ABOUT THE SERIES
It is becoming increasingly clear that people will have to rely on and care for each other more and more after years of purposeful abandonment from those in power. This series will highlight concrete ideas, strategies, and practices for creating solidarity and conditions where care is centralized. If we are to resist policies of violence and economies of war what are our alternatives? How can we expand our ideas? How can we encourage collective consciousness and reject apathy and individualism?
Series Timeline: Third Wednesday of every other month Beginning in February 2025 at 1pm est, 12pm ct, 10am pst.
Sessions
- Feb 19 – Session 1: Who Cares? Racial Capitalism, Social Reproduction, and Collective Entanglement
- April 16 – Session 2: Abolition, Land, and Care Work: Lessons from the Food Justice Movement
- June 18 – Session 3: Abolitionist Care Ethics
- September 17 – Session 4: Reclaiming Space Through Pattern Traditions as Communal Care
Session 1: Who Cares? Racial Capitalism, Social Reproduction, and Collective Entanglement
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Who performs care that sustains life, and under what conditions? Through a decolonial/Black feminist lens, this session explores the intersection of racial capitalism, social reproduction, and the international division of labor, emphasizing the ways that race, gender, class, and migration shape local and global care economies.
By interrogating who cares, for whom, and at what cost, this session will illuminate the urgent need for alternative models of care that challenge exploitation and affirm collective well-being.
SPEAKER BIO
Jalessah T. Jackson (they/them) is an interdisciplinary cultural worker, educator, writer, and organizer. With a background in Black Studies, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Cultural Studies she researches and teaches about critical theories of race, gender, class, sexualities, disability and resistance movements.
Session 2: Abolition, Land, and Care Work: Lessons from the Food Justice Movement
ABOUT THIS SESSION
This session explores how the struggle for food sovereignty is an abolitionist project. What does it mean to build a world where we are all able to meet our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs—a world that centers the liberatory potential of food and land to heal and restore relationships torn apart by centuries of oppression? How is collectively tending to the land an act of care?
Through sharing lessons and learnings from movements for food and land sovereignty in Baltimore, New York, Cuba, and Palestine, Kanav also invites participants to envision the roles and skills needed to build alternative educational and food systems, develop land-based forms of mutual aid, and collectively practice revolutionary care.
SPEAKER BIO
Kanav Kathuria’s (he/him) work lies in the intersection of abolition, food and land sovereignty, and revolutionary education. He is the co-founder of the Maryland Food and Prison Abolition Project, a community-based organization that seeks to dismantle the prison food industrial complex, as well as a land steward, educator, and a PhD student in geography researching how people have used food and land to help get free.
EVENT RECAP
We were Joined by Kanav Kathuria who has been working at the intersections of abolition, food justice and land sovereignty. During the first part of the series Kanav shared their experiences and care lessons from being a part of the Food Justice movement. He rooted us in his own story and shared how his experiences shaped his entrance into the food justice movement. He then shared about the work he has done and how red lining, the rise of the prison industrial complex, extractive economies, and control have influenced our relationship to food, land and each other. He then grounded us in theories and questions that have arisen around abolition, anti-capitalism and food and land sovereignty.
“Today we have a food system that is corporate controlled, destroying our health, built on a relationship to land that is deeply extractive (without consent)…. (According to food regime theory) What they call civilization is socially constituted violence against the earth. – Kanav Kathuria
The second half was a space for participants to ask questions and share reflections on their work around food justice and prison abolition. People asked how they should navigate their role and not further legitimize the prison system. People reflected on the relationship between non-profit work, prison gardens and more radical models of change.
Graphic notes by Emma Dulski
Session 3: Abolitionist Care Ethics
ABOUT THIS SESSION
A conversation on justice-impacted people’s leadership, care-centered practices in ATL’s Black Mamas Bailout and the contradictions present in who we fight with for Black Liberation w/ Bridgette Simpson from Barred Business. She will share about her work on multiple fronts, and her concrete wins for Protections for Justice Impacted people in Atlanta and beyond. She will share about mutual aid work, business fund, and their “S.T.A.B.L.E. Program, they provide organizing and advocacy training, political education, leadership development, housing, and wraparound programming and support for formerly incarcerated Black women who are returning to their communities and are living in the S.T.A.B.L.E. house or in the community. Bridgette will share her approach to grounding in radical ethics while navigating resistance to state institutions. After grounding in Bridgette’s work, we will discuss what abolitionist care ethics look like in our work. If Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s free, how do we reflect on who we are leaving out in our movements? What do we do when we are committed to freedom but we are still carrying harmful ideas, thoughts, and perspectives? How do we balance our individual freedom with our dreams of collective liberation?
SPEAKER BIO
Bridgette Simpson is a passionate abolitionist who draws from her experience as a formerly incarcerated survivor to drive social justice reform. She’s the co-founder of Barred Business and the Formerly Incarcerated Small Business Rescue Fund, In Atlanta, she launched the S.T.A.B.L.E. program and led efforts to pass legislation protecting formerly incarcerated people as a legal class.
EVENT RECAP
Some gems from the workshop with Bridgette!
- “How can we build power if we don’t care for each other?”
- “I wouldn’t trust my life to someone I couldn’t be in conflict with. it’s all good when it is all good but when it is not how do we struggle?”
- “Care doesn’t mean perfection, love doesn’t mean perfection, it means we stay committed to it until we figure it out”
- “Love is a stance. It’s a position not a destination.”
Session 4: Reclaiming Space Through Pattern Traditions as Communal Care
ABOUT THIS SESSION
This session explores how art and culture can be used as a practice of revolutionary love and healing. This session talks about Jazmine’s practices studying African diasporic patterns and staying connected as an artist to community and rooted to liberation struggles. Jazmine shares her work with community organizations, working with Public Assistants, and working with the City to design art that centers intergenerational care, interdependence, and healing in the Black diaspora.
SPEAKER BIO
Jazmine Hayes is an interdisciplinary visual artist, musician and poet born and based in Brooklyn, New York. Through a research based lens, her practice explores histories of the African diaspora and the ways they are preserved and reproduced through cultural traditions. She is a 2023 U.S. Fulbright researcher, in which she traveled to Senegal, Africa to study weaving traditions and patterns as coded communication, protection and preservation of Black American, Afro-Caribbean & West African histories. For over 14 years, she has worked with community-based youth organizations across New York City as an educator and muralist with several renown non-profits and has been featured in Art Forum, Interview Magazine, Artnet, and several other publications.
