Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal Defense in Psychology: Gordon Crean 5/25

Abstract:

The prison industrial complex (PIC) in the US is a foundational pillar upholding coloniality and racial capitalism, as it maintains oppressive social arrangements based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability, and is a key means of counterinsurgency against social movements. White settlers as a collective are deeply implicated in maintaining and profiting from the PIC and racial capitalism more broadly. While many white settlers have worked to break with white solidarity and support struggles to abolish the PIC (and other interrelated struggles), several scholars and organizers have shown how white settlers involved in struggles to abolish the PIC have often perpetuated oppression through our actions and ways of being and call for accountability and transformation. Responding to these calls from my position as a white settler who aspires to participate in abolitionist movement, in this dissertation I seek to explore the question: “What are the ways in which white settlers are engaging in transformative praxis in abolitionist movements?” In particular, I focus on relational and embodied capacities to engage in critical reflexivity and centered accountability. Drawing upon community, liberation and decolonial psychologies, as well as critical whiteness studies and generative somatics, I aim to critically analyze the knowledges and narratives of participants in diverse initiatives, collectives, and struggles for abolition of the PIC across the US. This includes both work to dismantle the PIC, as well as work to replace it with liberatory self-determined systems of care and safety. Using critical narrative inquiry, I will conduct interviews with people involved in multiracial abolitionist movement spaces and attempt to document the counternarratives, knowledges, ways of being and relating that participants are co-creating, as well as challenges they are facing.