring of universities.”

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The educational role of activism toward building an abolitionist university was also raised. Andy,
Berto, Fiona, Froggy, Grace, Naomi, and Olivia all named the potential they saw in the educational work
of activism. Fiona saw great potential in “the ways that political education and media projects and coorganizing” can lead to the “shift in worldview or shift in perspective” needed to work towards an
abolitionist university. Froggy highlighted his education experiences toward “building political
consciousness,” stating, “Once I started organizing, I started understanding the political- the connections
between larger society, larger political parties and my environment.” He began to realize it was not that
he and his community had been “politically abandoned” but that they were being “politically used as lab
rats.” He raised the recurring idea in abolitionist spaces that “the system is not broken. It’s doing what it’s
supposed to be doing,” and what it is doing is maintaining and sustaining acts of violence against
repressed communities. Olivia also stated that while she “was not familiar with abolition before coming to
college,” the role student activism has played in informing her makes “this [abolitionist] work
accessible.” Naomi and others highlighted the role theorizing could play toward “basing yourself in some
political education and a very principled value system.” However, she highlighted that this only matters if
you are “really trying to put the theory into play.” Grace and Olivia also named the importance of praxis
in activist education work. Olivia suggested we must practice “the theory that we’re studying and the
world that we want to build on a smaller scale so that we [can] reproduce that on the larger scale.” Our
activism, she argued, must be rooted in both theory and organizing to “carry with it the potential for real
structural change and movement building.”
Avery, Grace, Olivia, and Sophie highlighted the role activism can play in broadening one’s
imaginative abilities. Avery noted that “it can be used to unlock people’s imaginations,” and Grace
specified that activism could teach us how to “reimagine” the structures that already exist and break the
conditioning that “everything is the way they are for the reason that they’re not going to change.” Sophie
tied the role of creative imagination as the step that must be done before we can begin the “building of
new infrastructures, new ways of dealing with harm [and] dealing with conflict.” In this way, activism

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serves educational and action-orientated purposes and performs future-oriented work, allowing us to
speculate on future possibilities.
Histories of student organizing were not the only curriculum changes suggested by interviewees.
Froggy argued that we should study not only racial power movements but also “other movements, Ireland
with the IRA,” “LGBTQ movements,” and global movements. He went on to discuss the particular need
to learn non-U.S. history and politics. He stated that often it feels like our relationship with the U.S. is one
where we are “hypnotized with capitalism, buying nice stuff, you dismiss the red flags, because you don’t
want to see them or it doesn’t benefit us,” a global perspective in the abolitionist university, he argued
would center “a way for people to acknowledge these red flags” and get out of the “American mentality.”
Grace similarly stated that the people teaching things would have reflected on whether they
should be teaching a topic and whether they have the experience of and on a topic to “have really done the
understanding.” They noted this would mean bringing in knowledge that currently “isn’t necessarily
considered as legitimate,” such as learning from Black and Indigenous community members about what
ways of being existed prior to colonization and enslavement. “That’s something that an abolitionist
university would really center,” they went on to say, “that we have so much to learn from the people who
come before us and have been structurally and violently erased.” Moreover, studying that erasure toward
“building a radical present and future” would recognize that we are all “coming from somewhere. We’re
all collectively learning from communities around us and our pasts.”
Andy, Berto, and Elisa also had specific ideas for what the curricula could contain. Andy
highlighted the need for learning about financial literacy, and Berto and Elisa both raised food
sovereignty as an essential goal, with Berto stating that people need to
learn how to plant because, you know, at the end of the world, people that don’t know how to
plant are going to be in big trouble because there’s not going to be a Whole Foods. Whole Foods
is not going to be around, so you better learn how to fucking plant your own corn.
Elisa also raised the idea of a college or university rooted in self-sustainability when it comes to food, so
the abolitionist university, to her, would involve “thinking about the ways in which we get our food, and

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the things that we need to live,” and thus have a garden, or farm, “a big plot of land where everyone is
growing, and using that food to sustain everyone that is learning.”
Many of the students at CC brought up the transformative justice independent study they were
partaking in, with Olivia stating that they are “trying to focus on creating collective power and work
against this structure that really divides a lot of these classes and allows these classes to continue being
you know, very- maybe not very, but somewhat carceral.” Sophie also spoke of the class, pointing out
that it emerged from a class entitled “Practice Abolition Democracy” taught by a politics professor. In
that class, they planned a panel on transformative justice on the campus that brought in restorative justice
practitioners, CC administration, professors, community members, students, and an organizer from
Dignity and Power Now27. According to Sophie, the panel asked
what is transformative justice? What could that look like here in higher education? What are the
roadblocks and the issues with dealing with that in a place with Title IX with all these other
institutional barriers to creating truly transformative responses to address university harm and
interpersonal harm, more specifically?
Sophie pointed out that the class taught her “how to organize others, how to organize myself, how to
create an event that has some sort of larger political end goal,” which she felt were rarely skills offered by
college classes. The previous semester, students involved in that project participated in a collective
independent study “to continue the transformative justice organizing work on campus, we’re continuing
to meet with professors, thinking of strategies to create better non-carceral solutions to interpersonal
harm.” Olivia pointed out that this involved trying to navigate the institution without the project being coopted (see Chapter 5). As previously discussed, she found “conflict between some of the core values of
our school and the social justice-oriented rhetoric and language and then also the title nine procedures and
a lot of institutional barriers and limitations.” While initially a group project, then a collective
independent study, Olivia shared the next step involved a “multiclass project” the following semester.
Offered at CC in Fall 2022, the multi-class project was entitled “Community Restorative Justice,” which
27 A Los Angeles based grassroots organization building “a Black and Brown led abolitionist movement rooted in community
power towards the goal of achieving transformative justice and healing justice for all incarcerated people, their families, and
communities” (Dignity and Power Now, n.d.)

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featured nine courses across eight departments28. The project, Olivia argued, would consist of
“abolitionist students and abolitionist faculty that are teaching abolitionist courses, or courses that touch
on abolition” and would “bring together students to produce a larger like restorative justice cultural shift
at CC.” Both Olivia and Sonya highlighted that cultural shift was not just about creating space for
survivors of sexual violence, but also about transforming “relationships among people” at CC, some of
that change was cultural, and some was rooted in institutional policy change.
Classroom Relationality
As discussed in Chapter 4, some of the main cultural issues students saw in the classroom were
gendered and racialized hierarchies, faculty power over students, and the assumption of who a normative
student is. Interviewees argued that the abolitionist university required a reinvestment in humanizing
pedagogy. Like Boggs et al. and Gilmore, Berto thought a lot about Audre Lorde’s call that you cannot
use the Master’s tools to dismantle the Master’s house and what that means for the university. He noted
that while he goes back and forth, right now, he disagrees with Lorde, believing that people have become
so like products that we are tools, and thus, if utilized properly, “the tools can dismantle the Master’s
House.” Yang makes a similar argument with his concept of the scyborg in A Third University is
Possible. The scyborg, he argues, is the “structural agency of persons who have picked up colonial
technologies and reassembled them to decolonizing purposes;” (2017, p. xiv); the “system” of one’s
agency is what puts the s before cyborg. The scyborg is a possible inhabitation for the reader; they are
produced by the university “as students, staff, faculty, alumni, and college escapees, technologies of the
university have been grafted onto” us (Yang, 2017, p. 55), and because of this Yang notes the scyborg is a
privileged figure, a “technologically enhanced colonial subject” (p. 70). The scyborg relationship with the
university can then reorganize “institutional machinery; it subverts machinery against the master code of
its makers; it rewires machinery to its own intentions” (Yang, 2017, p. 55).
28 Critical Global Studies, Dance, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Writing.

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While she did not use the word “scyborg,” Fiona brought up her collective’s organizing of an
abolitionist pedagogy workshops series entitled “The Classroom as Liberatory Practice” as an example of
utilizing university resources to enable the creation of a less carceral/abolitionist university. She gave
examples that faculty can perform scyborg work in “how [they] approach grades” or “engage with
students…with staff, faculty, the relationships that you have with people at the university.” Fiona argued
that the university could become less carceral in re-centering these relationships as relational. She noted
that social precarity plays a role in how explicitly you can bring these abolitionist practices into the
classroom, but that “any bit that you can do” can allow “other people start seeing that yeah, it doesn’t
have to be like this.” Thinking about other small changes, Froggy argued that the abolitionist university
would prioritize creating “a space where people feel safe,” where “they could be uncomfortable, but they
would be safe,” specifying both physical and mental safety.
Sonya brought up the mutual aid organizing led by students at her university, which was called
“Nobody Fails At CC,” which, alongside providing resource support for students, also aimed “to change
the grading policies to [a] universal pass for students” during the pandemic. They did this to address the
different conditions under which everyone came to education during the pandemic. However, Sonya
argued that these differing conditions existed outside of the pandemic, so changing grading systems can
undo how current systems punish students with fewer resources.
Emily, Sonya, and Elisa all wanted to see no grades in the abolitionist university. Emily argued
that grades lend themselves to producing anxiety over benefitting learning—an argument backed up by
the growing research on ungrading practices (see Barnes, 2015; Blum & Kohn, 2020; Heron, 1987;
Stommel, 2023). Sonya brought up Hampshire College as an example of a place focused on the freedom
to learn through “written feedback and growth” as opposed to grades, which allowed for “a collaborative
working learning environment where you get to learn hands-on skills, and you get to experiment and be
so creative and design everything yourself.” Elisa said that without grades, learning could more easily be
about working towards “personal development, relationship development, [and] developing your

