Abolitionist Feminisms: Feminist-Queer, Anti-Capitalist, & WOC Grassroots Organizing

Abolitionist Feminisms

Join the Institute of Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz and partners for a conversation on feminist―queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color— organizing and abolition for the next event of Visualizing Abolition, an event series coupled with art installations on the vital struggle for prison abolition.

PANEL: Beth Ritchie, Erica Meiners, and Sonya Clark

Featured Music Performance - Sarah Elizabeth Charles

February 23, 2021 @ 4 - 5:30 p.m.PT

RSVP & Info here: https://ias.ucsc.edu/events/2021/abolitionist-feminisms-beth-richie-erica-meiners-and-sonya-clark-february-23-2021


SPEAKER PANEL:

Sonya Clark is a fiber artist known for using a variety of materials including human hair and combs to address the areas of race, culture, class, and history. In the recent performance, Unraveling, she and participants slowly unraveled a Confederate battle flag, thread by thread. As Clark explains, “The intent is not to destroy a Confederate battle flag but to investigate what it means to take it apart, a metaphor for the slow and deliberate work of unraveling racial dynamics in the United States.”

Erica Meiners is Professor of Gender, Women’s Studies, and Education at Northeastern Illinois University. She has authored several books on her research, most recently For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State. In all her writing, teaching, and organizing, Meiners examines the U.S. prison industrial complex and questions how a sustainable and flourishing world without prisons can be built.

Beth E. Richie is Head of the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice and Professor of African American Studies at The University of Illinois at Chicago. She has authored Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation and numerous articles concerning Black feminism and gender violence, race and criminal justice policy, the social dynamics around issues of sexuality, prison abolition, and grassroots organizations in African American Communities.


ABOUT: Visualizing Abolition

Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized by Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies and Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online.

The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at
San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-April 25, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz.
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BELOW: "Solitary Garden" public art installation at UC Santa Cruz as part of the
Visualizing Abolition series.