Welcome to Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities, a series of narrative essays that reflect on emergent themes from conversations with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to abolition of police and prisons. Interweaving research with brief dispatches from speculative abolitionist futures, each episode draws together the voices of people working toward food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice, and Black liberation to connect thematic currents surrounding the abolition of police and prisons. In each episode, we look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons, and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you’ll hear us explore abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.
Making Room for Abolition is a body of work that imagines a world without police and prisons by making speculative worlds through the lens of a home. This work explores the contours of possible abolitionist worlds by crafting speculative domestic artifacts; imagining, writing and reading speculative stories; and interweaving those dispatches from abolitionist imaginaries with conversations about present-day abolitionist practices.
This work and many of the artifacts collected here first materialized as an installation of a living room from a world without police and prisons at Red Bull Arts in 2021.
About this Site
This website is an archive of abolitionist realities—futures and alternate presents—expressed as artifacts, dispatches, and essays. It presents a distributed storytelling project comprised of three different types of media that are connected in various ways:
Artifacts are specific objects and sounds from (various) abolitionist realities, they may be situated in alternative pasts, presents, or futures;
Essays are big-picture thematic narratives that bring artifacts in conversation with real-life interviews with abolitionist organizers, other references, soundscapes;
COMING SOON
Dispatches are short stories that offer a glimpse into the world(s) in which these abolitionist realities are imagined;
Contributors
Lead Artist | executive producer
Lauren Williams (she/they) is a Detroit-based designer, researcher and educator. They work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power over Black life and death.
Co-Producer | essays
Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (he/him) is an organizer turned strategist whose work is story-driven: cultivating and protecting people's voices and self-perception as capable of changing their environments or circumstances. As a multimedia storyteller, they use voice to shift culture, engaging with communities through listening, memory-making, and movement.
audio engineer
Conor Anderson (he/him) is an Audio Engineer and Producer for 101.9 WDET, ensuring quality audio content for the station from underwriting to live bands, podcasts, and broadcasts. Before joining WDET, Anderson was an ethnomusicological documentarian and the lead audio engineer for Red Bull Radio Detroit. He is a graduate of The University of Michigan, where he received a degree in Sound Media and Culture.
Web Designer
Em Woudenberg (they/them) of Strike Design Studio offers frank consultancy and striking solutions for print and screens. With over a decade of experience, they have worked with notable brands and have exhibited their work across the world.
Studio Photographer
Radical Play, led by Na Forest Lim, they/them, is a photo and film studio that makes art to share unique + beautiful truths of Detroit artists, BIPOC, queer, disabled, immigrants, sex workers, & other marginalized individuals. Their creative purpose is to shift unbalanced personal narratives and transform societal issues.
Acknowledgments
This work, from 2021 through today, was made possible with funding from the Detroit Justice Center, Art 4 Justice Fund, The Center for Cultural Power, Race Forward, and Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
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Transcription
When you hear someone say they want to abolish police and prisons, what comes to mind? And more importantly, does it even seem.. Possible?
My name is Lauren Williams. I’m an artist and designer based in Detroit, MI and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power. You’re listening to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition.
You talk to people about abolition and you say, "The solution is housing everybody. The solution is feeding everybody without any questions." You tell people that and they're like, "Nah, that's too wild. That's never going to happen." You know, and there's this belief that that's never going to happen because some people aren't as important as other people. And also this idea that there's not enough of anything for all of us to have exactly what we want.
“Making Room for Abolition” first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as an installation of speculative artifacts from a future without police and prisons. This series of audio essays reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit-based organizers and futurists. People committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative or transformative justice , and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves—whether that’s healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict—it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design.
Each and every of the folks you’ll hear from is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible.
It's hard. It's hard to dream when you think that this place is Detroit.
But it's not because we have some innate limitation in our imagination.
Detroit is a French word, but there’s actually a history and a truth to this place and there’s a name to this place that we have all been denied knowing.
...it's because you have huge systems of power for generations telling us that this ..punishment is a very strong logic that really has to be, you know, we have to try to cut right through it.
So, in each episode, we’ll look closely at the kinds of carceral fictions, these myths concerning nature, safety, interdependence, time, imagination and more that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons, and punishment in the many spheres of life where they manifest.
We parent carcerally. We school people, carcerally. Medical institutions, mental health are all operating on carceral logic. They're all punitive. So, it’s a pervasive, logic.
And the thing is, these logics aren’t just inherently true — they’re myths, fictions that we’ve constructed and materialized into reality. In this series, we’ll examine where these fictions come from and how they affect us. But, at the same time, each time we introduce a carceral fiction, you’ll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being. So, if you consider yourself even the slightest bit abolition-curious, this series is for you. If you’d describe yourself as hopeful about abolitionist possibilities but struggling with the task of imagining how we get there, this series is for you. I hope you’ll join us for Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or on makingroom [dot] online.