Writing Abolition: Dismantling Carceral Literacies of the Prison-Industrial Complex through Black Queer Activism

Abstract

This dissertation uses various storytelling methods to introduce abolitionist praxes in composition pedagogies, community-engaged writing, and writing program administration. Chapter 1 of this dissertation posits that some literacies are carceral and help continue our facilitation of the prison-industrial complex. This chapter defines carceral literacies as the practices, documents, genres, and logics that help enact carceral harm and provides real-world examples of each element of carceral literacies. In addition to theorizing how carceral literacies infiltrate our civic discourses and educational spaces, I focus on composition pedagogies, community-engaged writing, and writing program administration via storytelling methods to visualize the integration of abolition in our fields. Chapter 2 uses autoethnography to demonstrate abolitionist responses to attendance and assessment in writing classrooms. In this chapter, I reflect on my own time as a student and the ways I witnessed carceral harm in education. Furthermore, I use my teaching materials and experiences as data to illustrate abolitionist teaching in various writing and rhetoric classes across two institutions. This chapter describes the initial steps for abolitionist teaching and the results of my autoethnographic research on abolitionist teaching. Chapter 3 is a multimodal chapter that employs podcasting and counterstory as a method to amplify the community literacies in #StopCopCity—a Southern abolitionist movement spearheaded by queer activists of color. The podcast chapter also seeks to subvert the true crime genre by focusing on harm instead of crime, as crime is a socially and politically constructed category that often disenfranchises marginalized communities. Whereas in true crime, storytellers focus on the police procedures of solving the crime of a harmed victim, in my podcast chapter I offer an abolitionist counter-narrative of someone who was a victim of police procedures. This chapter interrogates the public narrative of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita. Tortuguita was a victim of police violence in 2023 when they were shot and killed by Georgia State Patrol Troopers during a raid of the Stop Cop City encampment. Chapter 4 re-envisions writing program administration by looking at the work of abolitionist organizers. This chapter parallels abolitionist practices of radically imagining alternatives to punitive and carceral approaches. Specifically, I explore how to address programmatic issues like plagiarism, campus rhetoric, and labor issues through approaches of restorative practices, transformative justice, mutual aid, and grassroots organizing. This chapter reveals what is possible for writing program administrators wanting to engage in abolition.