Abstract
In this session, participants will engage with the participatory nonfiction project and art-book Abolition is Everything (Antenna Press, 2021). The art-book contains a deck of 50 cards, each of which explore a different value associated with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theories of an “everything-ist abolition” and represent different stories from the United States prison system. After the book’s publication in 2021, it grew into a years-long weekly writing workshop that has evolved to include visual arts, theater, and storytelling sessions across the United States and around the world, involving free and incarcerated artists in correspondence. As the project continues, it has grown from being a single-authored project into a collaborative, multi-authored, interdisciplinary form. In the first part of the workshop, participants will play with the cards in the deck and creatively respond to the work, adding to its ongoing authorship. In the second part of the workshop, participants will engage in dialogue about social practice pedagogies that have developed in prison, often limited by technological constraint and dependent on analog methods for dissemination. How might these methods continue to innovate and create new pedagogical frameworks for the art of social practice in an increasingly digital world? Incarcerated scholars involved in the Abolition is Everything project will respond to this question, and the workshop facilitator will include their responses as part of the group conversation.
Presenters
Sarah ShotlandDepartment Chair, Associate Professor, Department of Art, Communications, and English, Carlow University, Pennsylvania, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Social Practice, Abolition, Prison Arts, Prison Education, Art-book, Co-Authorship, Pedagogy