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relationship with the land” rather than the current career and professional development focused
education.
As with interviews, many workshop participants envisioned educational spaces with power
structures and dynamics very different from our current systems. Anahi said that she believed an
abolitionist university would look “nothing like we currently have” and would feature ungrading and
require getting rid of the professor-student hierarchy. This idea was also included via a quote on one zine
page that argued “class, in general, could be more horizontal, and more reflective,” focusing on resource
and skill sharing and changing ideas of who can claim to know in the first place. Another page included
quotes that argued universities are “conditioning us to submit [to] the hierarchy” and that universities
could become abolitionist by “allowing for self-guided education.” Justin argued for “communal
teaching,” and Emily noted she wanted a space where “everyone’s learning from each other.” In their
reflection after the workshop, one participant noted that “a different form of teaching, where skills and
knowledge is reached collectively rather than only by lecture,” could “mirror Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, which promotes circular learning whereby we teach each other. I think this kind of radical
restructuring of hierarchies is necessary to bring values into the classroom, practice informs ideas.”
Other zine pages made similar connections, with one page including a quote that said, “We
theorize globally and use our bodies to interrupt oppression, exploitation, and domination where we find
them” and another including “Build as we go.” Two pages included a quote from Boggs et al.’s
Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation that “An abolitionist perspective highlights spaces of
organizing, resistance, subversion, and accumulation towards non-capitalist ends in, through, and in
relation to universities.” Another participant had hand-written “world-building” on their page and
included MJ Hart’s quote that “we want to create transformative healing, restorative justice” from
Abolish the University. Finally, as can be seen in Figure 33, the individual who created the mini zine
included Eve Sedgwick’s idea of a reparative versus paranoid “reading,” citing Olivia Laing’s argument
that a reparative reading “might be engaged in resistance or concerned with producing some other reality
altogether” (2017, n.p.). This inclusion of transformative, restorative, and reparative work reflects an

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understanding of the ongoing violence we exist within and that building an alternative world and
university will require us to reckon both with that violence and its legacies/traumas.
Re-Evaluating What Counts as Knowledge and Who Accesses Knowledge
What counts as knowledge and who gets access to it has long been explored in the academy,
particularly in the study of epistemic injustice (Berlant, 1994; Code, 2018; Fricker, 2007; Giladi &
McMillan, 2023; Kelly et al., 2008; Kidd et al., 2017; Marabini, 2022; Maringe, 2023; Moran, 2010;
Posey, 2021). As discussed in Chapter 4, interviewees saw a limited approach to what counts as
knowledge as central to the carceral university. Thus, a desire to offer more expansive definitions of
knowledge, such as centering indigenous epistemologies and lived experiences, was part of what they
would like to see in the abolitionist university. Many workshop participants discussed the possible
changes that could be made between the university and non-institutional community members. Justin
highlighted that many universities do not create knowledge to benefit the surrounding communities and
often create knowledge that enables their displacement. Grace noted that they had gone out of their way to
engage with people in the surrounding community who are not students and stated that “what I’ve learned
from them has been more powerful than what I’ve learned from many of my professors.” Their statement
mirrors the broader desire of interviewees to see people not traditionally viewed as educators or providers
of knowledge in the educating role.
Returning to Froggy’s argument that he would like to see individuals speaking from experience of
a subject rather than formal education on a subject, he also argued the abolitionist university could hire
community members as faculty–regardless of formal credentials–so that classes on the community would
be taught by someone with lived experience of being in the community. Similar arguments have been
made when arguing for standpoint epistemology, but they generally still assume an academic background
alongside the lived experience (Krause, 2023; Toole, 2022). Alongside these conversations around who
gets to produce knowledge, AUS has also raised concerns about access to knowledge. Elise Thorburn has
pointed to independent publishing and open-access journals as examples of a “laudable commitment to
scholarship that challenges capitalist hegemony in both content and form” in 2012 (n.p.). This topic has

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been further explored since, particularly in the library sciences (see Morishima et al., 2016; Pinfield et al.,
2022; Scheufen, 2015; Wahlström, 2022).
AUS literature has also made some critical points about what we count as knowledge in
academia. Thorburn also pointed to the histories of militant research in the U.K. and the U.S. and
conricerca in Italy (co-research) as examples of ethical commitments to creating knowledge via the
academy. Militant research is “research carried out with the aim of producing knowledge useful for
militant or activist ends” (Van Meter & Team Colors Collective, 2009, p. 2; see also: Bookchin et al.,
2013; Herrera, 2018; and Halvorsen 2015). Conricerca was developed in the 1960s by Romano Alquati
and activists writing in the journals Quaderno Rossi and Classe Operai. They sought to understand the
struggles of factory workers and students “as a political tool for the expansion and circulation of struggle”
(Thorburn 2012, n.p.; see also Allavena & Polleri 2019; Alquati, 2019; Borio et al., 2009; Lassere &
Monferrand, 2019; Polleri, 2019). Other scholars also highlight ethical commitments to research funding
via supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in support of Palestine (Bain,
2023) and divesting from “weapons research and partnerships with arms manufacturers” (Rockrohr, 2021,
p. 9).
In their 2023 chapter “Marx, Critique, and Abolition,” Boggs et al. argue for thinking about
“different ‘modes of theory’” (p. 525). Inspired by Nick Montgomery and arla bergman’s Joyful
Militancy (2017), they contrast a critique-and-direction-based mode of theory with an affirmative mode of
theory. An affirmative mode of theory, as argued by Montgomery and bergman, is “a kind of theory that
participates in struggle and the growth of shared power rather than directing it or evaluating it from the
outside” (2017, p. 27). They cite examples, including Silvia Federici’s work (2004) on “rebellious
women’s feminist commons and networks of care that enact alternatives to the capitalist, patriarchal
family” (Boggs et al., 2023, p. 525), Glen Coulthard’s work on grounded normativity (2014), “autonomist
Marxists’ use of ‘general intellect’ and ‘mass intellectuality’” (Boggs et al., 2023, p. 526; see also Hall &
Winn 2017), Du Bois’ “theorizing of the ‘general strike of the enslaved’ that was crucial for the Union
victory in the Civil War” (Boggs et al., 2023, p. 526) and of abolition democracy (Du Bois, 2017 [1935]),

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Clyde Woods’ blues epistemology (1998), Cedric Robinson’s theorizing around the Black Radical
Tradition (2000 [1983]), and Liat Ben-Moshe’s “abolitionist epistemology and dis-epistemology” (2020,
p. 126).
Who Gets to Be a Student and Why Are We Students
As discussed in Chapter 4 under Assumption of a Normative Student, interviewees found the
university to reproduce classed, gendered, and racialized inequity through admissions processes of who
does and does not get to be a student. As discussed under Rhetorical Changes, in how the prison-toschool-pipeline can play a role in rehumanizing formally incarcerated students by viewing them as equal
students, we can also see how the normative student is not only white, middle-class, U.S. citizen, rational,
more often male, and aged 18-22, but the normative student has had no contact with the formal carceral
structures of the state. Multiple interviewees, particularly those who were formerly incarcerated, said that
simply existing in a university never intended for them felt like a form of resistance. Andy stated that
though he knew at times that making his status as formerly incarcerated public “could hurt me,” being
open about it feels like a refusal to “conform to what the university or society thinks we should be.”
Froggy highlighted that with his collective, “by demanding space for formerly incarcerated students and
resources,” you are asking the university “to acknowledge that you do exist, and you need resources.”
In the group interview with Boggs, Meyerhoff, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein, Meyerhoff
argued that this might involve expanding to include people younger than those in post-secondary
education in defining a student at a university, thus pushing back against the university’s “hierarchical
valorizing of that adult representational agency over the inactive-relational agency of young people” as
knowledge producers, and post-secondary students tendency to view themselves “as the viewers and
producers of knowledge” that often reproduces “the hierarchical valuing of intellectual labors over
manual labor.” As previously noted, Mitchell also pointed out that “the point of being a student is to not
be a student,” the point is to graduate, or should an individual refuse to do so, the “university is still going
to kick you out eventually.” This institution’s goal ties back to the ability to erase collective memory via
systemic turnover discussed in Chapter 5. These critiques can also be found in forming spaces for lifelong

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learning in other countries, such as the Swedish study circles (Larsson & Nordvall, 2010) or the Workers’
Educational Association in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (Wallace, 2015). As Mitchell
highlighted in our interview, universities can “eliminate the accumulation of institutional knowledge
among students in placing an end date on education.”
As discussed in Chapter 4, interviewees saw the university’s role as providing education for all,
functioning as a site of autonomy and agency, protecting and supporting students, providing resources–
including “knowledge-based resources [and] material resources,” and building community. The student
plays a role in all these goals. However, when the university is articulated as a provider of education, the
implication is that the student is the recipient of that education. Getting at questions of why they wanted
to be a student, Grace shared that they envisioned an abolitionist university allowing for self-guided
education. Doing such, they argued, would mean classes “could be more horizontal and more reflective”
and be rooted in resource and skill-sharing instead of an educational hierarchy. Sonya argued for a similar
space that would “facilitate education, and learning, and creativity, and exploration, and breaking the
boundaries, and thinking differently, and exploring questions that we’ve always had in guided ways, and
where pushback and challenging and conflict can be generative.” Importantly Sonya highlighted, that she
thinks these spaces “already exists in pockets here” via specific classrooms, professors, and student
groups. However, an abolitionist university would actively create, support, and sustain these spaces.
Olivia said she did not believe an abolitionist university “would look like just one thing” because she does
not think “learning and teaching and education should look like just one thing.” Again, returning to
Mariame Kaba’s concept of a million experiments, she noted, “I’m not sure if that would mean there’d be
a million different universities that are all teaching in different ways.” However, whatever it meant, “it
would be very different, one university to another, one space of learning to another.”
For Olivia, creating the abolitionist university, just like creating an abolitionist society, was
rooted in the phrase of “being in struggle” and the idea that “we’re not going to have a right answer, there
probably isn’t a right answer, but we are in continuous struggle for this goal.” Olivia argued that an
abolitionist university would thus be “a place where we can struggle through these questions and

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experiments and frameworks of safety and liberation.” Sonya also named Kaba’s a million experiments
and the idea of being in struggle as central to her understanding of the possibilities of an abolitionist
university. She argued that an abolitionist university would “look like experimentation” and could be “a
generative struggle” that’s already happening. Andy also brought up this idea of creating different
learning spaces, as he named an environment where people “don’t have to feel bad about either just
sticking with those they are most comfortable with or going out their comfort zone. Either would be fine.”
They could jump between arts, humanities, science, and social science classes simply to try them out and
learn new things instead of gaining a degree in hopes of making survival under capitalism easier. This
focus on study over class mobility points to Andre Gorz’s 1970 argument that “the right to study and the
right to social promotion can no longer go together” because “if, at best, everyone can, in fact, study,
everyone cannot be promoted to privileged posts,” thus central to the role of study in the abolitionist
university is that studies “cease[e] to be a class privilege” (Gorz, 1970, n.p.).
Valuing Creativity
The critical conversation raised during the workshop that received much less discussion during
interviews was the role of creativity. This role can further be understood through understanding the
relationship between physical space and creativity, media and creativity, and emotions and creativity. All
three have been discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. However, I will highlight that while differing physical
spaces for educational practices came up during interviews, workshop participants focused on them much
more. During introductions, Aranza noted that she thinks “a lot about how much time students spend in
educational spaces and how important those spaces can be for individuals, especially low-income
individuals, changing the physical space for example, the desk and chair, can mean having access to
different modes of sitting and learning.” Sophie and Zainab highlighted their work with environmental
justice organizations and the connections they saw between abolitionist practice and a just environment.
Many zine pages focused on connections to nature, including images of leaves and plants, as seen in
Figures 29, 32, 33, 34, and 35. One page (as can be seen in Figure 36) included the words Classroom
SPACE and then listed community gardens, outdoor classes, and comfort–giving the examples “Seating

