Abolition Feminism: Celebrating 20 years of INCITE!
ACCESSIBILITY: This event is free and everyone is welcome. Live-captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to andreajritchie@gmail.com.
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INCITE!, a national radical feminist of color organization, was founded in 2000. Over its two decade history, INCITE! has envisioned, articulated, and promoted what Angela Y. Davis has described as abolition feminism, a liberatory vision of a world free from all forms of violence, including those produced by carceral logics and systems of surveillance, policing, punishment, and exile. Abolition feminism envisions “a society based on radical freedom, mutual accountability, and passionate reciprocity. In this society, safety and security will not be premised on violence or the threat of violence. It will be based on a collective commitment to guaranteeing the survival and care of all people” (from the 2002 INCITE!-Critical Resistance Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex).
Abolition feminism, and its roots in grassroots anti-violence organizing by women, trans and gender nonconforming people of color, is particularly relevant in this moment of heightened attention on movements advocating abolition and resisting incarceration of our communities–and of backlash rooted in carceral feminism.
Join founders and generations of leaders of INCITE! and Angela Y. Davis for a discussion of the origins, genealogies, and futures of abolition feminism on April 30th, the 20th anniversary of INCITE!’s founding, from 6 – 9 pm ET.
Speakers include:
Beth Richie
Mimi Kim
Nadine Naber
Cara Page
Shana M. Griffin
Kiri Sailiata
Angela Y. Davis
The conversation will be followed by an online celebration honoring INCITE!’s 20 year anniversary!
Speakers
Beth E. Richie is a long-time anti-violence and anti-prison activist, a founding member of INCITE! Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance, and a Professor of African American Studies and Criminology, Law and Justice at The University of Illinois at Chicago. The emphasis of her scholarly and activist work has been on the ways that race/ethnicity and social position affect women’s experience of violence and incarceration, focusing on the experiences of African American battered women and sexual assault survivors. She is the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012) which chronicles the evolution of the contemporary anti-violence movement during the time of mass incarceration in the United States, and of numerous articles concerning Black feminism and gender violence, race and criminal justice policy, and the social dynamics around issues of sexuality, prison abolition, and grassroots organizations in African American Communities. Her earlier book, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women, advances arguments concerning race, gender and crime rooted in the experiences of survivors of violence. She is a board member of The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African Community, The National Network for Women in Prison, and A Call To Men. In 2014 she was appointed as a Sr. Advisor to the NFL to work on their domestic violence and sexual assault prevention program.
Mimi Kim is a long-time advocate and activist working on issues of gender-based violence in communities of color. She is a co-founder of Incite! Women, Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color Against Violence, and served on the National Organizing Collective from 2000 to 2004. In 2004, she established Creative Interventions which helped to develop collective, liberatory and non-criminalizing approaches to address and end domestic and sexual violence and has worked actively to develop feminist community accountability and transformative justice political frameworks and practices. Mimi’s research on the historical development of carceral feminism and the contemporary transformative justice movement includes “The Carceral Creep: Gender-Based Violence, Race, and the Expansion of the Punitive State, 1973-1983” (2019). Mimi is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach.
Nadine Naber is an author, public speaker and activist on the topics of anti-imperialist feminisms; Palestinian liberation; Arab and Muslim feminisms; and Arab and Muslim racial justice struggles. She has authored/co-edited five books: Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism; Race and Arab Americans; Arab and Arab American Feminisms; The Color of Violence; and Towards the Sun (with Rasmea Odeh). Nadine is a co-founder of organizations like the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association North America and MAMAS, and she has been working with movements and organizations like INCITE!; AROC, and the Arab American Action Network. She has co-founded programs and centers including Arab and Muslim American Studies program (UM Ann Arbor) and The Arab American Cultural Center (UIC), and is currently working on a political education storytelling project about the impact of state violence on mothers and mother-activism within U.S.-based abolitonist, immigrant justice, and Palestinian liberation movements. Nadine was a member of the INCITE! National Collective from 2002-2007.
Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer. For the past 30+ years, she has organized with LGBTQGNCI, People of Color & Indigenous liberation movements in the US & Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, healing justice and transformative justice. She is an architect of healing justice; deeply rooted in Black Feminist traditions and shaped by Southern Black radical traditions. She is currently building care, safety & resistance strategies that she began building regionally & nationally at the US Social Forum (USSF) 2007 Atlanta and the 2010 USSF Detroit at the Health & Healing Justice People’s Movement Assembly. As lead organizer & curator of her new project, Changing Frequencies, she is building an archival/memory and cultural change project to intervene on generational trauma; centering the Medical Industrial Complex. She is a recent recipient of the Soros Equality Fellowship (2019-2020) and an ‘Activist in Residence’ at the Barnard Research Center for Women to elevate this work. You can learn more about Cara’s work at carapage.co and @changingfrequencies. Cara is a co-founder and member of the leadership team of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective & the Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative. She is also the former ED of The Audre Lorde Project and former Director of Programs at the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. She has worked with many organizations nationally & internationally including: Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Project South, INCITE!, the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, & the Committee on Women, Population & the Environment towards building economic, racial and gender justice strategies for our liberation, care & protection. Cara served on the INCITE! National Collective from 2010 to 2012.
Shana M. Griffin is a feminist activist, independent researcher, applied sociologist, artist, and mother. Her work is interdisciplinary and undisciplinary, engaging black feminist practices that attend to the lived experiences of the black Diaspora. Whether serving on a board, a member of a collective, conducting research, collaborating on an art project, documenting social movements, organizing a conference, coordinating an action, leading a campaign, or establishing a new initiative or organization, her work is expansive and exists in multiple social justice formations, contexts, and capacities. Shana’s activism and research center the experiences of black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, carcerality, polluted environments, reproductive legislation, displacement, climate impacts, economic exploitation, and housing discrimination. She’s the co-founder of Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans; and co-producer of Sooner or Later, Somebody’s Gonna Fight Back, a documentary and multimedia project on the Louisiana State Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Shana co-founded the Women’s Health & Justice Initiative (2006 – 2016), a feminist of color organizing project in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic (2006 – 2010), which provided safe, affordable, and non-coercive sexual and reproductive health services, education, and advocacy to nearly 9,000 women throughout the Greater New Orleans Metropolitan area. Shana served on the INCITE! National Collective from 2003-2008.
Kiri Sailiata (Samoan) is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Macalester College. She’s a former member of Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti chapter and the INCITE! national collective.
Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Y. Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator–both at the university level and in the larger public sphere–has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. She is the author of ten books, including Women, Race and Class; Blues Women and Black Feminisms: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday; Are Prisons Obsolete?; The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues; and most recently, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without carceral systems and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.