Interview: Breea Willingham on Incarceration, Higher Ed, and Abolition – Epistemic Unruliness 37

In this episode, John is joined by his colleague, Dr. Breea Willingham, to discuss her multiple forms of work on higher education in prisons, both within and without academia. Their conversation about the new Journal of Higher Education in Prison, the Jamii Sisterhood, the States of Incarceration Project, and being a Black woman abolitionist in the discipline of Criminal Justice raises several pressing questions: how does one define an academic field that seeks to abolish the need for that very field? How do Black women scholars enact political practices between academic institutions that reject them and carceral systems that would capture them? What is abolitionist pedagogy at a rural PWI in a county and region structured by their carceral warehousing of Black and Brown people? How are Black women made hyper (in)visible by academia and by American society? Listen in as we engage these and related issues.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• Dr. Breea Willingham on twitter and at the Jamii Sisterhood
• Volume I, Issue 1 of the Journal of Higher Education in Prison
• The Jamii Sisterhood on facebook, including the announcement of their Spring 2022 symposium
• SUNY Plattsburgh’s contribution to States of Incarceration, “Cuffs to Classroom: College in Prison — How Can Higher Education Redefine Mass Incarceration in New York’s North Country“; Mountain Lake PBS coverage of the exhibition
• Willingham’s TedXArcadia talk, “Blinded By My Black Skin: The Hyper (In)visibility of Black Women“

Photo courtesy of Dr. Breea Willingham

Ep. 67 – Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy

In this episode, John and Sid are joined by friend of the podcast Danielle Hanley of Rutgers University to discuss Joel Olson’s The Abolition of White Democracy (2004). Our discussion weaves through a number of pressing questions: How does Olson center Du Bois in political theory debates about American democracy and citizenship? In what ways are Olson’s conceptualizations of “race,” “whiteness,” and “white privilege” precisely the kind of theorizations—politically astute, materially grounded, and non-reductive—that our moment calls for? What does Olson’s analysis of the constitutive relationship between race and American capitalism add to theories of racial capitalism? How does Olson’s vision of “abolition-democracy” expand democratic imaginaries and re-think agency and participation in critical race theory? Instead of turning to the work of Robin DiAngelo and Tim Wise, what if liberals interested in understanding and/or undoing “whiteness” read Olson’s prescient work?

Across our conversation, we find that Olson’s elegant work speaks to our historical and political moment in multiple ways and has much to offer the left, theoretically and practically, within and beyond academia.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

 

Links:

• Joel Olson archives, featuring academic and public writing, teaching materials, remembrances, and more
• Olson on white democracy and the 99%
• The Abolition of White Democracy at University of Minnesota Press