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(bean bags!) (couches!),” “Tables (sitting in a circle!),” “Colors! Art! Beauty!”. It also included the
language of “Take it outside” and “open windows.” Also, the archival poetry seen in Figure 10 references
creative relationships with movement, land, and space.
Figure 36
Zine Page From Media-Making Workshop
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the nature of the workshop, the role of creativity and media came
up more frequently than during interviews. When introducing herself to the group, Naomi mentioned that
she had recently been thinking about tweets by the rapper and founder of Noname Book Club: Noname.
In the first of three tweets posted January 28th, 2023, a day after the City of Memphis released body
camera and surveillance footage of police officers beating Tyre Nichols, Noname wrote, “the state will
NEVER stop releasing videos of police mercilessly beating and killing us. It’s a tactical effort to program

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black people into submission. It’s works incredibly well. What images can we produce as black artists?
Where is our revolutionary propaganda?” She then tweeted, “we see rappers get shot. We see police kill
black people. We listen to songs about niggas getting murdered. We watch movies and tv shows that
feature black death. I’m tryna see a haitian revolution movie where colonizers get they ass demolished.
More songs about amilcar cabral” before responding to that tweet with the statement, “art is a space to kill
any character we want.” All three tweets can be seen in Figure 37.
Figure 37
Tweets By Noname
Naomi tied the tweets to both her belief in the importance of political education and in the
choices she made around which entertainment to engage with, citing her own choice not to see Avatar 2:
The Way of Water given Yuè Begay, a Diné artist who called for the film to be boycotted given its
appropriation of indigenous culture (Chilton, 2022). Elisa also discussed mass media during her
introduction, noting that “the media we consume is our reality,” during the workshop, Sophie and

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Nathaniel discussed the need to democratize the arts. Nathaniel connected the work to Emily Thuma’s
chapter on women’s prison newsletters in her book All Our Trials: Prisons, policing, and the feminist
fight to End Violence (2019), in which she argues that women’s prison newsletters serve as a “worldmaking project” (p. 89).
Zine pages also included images of art projects, a person painting, and the handwritten text
“Liberation in CREATION.” This centering of creativity came up in the reflection, with one participant
noting that they “really enjoyed people’s reflections on the importance of creation & art in an abolitionist
university.” Another wrote that “one of the most freeing parts of abolitionist spaces is the way
imagination is centered,” as this allows us to “create worlds” beyond oppressive systems, so an
abolitionist place would need to be one that “makes room for plenty of imagining. Imagination brings
creativity, play, vulnerability, and emotional release -- all important life skills to exercise both as
individuals and in community.” Finally, I noted during the workshop that there seemed to be a deep desire
to be creative and spend time purposefully reflecting on imagining alternatives. Many participants
expressed genuine joy at the space made possible by the workshop, as noted in Chapter 3, staying late to
complete their projects. Despite this, these kinds of events rarely happen in activist spaces, I suspect,
because when they are solely volunteer-based, they seem less justifiable given the urgency of many of the
issues we are organizing around. Robé and Charbonneau make a related argument in their book InsUrgent
Media from the Front, arguing that “immediacy often takes precedence over aesthetic excellence” in
activist media (2020, p. 2). This argument raises questions about media use, as discussed in Chapter 5. I
would argue that it further supports the idea that digital media and social media can be understood as
“tools” in the eyes of abolitionist student activists.
Emotions were named throughout the zine pages, such as “Art, Love, Joy” and “LOVE” on one
page, “GENEALOGIES of power of love of kinship of care of aggression” on another, a third page had
handwritten “and if we (en)visioned something different with love?,” and then the participant had
surrounded the words with hand drawn hearts and flowers. Love came up again and again, with the mini
zine (see Figure 33) including the quote “Love (i) “a notably mature vision of love, ethical + erotic,

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valuing kindness over possession” - (also) Olivia Laing (ii) “if we love in the right way…the fact that the
self ends, is less terrible.” - Mohsin Hamid” (Laing 2018 and Hamid 2022). Another participant quoted
James Baldwin, writing, “To be loved...to strengthen you against this loveless world” (Baldwin, 1995, p.
9).
Other emotions that came up repeatedly were ideas of healing and creativity, with one zine page
including the language “heal from within” and quoting MJ Hart from Abolish the University: “But if we
begin to heal, not just ourselves but each other, we can build an outside to this system,” and another
participant wrote, “We create beauty out of trauma, we transmute that trauma into things that are
sustainable for our communities.” Finally, three pages mentioned “hope,” the mini zine included a list of
emotions: “Curiosity, wonder, hope, nourish/nurture, music, light ~rethinking empathy,” and two pages
included the Mariame Kaba quote, “Hope is a discipline.” In an interview with Brian Sonenstein and Kim
Wilson for their podcast Beyond Prisons, Kaba explained this idea, noting that
The idea of hope being a discipline is something I heard from a nun many years ago who was
talking about it in conjunction with making sure we were of the world and in the world. Living in
the afterlife already in the present was kind of a form of escape, but that actually, it was really,
really important for us to live in the world and be of the world. The hope that she was talking
about was this grounded hope that was practiced every day, that people actually practiced it all
the time. (2018, n.p.).
This idea of hope as a discipline that must be practiced towards creating new worlds has been taken up by
many abolitionist organizers, including participants of the media-making workshop, where they
understand that it is easy to feel hopelessness and practice feeling hope for an abolitionist world in the
face of that hopelessness is central to be an abolitionist.
Community Changes
Almost all interviewees and workshop participants highlighted the importance of community
building in resisting the inherently isolating nature of the carceral university. However, community was
never defined by any individual. Touching briefly on the history of defining “Community,” I will then
point to the four ways I see interviewees and workshop participants using the term and advocating for
change around the term. The term “community” is frequently used and rarely defined in our everyday

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lives (Cohen 2013[1985]). Historically, led by the work of Ferdinand Tönnies, sociology framed
“community” as in opposition to society (Adair-Toteff, 2023). In this view, community was framed “as
geographically specific, culturally homogeneous, and inherently apolitical entities-seemingly natural
phenomena of families, villages, neighborhoods, and ethnic and religious groups” (Collins, 2010, p. 9)
and thus was understood as “the arena in which people acquire their most fundamental and most
substantial experience of social life outside the confines of the home” (Cohen 2013[1985], p. 15).
In 1985, Anthony Cohen published The Symbolic Structure of Community, where he argued that
community functioned more as a symbolic structure than a social practice, as what distinguishes one
community from another are their constructions of boundaries: who is included in the community and
who is excluded from the community. Cohen thus argued that what individuals in a community have in
common with one another is rarely uniform, as their commonality is founded in their differences from
others (2013[1985]). While generally well-received, this turn has been critiqued by some scholars for
overly focusing on the symbolic dimension of community and not focusing enough on the social and
spatial dimensions (Amit, 2002). Gerard Delanty has argued that recent developments in
“cosmopolitanism, postmodernism, globalization, migration and the Internet” (2018, p. 1) have further
challenged some of community’s social and spatial dimensions. But these broad social changes have also
exacerbated a “crisis in solidarity and belonging” (Delanty, 2018, p. 1), challenging Cohen’s focus on
difference and resulting in a conception of community united in its concerns for “belonging and sharing”
(Delanty, 2018, p. 5). Given the lack of clear definitions provided by interviewees and workshop
participants, I follow Cohen in turning to focus on their use of community. I found four different uses of
community: a spatial community surrounding the university, a community “back home,” a campus
community, and community as a political commitment.
Community Surrounding the University
In her 2009 Presidential Address for the American Sociological Association, Patricia Hill Collins
argued that “people often use the term community interchangeably with concepts of neighborhood,”
pointing to “the place-based underpinnings” of the construct of community (Collins, 2010, p. 11). This

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usage could be seen mainly through references to the “surrounding community” by interviewees and
workshop participants. For example, SCU student Avery highlighted bringing in the surrounding
community into the abolitionist university and that the university could serve as a “mini commune-like
Resource Center” for the community, where “it’s completely accessible” as there are no processes of
enrollment or credit, reflecting “an emphasis on teaching versus degrees.” Grace and Hannah highlighted
their work with unhoused community members. Hannah drew connections between the transience of
students and unhoused individuals, naming institutions’ willingness to view students as part of the
community despite their transience and unwillingness to view unhoused folk similarly. Grace highlighted
the racialization of what “community” means at universities, noting that at their institution, white and
East Asian individuals are presumed to be students, while others are not.
During interviews, Andy, Derek, Froggy, Grace, and Olivia pointed to investing in and working
with the surrounding community as an essential way universities can become less carceral. Andy
proposed that making the university a space orientated toward community well-being would mean
opening resources to surrounding community members, including those to address mental and physical
health. Olivia also stated that universities should focus on relationship building with the communities
therein, as that could undo the institution’s work in dividing and hierarchizing the university against the
surrounding community. Derek suggested that the university should be student-run and accountable to the
surrounding community. He believed that in doing so, it could become less centered on “authoritarianism
and control.” Grace suggested town halls as a method that the university could be held accountable to the
surrounding community and a feedback method of ensuring those town halls were not just performative
but resulted in “action items.” Similar to Alessia’s thoughts on land, Froggy argued that universities
should give property back to the community and that “a healthy relationship between the community and
university” is one where the community benefits from the university’s existence and “the community
starts looking at the university as a part of the community, not as a private entity that happens to be in the
same area.”

