Updates from Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action
The Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action initiative at BCRW kicked off a series of Spring convenings on March 1st with Research Across the Walls, a day-long training on using the recently released toolkit of the same name to conduct participatory research with incarcerated and criminalized survivors of violence, coauthored with Survived and Punished. Researchers in Residence Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie spoke and moderated panels at Beyond the Bars: Until She’s Free conference at Columbia University and hosted a strategy session with key participants immediately following the conference. In the coming months the initiative will convene conversations about responses to sexual violence by law enforcement officers and a sold out national gathering on Building Accountable Communities.
Additional Resources
The Activist Files Podcast
Episode 12: Transformative Justice in an Era of Mass Criminalization: A Conversation with Mariame Kaba and Victoria Law
On the twelfth episode of The Activist Files, Senior Legal Worker Leah Todd talks with educator, organizer, and director of Project NIA Mariame Kaba and journalist, author, and organizer Victoria Law about their work on issues of violence, incarceration, gender, criminalization, and transformative justice. Mariame and Victoria share the personal experiences that brought them to their social justice work. They discuss the cycles of violence created by carceral solutions to social problems, and talk about the growing phenomenon of mass criminalization, including how the term allows us to think beyond just the impacts of incarceration and see ways that surveillance and punishment affect people’s lives even outside of prison walls. In a comment that may remind Activist Files listeners of our last episode, Victoria and Mariame discuss the ways that prisons and carceral solutions have “stripped away our imagination,” providing a one-size-fits-all response to harm that often causes more harm without providing resolution, safety, or healing. This episode highlights the importance of thinking in new ways about healing and providing accountability for harm, which is explored in Mariame’s project transformharm.org.
This episode of The Activist Files is vital listening for anyone interested in how to go beyond punishing harm, to healing from, being accountable for, and preventing it.
The Appeal: Podcast
Justice in America Episode 20: Conversation with Mariame Kaba
On the last episode of Season 2, Josie and Clint discuss prison abolition with Mariame Kaba, one of the leading organizers in the fight against America’s criminal legal system and a contributing editor for The Appeal. Mariame discusses her own journey into this work, provides perspective on the leaders in this space, and helps us reimagine what the future of this system could look like.
Image credit: Survived and Punished
Toolkit
Research Across the Walls: A Guide to Participatory Research Projects & Partnerships to Free Criminalized Survivors
Survived and Punished
January 2019
For many survivors, experiences of policing, criminalization, and incarceration are deeply intertwined with gender-based violence. Yet very little research exists about criminalization of survivors. With this research guide, Survived and Punished aims to equip more people with tools, resources, ideas, and models to pursue urgently needed community-based research projects. This guide should inspire more organizers, advocates, attorneys, scholars, and survivors—especially those who are currently and formerly incarcerated—to lead research projects that will contribute to a growing body of data and information to fight for the freedom and well-being of criminalized survivors, and of all people.
Web Resource
TransformHarm.org
Created by Mariame Kaba, Designed by Joseph Lublink
TransformHarm.org is a resource hub about ending violence. It offers an introduction to transformative justice. Created by Mariame Kaba and designed by Joseph Lublink, the site includes selected articles, audio-visual resources, curricula, and more. You can use what is here, and submit recommendations to be added to the focus areas listed here. We hope you will use these materials to foster your own education and also share them with your communities to build something new. Only together can we transform our relationships to each other and society. We hope that this site helps in this effort.
Image source: TransformHarm.org
For more information or to support the work of the initiative, please contact aritchie@barnard.edu or mkaba@barnard.edu.
History and Guidebook
Lifting A They Climbed: Mapping a History of Black Women on Chicago’s South Side
By Mariame Kaba and Essence McDowell
Lifting A They Climbed: Mapping a History of Black Women on Chicago’s South Side is a publication that features a number of Black women who contributed to the development of Chicago from the mid-19th century to today. It tells a story of Black women activists and artists who lived and worked on Chicago’s South Side by taking readers on a tour of relevant landmarks and locations.
The vast majority of women featured on this tour were active members of multiple organizations who pursued a broad range of issues. Others were artists (writers, painters, musicians, dancers) who both documented the conditions of Black people and shaped the culture of Chicago & the entire country. Chicago’s Black women activists organized to make the city work better for themselves, their loved ones and communities.
There are thirty-three main locations, mostly centered on the South Side of Chicago, featured in this guidebook, plus ten additional sites of interest.
Banner image credit: Survived and Punished http://www.tb-credit.ru/dengi-v-dolg.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/microzaim.html