Abolition on the Ground: Reporting from the Movement to #DefundthePolice

Professor Dean Spade, Wismer Professor in Gender and Diversity Studies, 2022-2024, begins a series of events on intersectional feminism with the first on next Tuesday, March 1. See the Program description and events page for registration below. 

From Professor Spade: "As part of the Wismer Professorship, I have the honor of organizing some events about intersectional feminism this year and next. I hope you will consider attending and spreading the word to your students and to colleagues in other departments."

Abolition on the Ground: Reporting from the Movement to #DefundthePolice
Panel Discussion: featuring Angélica Cházaro, Erica Perry, and Andrea Ritchie, Moderated by Professor Dean Spade
March 1, 7 p.m.
Virtual Program

See event page for registration

Abolitionists have been working for centuries to oppose the growth of systems of racially targeted criminalization. The 2020 uprising against police violence and anti-Black racism brought the conversation about abolition to the mainstream and prompted campaigns in cities and counties across the US to defund the police and shift public resources toward meeting basic human needs like housing, healthcare, and childcare. For almost two years, local organizers around the country have been rigorously working to transform city and county budgets, and their work has made significant changes in local, state, and national politics. Join us for a conversation with abolitionist organizers and lawyers leading this work to talk about lessons learned since June 2020, how this work fits into the larger abolitionist vision for a world without cages or borders, and the key strategic questions facing the movement now. 

This event is made possible by the Patricia Wismer Professorship in Gender and Diversity at Seattle University and in collaboration with the https://bcrw.barnard.edu/ including the center’s support in producing the event, providing ASL and live captioning. 

A little about the panelists: 

• Angélica Cházaro, an organizer with Decriminalize Seattle, is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law where she teaches Critical Race Theory, Poverty Law, Professional Responsibility, and courses on Immigration Law. 
  
  
• Erica Perry is a Nashville native committed to community-driven and movement-led abolition of the prison industrial complex. Erica has worked with organizers and advocates throughout Tennessee and nationwide to create alternatives to police and jails, fight for local budgets that invest in the community and not police, and organize to build power. Erica is a movement lawyer and organizer with the Black Nashville Assembly and Southern Movement Committee.
  
  
• Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant whose research, litigation, organizing, and policy advocacy has focused on policing and criminalization of women and LGBT people of color. She is the co-founder, with Mariame Kaba, of Interrupting Criminalization. She is author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition; “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women”; and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. She works with dozens of groups around the country to support campaigns to divest from policing and invest in community safety through Interrupting Criminalization and the Community Resource Hub.