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Derek, Froggy, and Nico all pushed for the surrounding community to have a say in the decisionmaking process of the abolitionist university, with Derek specifying that “people from the community
[should] also have a say in classes” and be able to teach regardless of whether they have the formal
training, allowing “a breakdown of the hierarchy that we see today” in academia, and creating an
environment “where there is more equality and more openness.” He noted that such a space “can still be
compatible with some kind of role differential,” where individuals serve as learners and educators.
However, the authority of the traditional university has been taken with them to make for a more
equitable distribution of engagement. Nico stated that he envisioned a class where “people from the
community could come and take these classes.” Subsequently, they would blur “the line between
students, community and even faculty. It would be more along lines with the faculty being there not to
teach you this, but to engage in this conversation with students and for them to learn themselves.” Froggy
also highlighted that the abolitionist university would be “more grassroots” and “community-led,” and in
particular, that it would prioritize “more Native voices” to get at addressing years of colonial genocide
and violence. Similarly, the zine “Abolish the University? What does an abolitionist movement within,
and beyond, higher education look like?” argues for “Community-controlled research boards, including
Tribal IRBs,” thus allowing community control over research and “shifting the decisions about whether
research is ethical to the communities being researched” to those in the community (Abolitionist
University Studies, 2023, p. 35), rather than those who benefit from the research.
Alongside Froggy’s focus on Native voices, Naomi and Sonya both brought up an abolitionist
university giving Land Back to the indigenous communities they are built upon–in reference to the
growing North American LandBack movement (Manuel & Klein, 2020), with Naomi noting that while it
may “get muddy” because it raises questions about the physical presence of the university, an abolitionist
commitment to decolonization means “we give space to the original caretakers of the land to decide what
that looks like, and what the university’s role looks like.” This argument ties back to Red Shirt Shaw’s
argument toward rematriating land, discussed as a Structural Change. Similarly, Sonya noted that it would
be an opportunity to negotiate “the relationship between the institution and land the institution is on and

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the relationship that the institution has with indigenous people from this land” and an opportunity to find
out what indigenous people “want to see, what they need from the university.” Sonya highlighted that this
involves repairing institutional and intergenerational harm and prioritizing creating systems “not that will
never create harm, but that reduce harm, and that build generative systems of care.” To her, this was a
central part of community building and meant thinking about community within the university,
surrounding the university, and the community from which each university member comes.
Community “Back Home”
The “community” each university member comes from was referenced by Elisa, Kenia, and
Vianca during the workshop. Their conversation focused on their relationships with their communities
“back home” as students attending university far from their hometowns. Kenia noted that much of her
work at home centered around getting BIPOC literature for BIPOC youth into community businesses and
organizations. Elisa noted her work “making a radical youth program for Latinx students” in Oklahoma.
Finally, Vianca said that much of her recent community work has been focusing on resilience and
storytelling, that she has been “stepping away from the focus of producing” and instead focusing on “care,
love, community, and how to nurture the community back home.” She highlighted what she saw as a
“brain drain” in how education takes individuals from their communities, channels them into institutions,
and then into wealthy communities. Schwoerer and Murray have pointed to this uprooting as a systemic
element of the carceral university, where “frequent dislocation conveniently detaches many of us from
our communities, preventing us from building the long-term relationships required for political
organizing” (Schwoerer & Murray, 2022, p. 34).
This critique also mirrors one made by Madhu Sui Prakash and Gustavo Esteva in their book
Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures (1998), where they argue that
education uproots individuals “from their traditional spaces, indigenous knowledge, skills, and the arts”
(p. 24). Prakash and Esteva ultimately propose “to abandon education” (1998, p. 15). Moreover, the end
of the university also appeared in the zine pages. One page included the word “dismantling,” another
“ABOLISH,” and “Shut it down.” As seen, when looking closely at Figure 38, a third has written

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“ABOLITION. TO ABOLISH. TO GET RID OF. TO RADICALLY RECHANGE” as the page’s
background layer. Finally, one participant, when reflecting on the workshop and asked to share any
additional thoughts on an abolitionist university, wrote, “Burn it (the “university” as we know it) down.”
Figure 38
Zine Page From the Media-Making Workshop

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A Campus Community
Prakash and Esteva’s critique of dislocation actively mirrors what often gets framed as an
advantage of university education. In The Community of Scholars, Paul Goodman argues that the
university community’s inevitable foreignness “makes a university” (1964, p. 169) as it creates a site of
individuals with infinitely different experiences experimenting with self-governance around shared
values. Said made a similar argument when arguing that the academy’s “model for academic freedom
should, therefore, be the migrant or traveler,” keeping open the gap between the university and society
(Said, 2005, p. 32). The campus community–a space where individuals both live and study began in the
medieval European university, which grew out of a monastic tradition (Chapman, 2006), while many
universities function as collegiate universities or multi-site universities, with many students and most
faculty living off-campus–either with roommates or family. Despite this, a “community of scholars” is
frequently used to refer to a campus community (Waggoner & Goldman, 2005).
While universities rarely reference Goodman, given that “community vocabulary permeates the
elite language of education” (Collins, 2010, p. 11), I use his theory to unpack what is meant when
referring to a campus community. Goodman argued that the emergence of universities in the U.S. was
rooted in “the principle of anarchy” with a focus on free association and federation “rather than top-down
management and administration” (1964, p. 163). Universities in 1964, he argued, were becoming more
and more a reflection of top-down management and administration, abandoning their place as “the only
important face-to-face self-governing communities still active in our modern society” (1964, p. 167).
Goodman’s prediction that universities would become greater sites of administration and management can
be seen in the development of the marketization of higher education and Critical University Studies
scholarship (see Chapter 2). Goodman thus proposes returning to “an ancient but neglected invention, the
community of scholars” (1964, p. 165). Goodman argues that the community of scholars should be
Anarchically self-regulating or at least self-governed; animally and civilly unrestrained; yet itself
an intramural city with a universal culture; walled from the world; yet active in the world; living
in a characteristically planned neighborhood according to the principles of mutual aid; and with
its members in oath-bound fealty to one another as teachers and students. (1964, p. 189)

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Ultimately, Goodman argues that the community of scholars should be “dissensual” to society (p. 170).
This dissensualism allows the campus communities to be “used for free growth, criticism, and social
experiment” (Goodman, 1964, p. 216). While the abolitionist university was not framed identically to the
community of scholars, the desire for experimentation from interviewees and workshop participants can
be seen in their references to Kaba’s a Million Experiments discussed when defining the Abolitionist
University and querying the purpose of the student. Goodman ultimately makes the argument that the
need for this experimentation is because “the socializing of the young becomes a two-way transaction: the
young grow up into society, and society is regularly enlivened, made sensible, and altered by the fact that
the young must grow up into it” (1964, p. 216). The campus community changes proposed by
interviewees and workshop participants can thus be seen in the structural changes previously discussed.
Community as Political Commitment
While interviewees and workshop participants call for experimental campus communities,
mirroring Goodman’s 1964 argument, they see the abolitionist university as having a specific political
commitment. This argument is not uncommon in the field of Community Studies (Collins, 2010). As
noted by Delanty, “community building can be a way in which people become empowered” (2018, p.
153). Delanty understands the ongoing “crisis in solidarity and belonging” (Delanty 2018, p. 1) as
fundamentally a response to decades of disempowerment “brought about by neo-liberalism and
globalization which have left local communities powerless” (2018, p. 153). Following his critique of
community as solely symbolic, community rooted in a political commitment is then “formed in the
dynamics of social action” (Delanty, 2018, p. 133); they become “created rather than reproduced”
(Delanty, 2018, p. 153). Similarly, Collins argues that “participating in building a community” is
political, dynamic, and aspirational (2010, p. 25).
This understanding of community as a political commitment can be seen in both the interviews
and media making workshop. For example, when discussing his collective’s organizing, Andrew pointed
to the importance of everyone being “sort of on the same page since the beginning,” stating that “the
exact tactics or all the details were minor, the disagreements or the things that we had to speak about,

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were minor. The goal was set from the beginning.” Emily argued that her choice to join abolitionist
collectives was part of an effort to “surround myself with people who also are trying to resist carcerality,
and [I] find myself less inclined to pursue relationships with people who aren’t thinking about it.” This
goal did not only apply to individuals within the collective but also to the collective’s broader networks.
Grace and Sophie noted the importance of uplifting other collectives and campaigns related to their work.
Sonya pointed to her “outlook on the university of non-disposability,” which to her means “resisting
rejecting people from our community” of asking herself, “How do I show up and try to bring people
closer rather than further away?”
During the media-making process, I noted Elisa and Aranza discussing that universities feel “so
manufactured” and that the thing that makes university “really hard” is because “it’s not community.”
While neither explicitly defined what they meant by “community,” they discussed that “back home,
people genuinely care about each other. “In contrast, at their university, they said there was a denial of
who they live beside, their differing backgrounds, and, importantly, their differing experiences of COVID
and processing COVID trauma. One of the zine pages included a quote from MJ Hart in Abolish the
University: “We’re looked at in a negative light, so it’s really important to highlight what we’re doing
towards healing the wound, what we’re creating. I’m an artist as well, creating art in a lot of what I do
because my focus is Positive Psychology, bringing innovation into the world of psychology, including art
and third-wave therapies. We’re building this community.” This same person also handwrote “centering
STUDENT stories” on their page (as seen in Figure 36). While other zine pages did not specifically name
students, their centering of community can be seen in a myriad of ways. Many included the word
“building,” another included the quote “creating abolitionist community.” Two pages included the quote
“strong communities make police obsolete,” centering community building as an alternative to police.
Finally, in this political commitment to reject disposability is the role that interviewees see
transformative and/or restorative justice practices playing in an abolitionist university. Alessia, Elisa,
Fiona, Froggy, Grace, Naomi, and Sonya all named the importance of transformative and/or restorative
justice practices. Fiona specified that this could start today by “acknowledging that no one has all of the

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answers, none of us are perfect, we’re gonna fuck up and make mistakes. And it’s going to be really
messy, but we can be gracious with each other.” Grace saw this spreading into creating accountability
structures that do not currently exist at universities. They specified that particularly when the harm is
caused by people in positions of power such as administrators, deans, or chairs, there is “no network or
foundation of accountability that is accessible, at least to people who may be harmed by these people,” so
accepting conflict and harm, and creating “trauma-informed systems and relationships that can address
these issues in a way that everyone’s needs are being met” is one of the critical ways that universities can
start to implement abolitionist practices. Naomi and Sonya argued that their understanding of
transformative justice is rooted in the belief that “no one is disposable”29 For Naomi, this means believing
survivors and also making sure “we don’t just dispose of people…we don’t just throw them away for
making a mistake”; we instead turn to “stop violence at the root” and figure out what is going on in our
communities.
Grace and Olivia argued that in committing to transformative justice, universities can center the
needs of their community members and give them “the resources to understand what they’re doing may
be harmful to themselves, but also still allowing them autonomy.” Sonya focused on transformative
justice as a response to interpersonal and sexual violence, which could allow for skill-building, research,
policy changes, and culture changes to create a survivor-centered process. She noted that universities
could recognize they already have student practitioners (often informally) trained in restorative and
transformative justice who think and do this work; thus, universities can utilize their existing resources.
David Clark has asked us to imagine what a university that addresses “the conditions that create
that suffering, as well as the affirmation of human capabilities [as] its very highest priorities” could look
like. The abolitionist university certainly offers some visions for this. Five zine pages included an image
from the Cops Off Campus Disorientation guide stating, “None are Free Until All Are Free. Rise up in
29 A phrase first used by Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) a community justice initiative originating in
Canada (Hannem & Petrunik, 2007) and popularized in abolitionist organizing spaces by Tourmaline & Spade
(2014).

