Abolition Geographies

Image: Graphic recording by Radical Roadmaps. For  ​C Samuels, N Morgan, C Serrano, SA Smythe and M Ybarra. “Reflections on Cops Off Campus and Everywhere Else Movements, from 2020 and beyond.” https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/cops-off-campus-and-everywhere-else-a-conversation, published October 31, 2022.

The Aroma of Tacoma

Radical Placemaking for Abolition and Environmental Justice

Over the last decade, I have shifted from thinking about my research as being accountable to held in Tacoma’s immigrant detention center, which cages up to 1,575 people per day, toward being accountable to the long-term relationships I have been able to hold with people who are criminalized and/or vulnerable to deportation. This means that my work has shifted from a singular site fight in Tacoma, Washington, to thinking about how to reveal the damage of the criminal punishment to deportation pipeline… and then to turning the pipeline off.

With Wesley Carrasco, I wrote a zine called "Unjust Enrichment: The struggle for fair wages and an end to all immigrant cages." This traces two lawsuits (by the State of Washington and a class action lawsuit by formerly detained workers) against GEO Group, a company that profits from exploiting captive detainee labor at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, Washington. We tell the story of the lawsuit through 2021, the legal meaning of "unjust enrichment" and explore how this case is part of the movement to abolish immigrant detention, and to shut down the prison to detention pipeline.

The Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, WA is one of the largest immigration prisons in the country. On Friday, March 7, 2014, over one thousand people held in the NWDC fought back against an unjust system by putting their bodies on the line: a hunger strike. The strike continued for 56 days and spread to other detention centers across the USA. With an Antipode Foundation Scholar-Activist Grant and the Northwest Detention Center Resistance, I co-wrote A Hunger Strikers Handbook and an 11-minute documentary short: ​Hunger Strikes: A Call to End Immigrant Detention. These works both celebrate the organizing of detained immigrants and challenge those of us not detained to join in their work and act as accomplices in abolition.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I also participated in political education about environmental justice on the Tacoma Tideflats that centers the Puyallup Tribe’s treaty rights.

  • “Tacoma LNG Resistance on Environmental Injustice.” Racial Justice is Climate Justice webinar series, hosted by 350 Seattle. Seattle, WA. October 4, 2020, published at: https://youtu.be/fgxs6R0iJac

  • "Taking our Power Back: Indigenous Sovereignty and Pipeline Politics," Webinar hosted by Seattle 350. February 18, 2021, published at: https://youtu.be/msXO-ruT4G0​ 

  • “Protecting Culture and Tribal Treaty Rights,” Webinar hosted by The Conversation of Tacoma, UW American Indian Studies, and the Puyallup Tribe. February 20, 2021, published at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD8JC35HNSs

Map showing differential vulnerability to tsunami on the Tacoma Tidelats. Northwest Detention Center is marked as a site in red.

Abolition Ecologies

With Nik Heynen, I organized a double session at the 2018 AAGs in New Orleans on "Abolition Ecologies." In recent work, Heynen has called for abolition ecologies that theorize "against and about the continued existence of white supremacist logics that continue to produce uneven racial development within land and property relations.  How can abolitionist praxis inform contemporary political ecological struggles around air quality, soil quality, water pollution, inadequate shelter, food insecurity and hunger that continue to ravage communities of color and poor communities?" Our goal is to work through grounded practices that highlight the ways that the daily work of struggle signals abolition dreams. 

These were published as a symposium in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography in 2021: