2021-2022: Abolition & Abundance as Method

Issac Rivera and Alika Bourgette were selected as the 2021-2022 CLIP Fellows. Their course series, “Abolition and Abundance as Method” explores the diverse critical theories, histories, and activisms generated by Black and Indigenous peoples across periods, geographies, disciplines, and methods. By shifting conversations of Black and Native experiences under empire from a focus on scarcity, loss, and decline to the rearticulation of kinship and relations of abundance in a place-based context, our courses posit anti-statist and anti-patriarchal imaginations of future liberations. The classes present abolition and abundance as analytics that counters colonial forms of world-making. Contesting disciplinary boundaries, our course series centers Black and Indigenous pedagogies and ethics that prioritize relations among seemingly distinct areas and peoples as the result of transit and migrations; reciprocities between humans, non-humans, lands, and waters. Examples of caring labor expressed through collective fishing and farming among other land- and water-based practices detail the complexity and continuity of Native life and the strategies by which communities wrought abundance from their environments in the face of ongoing global colonialism.

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