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defense of Black Life” (Figure 39). The image appears to mirror a standard shape for a police badge but
instead features plants growing and hands cupped together. Another two featured the quote, “When Black
lives matter, all lives matter.” The connections drawn between centering Blackness to resist carcerality
reveal both the role anti-Blackness plays in policing and the need to fight against that anti-Blackness in
abolitionist thought. The other group repeatedly named on zine pages was “survivors,” with four zine
pages including the quote, “Abolition centers the needs of survivors of harm.” As with the interviews, the
zine pages reveal that participants see the current system as failing survivors of harm and believe
abolition to be the solution to that failure. One of the pages included a quote reading “transformative
justice/restorative justice” to further point towards alternative responses to violence. The abolitionist
university thus argues that a commitment to transformative justice is a commitment to addressing
interpersonal and antiblack suffering.
Figure 39
Image From the Cops Off Campus Disorientation Guide
This political commitment to many interviewees and workshop participants would have to expand past
the campus community. For example, Alessia suggested that an abolitionist university might involve
creating a network outside the individual institution, where we can “connect and compare notes” of the

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work individuals and collectives are already doing within institutions. Grace similarly suggested the
creation of networks as central to an abolitionist university, noting that they might involve “networks of
reciprocity, networks of collectiveness and mutuality and learning from one another.” They also noted
that the size of larger institutions seemed significantly limiting to community building, as it is “difficult to
build strong networks of mutuality and really be able to collectively care for one another” in universities
with so many individuals within them. Especially when we are encouraged to view them as a professional
space, they noted that for them, a clear first step in creating an abolitionist university is “untangling the
idea that we exist as colleagues and just in a professional academic sense of peers” instead of reflecting
on a collective responsibility toward “being at this university together,” learning from one another and
showing up for one another. To enable this kind of “showing up,” Grace argued that they hope in the
future to see a lot more “actually creating networks of phone numbers and resources that people can call
when there is like an emergency,” noting that while there is a current emphasis on mutual aid in
abolitionist organizing, we must also work towards building a response team/network. Armando pointed
to how his time with the Underground Scholars–a collective of formerly incarcerated students–reflected a
community space of shared experiences.
Many interviewees highlighted the horizon elements of abolition that make it difficult to name
what a community may need. Sonya argued that this would result in a university that is “a constant cocreation,” where power dynamics are in a cycle of being named, negotiated, dismantled, and
experimented with. Naomi named some clear foundations for creating and sustaining a university
community: “One where students don’t go hungry. It’s one where all students are housed.” Grace
expanded this to mean not only supporting students but “also the people that it’s impacting by giving
these people the necessary resources to survive and exist” In meeting the basic needs of the broader
community, they argued, the university could work towards “making these systems of violence obsolete,
by investing in affordable housing, and food and water security, transformative programs, and community
based responses to harm.” Andy also named that the university should be “a place where literally people
could go for anything, whether it’s supportive services, housing, or education.”

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Conclusion
In this chapter, I have attempted to re-center the student in creating the abolitionist university. I
argue that current Abolitionist University Studies texts situate the student as laborer, debtor, reminder, or
resistant. However, in looking at abolitionist student collectives, I find students serve as creators of
abolitionist universities. In her article “Imagination and the Future University” (2022), Keri Facer uses
Sharpe et al.’s theory of the “Three Horizons” (2016) to argue that we often fail to offer a Horizon 2 when
discussing the future of the university. According to Sharpe et al., the first horizon “represents the way
things are done now” and the reproduction of how things are done (2016, p. 50). Facer argues that we
have abundant work within the university addressing the first horizon in “critiques of the current
neoliberal university and its failings” (Facer, 2022, p. 203). Sharpe et al. argue that the third horizon
“represents the emerging pattern that will be the long-term successor to the current first horizon” (2016, p.
51). To Facer, we see these in our sometimes utopian “projections of the desired future” (Facer, 2022, p.
203). Facer argues it is the second horizon that has been the least explored, which she understands as the
“space between critique and desire” (2022, p. 204). Sharpe et al. argue that the second horizon “provides
the disruptions for more radical 3H systems to emerge.”
Abolitionist student activists envisioning the third horizon can be seen in their desire for a
“million experiments.” To them, the abolitionist university is a university without police, in “constant cocreation” with community members, a university where students are fed and housed, supportive of the
LandBack movement, attempting to “build generative systems of care,” creating abolitionist networks,
learning in a community of scholars through “written feedback and growth,” a place people to feel safe
and commit to restorative and transformative justice practices, more autonomous and democratic, with
less bureaucracy and more accessible education, invested in communities of color both as members of the
institution and as producers of knowledge, explorative through creative and horizontal educational spaces,
featuring a curriculum reflecting the material needs of the community, and ultimately a place committed
to a political goal.

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This chapter shows that abolitionist student activists are doing Horizon 2’s disruption work. In
doing so, they reveal that the abolitionist university already exists. Maybe not all in one physical location,
but it all exists in one city (Los Angeles). All the abolitionist students’ desires for an abolitionist
university are already happening. The second horizon of educational possibilities is creating the third.
Sonya made this point when she argued that spaces that “facilitate education, and learning, and creativity,
and exploration, and breaking the boundaries, and thinking differently, and exploring questions that we’ve
always had in guided ways, and where pushback and challenging and conflict can be generative…already
exists in pockets here” via specific classrooms, professors, and student groups. As I will discuss in
Chapter 7, the question becomes how do they scale up their abolitionist university so those outside of the
spaces these student activists are in get to experience it too? Furthermore, does scaling up require
institutionalization, or can the abolitionist university exist on a larger scale without institutions?

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Chapter 7. Conclusion
In the last few months of 2023, student activism supporting Palestinians has revealed how deeply
U.S. universities rely on carceral practices. Student demands have varied, but university repression has
followed a clear carceral pattern. Framed as a “battle over free speech” (Chronicle of Higher Education,
2023), since October 7th, 2023, universities have canceled events, suspended student groups, stayed silent
in the face of their students getting doxed, revoked scholarships, arrested student activists, “disciplined”
faculty, staff, and students, and rejected academic articles that argue “the events in Gaza should be
evaluated within and beyond the legal framework of genocide, as defined by the United Nations” (Patel
and Betts, 2023, n.p.; Gagosz, 2023; Hicks, 2023). Despite decades of research making it clear that antiZionism and critiques of Israel cannot and should not be equated with antisemitism (Balthaser, 2020;
Butler, 2023; Corrigan, 2009; Feldman, 2015; Herf, 2007; Jad, 2020; Jewish Voice for Peace, 2017;
Moen, 2016; Plaut, 2023; Vidal, 2018), universities and the U.S. Senate have passed measures equating
the two (Harb, 2023). This equation is not a new phenomenon and has long been called the “Palestine
exception” within the discourse of Academic Freedom (Abdo, 2023; Palestine Legal, 2015; Shwaikh &
Gould, 2019; Zarook, 2021).
In using the definition of carcerality offered in Chapter 4, of controlling people, forcing people to
conform to the status quo, maintaining structures of oppression, punishing people, creating avenues to
dispose of or eliminate people, and dehumanizing people. We see everything in place regarding the
university’s response to activism supporting the Palestinian people. Alongside this, there have been
transparent investments by universities in increasing resources for campus police (Cozzarelli & Wood,
2023; Lingappa, 2022; Mackel, 2023; Ramunno, 2023), reinforcing institutionalized white supremacy
through the suppression of student protest (Davis, 2019), and a commitment to maintaining the new world
order of neoliberalism (Morley, 2024; Sen, 2023). This commitment to the carceral makes visible the
university’s co-constitution with systems of domination as a “state-sanctioned and/or extralegal

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production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore, 2007, p.
247), and points to the necessity of abolitionist frameworks in world-making.
Summary
This dissertation looks to understand why these collectives have placed abolition at the center of
their moral and ideological vision, and what role they believe universities can play in an abolitionist
movement. It asks these questions to think through more significant questions around the role of
voluntary education in producing social change. To do, I started by centering the abolitionist student’s
understanding of the university as a carceral space in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5 I then looked at how
abolitionist students resist the university, and specifically engage alternative media in that resistance.
Finally, in Chapter 6 I looked at the alternative possibilities they see the university able to play moving
forward.
Through interviewing student activists, studying media and social media produced by student
activist collectives, and organizing a media-making workshop, I have found that abolitionist student
activists understand and believe universities can play a role in imagining our collective futures, but only
through pockets that emerge resisting the carceral university. As much as abolitionist students queried
whether the university would still be a university if it was not “playing an active role in destroying
different communities,” many of them also believed the university could function as “a resource to be
exploited” (Montegary, 2021, n.p.). Before destroying the university, Berto argued we should experiment
with decarcerating it: keeping it and trying to “find a way to reverse the problem, which I think could
work just as much as burning it to the ground.” This echoed Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s argument in
Abolition Geography, where, building upon Audre Lorde’s statement that “the master’s tools will never
dismantle the master’s house (1984, p. 110), Gilmore writes “the house must be dismantled so that we can
recycle the materials to institutions of our own design, usable by all to produce new and liberating work”
(2022, p. 79).
Abolitionist student collectives understand the university as (re)producing carceral ideologies coconstituted by white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems that reproduce

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domination and control. By focusing on abolitionist ideologies as an alternative, they argue that a “new
society” requires “[n]ot so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have
prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination
of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 42). Through
interviewing student activists, studying media and social media produced by student activist collectives,
and organizing a media-making workshop, I have found that abolitionist student activists understand and
believe universities can play a role in an abolitionist future, but only through pockets that emerge resisting
the carceral university. This dissertation evaluated ten research questions:
1. Do abolitionist student activists draw connections between carceral logics and the university? If
so, what connections do abolitionist student activists draw between carceral logics and the
university? And how do they draw connections?
2. Do universities use carceral logics to enable their “mode of study” (Meyerhoff, 2019a)? If so,
why?
3. How can carceral logics limit study?
4. What role do abolitionist student activists see university education playing in producing social
change?
5. Do abolitionist student activists use alternative media in their activism? If so, how do abolitionist
student activists use alternative media toward decarcerating the university?
6. Do abolitionist student activists believe the university can be decarcerated?
7. What practices do abolitionist student activists believe a university can enact to decarcerate?
8. What role do abolitionist student activists believe student activism can play in developing and
practicing an abolitionist university?
9. What alternative modes of study do abolitionist student activists envision both outside and within
the university?
10. How do universities enable or disable learning toward enacting social change?

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In Chapter 2, I looked at the existing education literature and argued that education has long been
understood to signify a social contract of a system of maintaining the status quo. Despite being rooted in
classed ideological origins and usages of education, there has remained a belief in the liberatory
possibility of education. I looked at the development of two subfields in the Sociology of Education: a
critical sociology of education grounded in Marxist theorizing and the sociology of higher education that
has mirrored the status attainment and social reproduction traditions and an efficacy-centered
organizationally oriented sociology focused on policy improvement of the sociology of education as a
whole. Critical University Studies has emerged in the intersections of these two areas, looking at the
development of U.S. universities via three transformations: massification, vocationalization, and
marketization.
Critical University Studies has also turned to the philosophy of education to understand what a
university is for and what should and does make a good or bad university. CUS has centered the argument
that neoliberalism and the end of the Welfare State have shifted the burden of educating and training
workers from the employer/state to the employee. This burden has only expanded in the 21st century,
where the rhetoric of college as promising individual status and income remains, even when this promise
does not always hold (Newfield, 2022). Instead, higher education reproduces “racialized economic
inequalities” and legitimizes “the managerial and antidemocratic aspects of state and national politics”
(Newfield, 2022, p. 94). I then argued that this reveals education as a disciplinary institution invested in a
politics of disposability. The university can best be understood as a disciplinary institution through a
carceral analysis. I claim that carcerality requires a structure of objectification and control and is coconstituted by white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems that reproduce
domination. Carcerality and a politics of disposability come from prison studies and an understanding of
our society as reproducing racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000 [1983]). Through looking at the work of
Dennis Childs, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Loic Wacquant, I showed that the prison is an
inherently racist institution, and we cannot end racism without abolishing prisons. To abolish prisons, we

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must end the carceral culture/logics that normalizes them–including universities. Universities reflect one
under-analyzed part of a carceral system that renders people as disposable objects.
Next, I turned to Meyerhoff’s argument that formal education is one mode of study among many,
tied to different modes of world-making. I argued that education serves as a carceral mode of study that
upholds a carceral mode of world-making, which maintains systems of objectification and control through
the co-constitution of white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems that
reproduce domination. I then turned to alternative modes of studying, attempting to exist “within, against,
and beyond the dominant university” (Meyerhoff, 2019b, p. 317). These included “political education,”
“social movement learning,” “free universities,” and “the undercommons.” I situate these modes of
world-making alongside abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019), abolition democracy (Davis, 2005; Dilts,
2020; Du Bois, 2017), and Abolitionist University Studies (Boggs et al., 2019; Meyerhoff, 2019a). By
briefly discussing the history of Abolitionist University Studies and defining abolitionist ideology, I
showed the need for other abolitionist approaches to education within, against, and beyond the university.
Many critiques of those I have looked at have been rooted in the lack of solutions provided by their work
(see Ferguson on Meyerhoff 2020 and Parker on Giroux 2021). While I follow the abolitionist belief
argued by Davis that we must “let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system” (2003b, p.
106), I do see the value in exploring the already existent method and practices of abolitionist study and
possible strategies toward the abolitionist horizon. I thus attempt to fill some of the gaps by exploring
abolitionist student activists’ alternative modes of study.
In Chapter 3, I pointed to the choice of methods as methodologically grounded in action research
through its commitment to a “participative-collective method,” “producing alternative content,”
“developing strategic thinking for broad political processes,” “building relationships and networking
connections,” and “opening knowledge” (Fuster Morell, 2009, p. 28). Data collection that allowed me to
interact with participants (interviews and the media-making workshop in particular) and the usage of
theoretical analysis grounded me in these commitments. In the hope to both articulate the relationship
seen by abolitionist student activists between universities and carcerality alongside the ongoing attempts

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by individuals within the university to break the articulation, to disarticulate the university from
carcerality, and to understand how the university may be changed or rearticulated (Slack, 1996, p. 114),
this project has used thick description to “draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured
facts” (Geertz, 1973, p. 28) through its analysis of media and social media alongside the interviews and
created media. Methodologically, then, this project engages in “the work of listening” to those resisting it
to understand how the linkages are “already being forged” between the university and the carceral, how
they are continually circulated, and where they “are coming apart” in Los Angeles (Clarke, 2015, p. 284).
The data collection for the project focuses on a range of sites of student activist voice: the
interview, media analysis, social media analysis, and media creation. They also prioritized the utopian
“desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively” (Levitas, p. xi)
through the centering of abolition in the theoretical analysis. While these voices are almost entirely
limited to students in Los Angeles–with some exceptions via social media–they allow for a deeper
exploration of place and educational institutions’ “intimate relationship” to place (Coultard &
Beasamosake, 2016, p. 254). This specificity has also allowed for exploring institutional form to
understand what difference, if any, an institution being private, public, research-focused, or teachingfocused makes. Insights from these four sites have allowed for a richer picture of the articulation(s)
between the university and carcerality and the utopian breakages envisioned by abolitionist student
activists.
In Chapter 4, I turned to the questions: (1) Do abolitionist student activists draw connections
between carceral logics and the university? If so, what connections do abolitionist student activists draw
between carceral logics and the university? And how do they draw connections? (2) Do universities use
carceral logics to enable their “mode of study” (Meyerhoff, 2019a)? If so, why? (3) How can carceral
logics limit study? And (4) What role do abolitionist student activists see university education playing in
producing social change. First using interviews with student activists, I established a definition of
carcerality that was then used throughout the dissertation: carcerality as the practice of controlling people,

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forcing people to conform to the status quo, maintaining structures of oppression, punishing people,
creating avenues to dispose of or eliminate people, and dehumanizing people.
Students drew connections between the university’s role as it functions as exclusionary, a
gatekeeper of knowledge, and conditioning students towards professionalism as methods forcing people
to conform to the status quo. Many students highlighted that the university enables a carceral mode of
study by controlling and punishing people by serving as both a business and debt-maker, selling dreams
to students for high costs and prioritizing wealth accumulation. In comparison to this reality, interviewees
believe the university could work towards social change by providing education, functioning as a site of
autonomy and agency, protecting and supporting students, providing resources–including both
“knowledge-based resources [and] material resources,” providing a university for all, and building
community–including addressing current displacements the university has caused.
I next turned to the specific methods of carcerality limiting study that interviewees saw
concerning space, place, and location. Interviewees provided several recurring themes, which can be tied
to David Sibley’s notions of geographies of exclusions (1995). These included the effect of COVID on
the carceral practices of the university, carceral university practices of isolation, the role of funding and
finances in the carceral practices of the university, the entwined relations between gentrification and the
university’s carceral practices, and the treatment of unhoused people as it relates to this. Interviewees also
highlighted the very literal gatekeeping of their universities from the surrounding community, the overpolicing of students and communities of color, the framing by the university of the police as the only
option to meet students’ safety needs, racial profiling in technology by police the mission of each police
force and whether they serve their institution or the people, the role of surveillance in modern day society,
the active role the university plays in dismantling protest, and how lack of access for people with
disabilities plays a central role in carceral ideologies. Throughout this section, we see Sibley’s argument
that “the guardians of sacred spaces” that reproduce structures of domination “are more likely to be
security guards, parents or judges” (Sibley, 1995, p. 72).

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Alongside carcerality doing the ideological and material work of normalizing geographies of
exclusion to limit study, interviewees also named connections between carcerality, pedagogy, and the
forms of relations on campuses. These included framing the police as a “resource,” expansive
surveillance, the maintenance of hierarchies, the unequal power distribution between different groups, the
limited approach to learning, the normalization of punitivity, a lack of accountability, and finances as a
motivator. Students highlighted the centrality of white supremacy, ableism, sexual violence, and the
othering of formerly incarcerated students to on-campus relationships. Finally, students noted a few
methods of resistance they saw within their universities: inverse surveillance, collective power, and
supportive relations.
In Chapter 5, I turned to question (5) Do abolitionist student activists use alternative media in
their activism? If so, how do abolitionist student activists use alternative media toward decarcerating the
university? To answer this question, I looked at the ecologies of movement performed by abolitionist
student collectives in their work to resist carcerality. I found that media and social media are at the center
of their work, sharing events, information, and practices that members and outsiders can engage in when
working towards abolition and resisting carcerality. In looking first at the content and its use of
“heterodox-creative logics” before turning to the “participatory logics” of production and how distribution
is used to center “logics of (counter-)public-formation and facilitation” (Mowbray, 2015, p. 21). Finally, I
turned to look in more detail at the aim of the media and its ties to Mowbray’s “critical-emancipatory
logics,” arguing that alternative media better suits their aims of capacity building, political education, and
resisting institutional temporality as part of a broader media ecosystem that reaches outside of the
individual universities to decarcerate the university. I saw that abolitionist student activists, in part, turned
to alternative media without ever considering using traditional media. I then argued that understanding a
collective as part of an ecology of movement points to the false dichotomy of mass participation versus
smaller collectives but also reveals how alternative media can perform a triumphant resistance in ways
that may better suit a collective’s goals than mass media. The ecology of student activists’ movement use
of media and social media requires future work, particularly in figuring out their engagement with local

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versus national versus global collectives and viewers. However, I found that while abolitionist student
collectives may not be creating their own media ecosystems, they exist within local, national, and global
ecologies of movement. The potentials and pitfalls of such must be considered.
In Chapter 6, I turned to questions 6-10: (6) Do abolitionist student activists believe the university
can be decarcerated? (7) What practices do abolitionist student activists believe a university can enact to
decarcerate? (8) What role do abolitionist student activists believe student activism can play in developing
and practicing an abolitionist university? (9) What alternative modes of study do abolitionist student
activists envision both outside and within the university? And (10) How do universities enable or disable
learning toward enacting social change? Through re-centering the student in creating the abolitionist
university, I argue that current Abolitionist University Studies texts situate the student as laborer, debtor,
reminder, or resistant. However, in looking at abolitionist student collectives, I find students serve as
creators of abolitionist universities. Abolitionist student activists desire a “million experiments” within
universities via four critical changes: rhetorical, structural, epistemological/pedagogical, and those in the
community. They imagine a decarceral and/or abolitionist university as one without police, in “constant
co-creation” with community members, a university where students are fed and housed, supportive of the
LandBack movement, attempting to “build generative systems of care,” creating abolitionist networks,
learning in a community of scholars through “written feedback and growth,” a place people to feel safe
and commit to restorative and transformative justice practices, more autonomous and democratic, with
less bureaucracy and more accessible education, invested in communities of color both as members of the
institution and as producers of knowledge, explorative through creative and horizontal educational spaces,
featuring a curriculum reflecting the material needs of the community, and ultimately a place committed
to a political goal. I then argue that working with abolitionist student activists reveals that the abolitionist
university already exists. Maybe not all in one physical location, but it all exists in one city (Los
Angeles). All the abolitionist students’ desires for an abolitionist university are already happening. Thus,
as institutions, universities disable learning toward social change, but abolitionist pockets have emerged,
enabling “relentless struggle, deep study, and critique” (Kelley, 2016, n.p.).

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Contribution to the Field
The university remains a site of struggle both in terms of being a place where struggles happen
and a place that is struggled over. The focus on student activism and free speech in the wake of Israel’s
most recent wave of state violence is, as Andrea Long Chu argues, an attempt to “obfuscate the material
stakes of a situation” (2023, n.p.). Just as is Ben Sasse’s focus on the “religious cult” of critical race
theory and intersectionality, a backlash and distraction from the demand that state and institutional
employees stop enacting and enabling the murder of Black people. Abolitionist students do not engage
with partisan politics that present orthodox demands (justifying state-committed and state-sanction
murder) against progressive demands (asking states to stop committing and sanctioning murder). They
instead propose a far more radical alternative: the creation of “life-affirming institutions” (MPD 150,
2020). Abolitionists argue that “no one is disposable,” and ultimately, they want to see institutions that
support that.
Firstly, in centering a critical carceral analysis, this dissertation offers an analysis that
understands higher education as reproducing not just capitalist and neoliberal structures–as has been
argued by Sociology of Education and Critical University Studies scholars–but structures where
capitalism, neoliberalism, white supremacy, ableism, cisheteropatriachy, and other systems that reproduce
domination and control are co-constituted. In doing so it expands Foucault’s concept of “normalizing
power” and “carceral continuity” (1995, p. 304 and p. 310) to think through the legitimacy of disciplinary
power used by institutions of higher education. I also turned to the question the role of the state, in
focusing on the lack of compulsion in understanding whether voluntary education can function as a
carceral space. Many interviewees pointed to the connections between the state and their universities—
e.g. Sonya’s experiences with having the police contact her and Armando, Derek, and Nico pointing to
the relationship between the institutions and state structures such as the Department of Homeland Security
and the military. However, Alessia specified that her vision for abolition included creating “alternatives
outside of the state, to fulfill needs, and problems that often are just fake anyway- propped up by the
state,” and she saw universities as a potential space for this work. A carceral analysis that understands

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carcerality outside of state compulsion, points to the forms of surplus repression that exist outside of the
state, and the need to fight both state and cultural carcerality.
This analysis also points to the value of looking for non-Indigenous forms of grounded
normativity within our approach to studying higher education, where the specificities of place for each
university, the relationship between university, students, and place, and the differences in their
private/public and research/teaching form can be made apparent. In looking at the focus of the university,
I found that despite the public university’s rhetoric as “for the people,” students hold little power,
furthering their objectification. Whereas private universities did not use this rhetoric, students argued they
had even less transparency, accountability, and shared governance than public universities, further
maintaining the status quo. Students at the CC saw some ways that a university’s private status could give
it more agency and flexibility but saw this was rarely taken advantage of by the institution towards social
change. CC students also argued that the teaching focus of the university meant they were humanized
more than students at research universities. Students at teaching-focused universities saw their institutions
as more focused on real-world context and consequences than research-focused institutions. This insight
was backed up by research-focused university students, who argued that their institutions prioritized
money over knowledge and learning.
Secondly, it points to the importance of looking at ecologies of movement as modes of analysis
that refute empirical measures of success when studying social movements. An ecology of the abolitionist
movement points to the communicative complexity of social movements, the media practices of social
movement actors, and the three approaches to social change within social movement ecologies (SMEs). In
positioning abolitionist student activists within multiple SMEs, we can understand student movement
ecology as connected to different organizations and campaigns addressing these issues across Northern
America and beyond. Similarly, the media practices are primarily used to draw the connections between
these different movements and theories of change to support a healthy movement ecology working
towards a changed world. Using ecologies of movement to look at abolition’s goal to “change everything”
(Gilmore 2018, n.p.) means changing anything is a successful step toward the abolitionist horizon.

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Finally, I argue for the field of Abolitionist University Studies to expanding our understanding of
the university’s moral and ideological visions to position students as creators of their own moral and
ideological visions. This is the first dissertation to look in detail at student collectives committed to the
abolition of police and prisons, and it attempts to address some of the gaps in the Sociology of Education
around “questions related to culture, institutions, politics, knowledge, comparative education, and values”
(Mehta & Davies, 2018, p. 2), and reground the literature in Freire and Willis’ argument we should put
resistance and liberation at the center of their analysis, a theme I argue CUS has failed to center
adequately. I then look at their use of alternative media as an alternative mode of study and their utopian
hopes for the possibility of the university and study. In centering activists, I also try to address the
critiques of CUS and AUS, that they do not offer solutions, through offering the already existent methods
and practices of abolitionist study and possible strategies toward the abolitionist horizon used by
abolitionist student activists. Their visions for an abolitionist university include a university without
police, in “constant co-creation” with community members, a university where students are fed and
housed, supportive of the LandBack movement, attempting to “build generative systems of care,” creating
abolitionist networks, learning in a community of scholars through “written feedback and growth,” a
place people to feel safe and commit to restorative and transformative justice practices, more autonomous
and democratic, with less bureaucracy and more accessible education, invested in communities of color
both as members of the institution and as producers of knowledge, explorative through creative and
horizontal educational spaces, featuring a curriculum reflecting the material needs of the community, and
ultimately a place committed to a political goal.
Limitations
As discussed in Chapter 3, there were five key methodological limitations in this research project.
Firstly, that it is not generalizable to broader populations or contexts, and thus the results may not be
applicable to other settings. Despite this, I follow Alasuutari’s belief that generalization should not always
be a focus for qualitative research, instead it can offer “local explanation” to produce “classifications,
conceptual tools and explanations for different kinds of phenomena” (1995, p. 144) from an informed

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position, and empirical research can then be used to understand the generalizability of the explanations
further. So, while not aimed to be generalizable, I do understand the research as rooted in comparative
work, not only through its discussion of private versus public and research versus teaching universities
but also through looking at collectives outside of Los Angeles to understand Los Angeles as a site of
articulation for broader issues being discussed by student activists around the country.
Secondly, there is the role of subjectivity and bias within the research. As noted in Chapter 1, I
come to this research as someone who identifies as a student activist and understand my research as part
of the reflexivity of my own organizing work. In all aspects of my life, I am only interested in committing
to work against the many dehumanizing systems and structures found in our society, and this includes my
understanding of the possible value of all forms of research. Given, the inherent subjectivity of
interviewing as a method, as well as my own commitment to research, I reflected on subjectivity
throughout the process instead of attempting to meet an unachievable goal of objectivity. Finally, I
understand the data collected as truthful to the participants involved during the interviews through its
focus on “discourse as knowledge, not language” (Bonham & Bacchi, 2017, p. 688). Focusing on the
subjectivity of the involved participants, the cases discussed are not necessarily representative of
universities, students, or even abolitionist student activists as a whole. This research represents a
particular point in U.S. history (2020-2023) where the COVID-19 pandemic aligned with the growing
Black Lives Matter movement to cause abolitionist movement discourse to enter the mainstream.
However, details of method procedures have been included should a similar moment arise, and a
comparative analysis wish to be done, the main factor informing replicability for future research is the
dissolution of many of the collectives, but I believe the methods could be utilized with other collectives,
students, or universities.
Third, the time, resource, and skill requirements asked of by action research when looked at
alongside deadlines and limited resources presented by the dissertation process make it impossible for any
researcher to produce work in their ideal research situation. In part, this resulted in my choice to student a
community I was already engaged with, and thus would have fewer barriers of access. Though, despite

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this, ultimately I was only able to get 17 of the 20 planned interviews (all three were with members of
LAC). One of the results of this was the hindering of the conclusions from comparing university focus.
As discussed in Chapter 4, I saw some critical themes led by a university’s private/public status and
research/teaching focus. These themes included the rhetorical use of “for the people” by public
universities to frame them as a public good instead of the apparent prioritization of wealth, lack of
transparency and accountability, and the misuse of autonomy noted at private universities. An investment
in limiting critical conversation away from nuance in teaching-focused spaces, as opposed to the
extraction of knowledge for production and commodification seen at research-focused universities. While
I do believe the findings of private (10 interviews) versus public (7 interviews) and research (10
interviews) versus teaching (7 interviews) are applicable, understanding the intersections of these
categories with only two interviews from a public teaching-focused university is not.
Fourth, in addressing validity and reliability limitations of this project given the emphasis on
context-specific and dynamic interventions, I return to Gerring’s general criteria for research design. In
addressing plenitude, and tying back to my own commitment to research, this project is not aimed at
finding some kind of “objective truth” around how education functions but instead focuses on the voices
and perspectives of abolitionist student activists in their understanding of the role of the university and
education in comparison to normative rhetoric around the role of education and the university. It does so
by looking at education alongside their centering on carcerality as one of the primary crises in the
political and state legitimacy of this conjunctural moment (Hall et al., 2002). Thus, I follow Haraway’s
argument for situated knowledge, understanding the knowledge produced through this project as “about
particular and specific embodiment and... not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits
and responsibility” (1988, p. 582).
A fifth limitation of my project—tied to the resource limitations of the project—involved the
textual analysis of social media. As I included analysis of content produced at universities other than the
four I conducted interviews with, I do not have access to a broader context of the campus or of the
production or distribution process outside of what is included social media itself. For example, one of the

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main arguments made at Los Angeles College was that the university continued to invest more money in
policing than mental health counseling, with an average of 1,900 students per counselor. The details of
the university budget were provided either in the image or text portions of the post, alongside a discussion
of the university using the rhetoric of a “budget crisis” to justify not hiring more counselors while hiring
more police officers.
A sixth limitation arose as a result of doing this research project, when, in my interview with
Froggy (see Chapter 6) we discussed my focus on the college student in the free world. While many of
my participants are formerly incarcerated, none were currently incarcerated, meaning my definition of a
college student was rooted in their access to the free world. While this was, in part, a purposeful choice
due to the ethical considerations and additional barriers to doing research with incarcerated individuals, it
was one I quickly made. At the end of my interview with Froggy, I asked if there was anything else he
would like to add, and he noted that on the outside, we have “privilege and entitlement” of getting “to
pick what university to attend, or you have an option to pay.” He argued that this privilege, in many ways,
disconnects outside college students from inside college students, as “there’s a lot of people that are
locked up, that are taking college classes inside.” Their educational experience challenges our
understanding of the college student.
Despite these limitations, this dissertation shows the importance of engaging radical alternative
ideas of the university, understanding students as integral and creative parts of our institutions, and
looking at social movements and media usage through an ecological lens. Through centering the voices of
abolitionist student activists in their understanding of the role of the university and education compared to
normative rhetoric around the role of education and the university, this dissertation takes seriously an
often-dismissed perspective: the complaining student. While abolitionist student activists make up a tiny
proportion of the student population, I believe this project shows the particular critical perspective they
bring through their centering of carcerality and policing/prisons as one of the primary crises in political
and state legitimacy of this conjunctural moment (Hall et al., 2002; Shedd, 2015). This dissertation shows

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that their complaints (Ahmed, 2015; Ahmed, 2021) are rooted in modes of study and a desire to build and
live in a better world.
Future Research
There are two key directions I see the future of this research taking. The first is looking more at
the specificity of systems-impacted students when imagining an abolitionist university. Many
interviewees acknowledged the need for “people who have been the most impacted” to lead the struggle
for abolition. They highlighted that alongside individuals who had been incarcerated, this also included
individuals from criminalized racialized communities (in the U.S., this is predominantly poor/working
class Black, Latine, and Indigenous communities). Scholars are working on the experience of the
university as a carceral space alongside experiences of incarceration and Black, Latine, and Indigenous
identities but less attention has been paid to if there are differences in envisioning an abolitionist
university between different student populations (see Castro & Magana, 2020; Comeaux, 2018;
Contreras-García, 2023; Corbett & Wall, 2021; Dache-Gerbino & White, 2016; Dizon, 2023a; Dizon,
2023b; Dizon et al., 2022; Hernandez et al., 2022; Jenkins et al., 2021; Johnson, 2015; Johnson & Davis,
2021; Johnson & Dizon, 2021; Johnson & Manyweather, 2021; Johnson et al., 2021; Oparah, 2014; Smith
et al., 2007). Notably, both collectives at public schools were led by Black and Latine students and
included formerly incarcerated members. In comparison, both collectives at private schools consisted of
primarily white and East Asian members and no formerly incarcerated members.
Further research on this topic is required to understand best how to support racialized and
systems-impacted student activists to enable their work to continue and reenvision the university. In my
interview with Sonya from CC, for example, she noted that “as someone who is a person of color and has
been impacted by the prison industrial complex,” she found that the whiteness of the collective meant she
did not “always feel comfortable being in” it, given so few of the members can understand her own
experiences and where she comes from. Sonya noted that this reflected the institution more than the
collective itself, given “the institution that we currently exist in [there are] predominantly white, heavily
affluent people here.”

285
The second future research area includes questions of scaling up or pluralizing the abolitionist
university raised at the end of Chapter 6. While the abolitionist university theorized by student activists
exists, their desires for an abolitionist university are already happening throughout different spaces in Los
Angeles. How do they scale up their abolitionist university so those outside the spaces these student
activists are in can experience it, too? Furthermore, does scaling up require institutionalization, or can the
abolitionist university exist on a larger scale without institutions? In their entry for The Edu-factory
Collective, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson argue that “the various attempts to construct alternative or
nomadic university experiences might end up reproducing ossified forms of national and cultural
resistance to the neoliberalization of the university” (2009, p. 87). Future research should examine these
questions of scale or pluralizing the abolitionist university. Given their rejection of the carceral state, I do
not believe abolitionist universities should follow in the footsteps of the U.S. right to institutionally
takeover universities (Contreras, 2023; Goldberg, 2023; Shepherd, 2023). These require a renewed
investment in authority, control, oppression and dehumanization that abolitionist student activists have
rejected in their investment in abolitionist futures. Instead, I would suggest researching and experimenting
with three non-hierarchal historical approaches: commons over commodities, educational webs, and
voluntary associations.
Rejecting the commodification of education and reinvesting in a commons of education has long
been suggested by critics of capitalism and neoliberalism’s effects on higher education and can be seen in
Harney and Moten’s argument for an Undercommons–as discussed in Chapter 2. Prakash and Esteva
point to grassroots and pluriverse cultures as sites of “personal and collective knowledge in their
regenerated commons” (2005, p. 87). Aihwa Ong, in her entry for The Edu-factory Collective, points to a
rejection of a universal notion of common good or common humanity, instead pushing for a notion of
commoning that refers to “mutual respect, tolerance, and coexistence with diverse communities,” (2009,
p. 41) that can reflect a commitment to coexistence of diverse educational communities. Pointing towards
a form of institutionalization, Toni Negri and Judith Revel, in the same collection, argue for a “common
autonomous institution” (2009, p. 173) that is “founded on the new relational horizon (communicative,

286
informative, etc.)” and “further characterized by its network form” (2009, p. 173). The network form is
similar to Alessia’s suggestion in Chapter 6 that an abolitionist university might involve creating a
network outside the individual institution and to Ivan Illich’s concept of educational webs (1970).
Educational webs, Illich argues, are “reticular structures for mutual access” (1970, p. 76) that start with
the question of “what kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to
learn?” (1970, p. 78). Utilizing the technology of the time, Illich divides educational resources into
“reference services to educational objects” (1970, p. 78), skill exchanges, peer-matching, and “reference
services to educators-at-large” (1970, p. 79). Thus, even if abolitionist university spaces remain small,
pluralization via educational webs may allow broader access to learning than limited to their physical
campuses.
Finally, somewhere between the Commons and educational webs is a commitment to learning
voluntary associations or learning unions. Eileen Schell points to Open-Source Unionism in her
contribution to The Edu-Factory’s edited collection. She gives the example of the Coalition of Contingent
Academic Labor (COCAL) in building solidarity across North America for contingent academic workers
since 1996. The Cops Off Campus Coalition emerged out of the call for a Cost-of-Living Adjustment
(COLA) by graduate student workers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), culminating in
the wildcat strikes of 2019–20 across the University of California system (Gilich & Boardman, 2022).
These demands re-emerged in the UC system in the Fall of 2022 when academic workers went on a
nearly six-week strike, and many pushed an initiative to defund, disarm, and disband the University of
California Police Department (Appel, 2023). In her recent piece “Tenant, Debtor, Worker, Student” for
The New York Review Hannah Appel, writes that in making the demand for both cops off campuses and
a COLA these workers “recognize that the UC system is not only an employer—the third largest in
California, itself the planet’s fifth-largest economy—but also a major financial actor, real estate investor,
and police force” (Appel, 2023, n.p.). All of which intersect, given the UC police department (UCPD)
“has statewide jurisdiction, in part to secure these expansive property holdings.” Appel makes the
argument that this expansiveness is precisely what makes universities both “more powerful” and

287
“increasingly vulnerable to a wider range of transformative strategies.” While Appel–who researches debt
and debtors’ unions–suggests that this power is in “the potential of organizing [union] members as tenants
in addition to workers,” I would like to suggest there is also power in utilizing the imaginative and
prefigurative work of abolitionist organizers. Trade unions may primarily function as a practical method
of “structure-based organizing” (Engler & Engler 2021) but involving abolitionist student activists allows
organizers to reimagine the institution as they organize, and utilizing open-source unionism can serve as
both a space of union membership growth and political education.
Conclusion
Turning to those inside the university committed to abolition, in this case, students, allows us to
understand the possibilities of both an abolitionist university and an abolitionist future. In their essay “the
university: last words” (n.d.) Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write that “an abolition(ist) university
would be kinda like an abolition(ist) prison or an abolitionist plantation. It would be where the generation
of knowledge in the university—at the level of its form, content and practices—tends towards the
knowing degeneration, disorganization and disequilibrium of the university” (n.d., p. 2). In working
towards the “knowing degeneration, disorganization and disequilibrium” of the carceral university as we
work toward the “knowing degeneration, disorganization and disequilibrium” of our carceral society,
abolitionist student activists offer practical solutions to decarcerate both the university and prefigurative
visions for both the future of what study can look like and the enactment of that study now.
The university is absolutely performing moral and ideological instruction but understanding it
through a “culture war” between “the progressive and the orthodox” (Hunter, 1991, p. 41), fundamentally
misunderstands the ways in which power and culture function. Universities, reproduce a status quo that,
as has been discussed, reproduces ongoing systems of domination and control. Abolitionist student
activists are not as invested in the ultimate goal of abolishing the university as the field of Abolitionist
University Studies is. Instead they are introduced in the here and now, and what it means to situate
ourselves in a place where “we create the conditions for our everyday lives by organizing ourselves and
materials and environmental resources” (Gilmore, 2023, n.p.). That place, I have argued, is the

288
abolitionist university, and as abolitionist student activists prefigure the abolitionist university within the
academy as it currently exists, they make it more livable. An abolitionist approach to higher education
suggests methods “to appropriate, invent, direct, and control the multiple layers of power and politics”
inside higher education through a commitment to experimentation (Giroux, 2007, p. 37). That
commitment to experimentation, means if the university is to hold any in an abolitionist future, those of
us within, against, and beyond the university must start taking risks towards a more livable place and
future.

289
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