Oral Presentations

Abolition feminism offers guiding blueprints to dismantle structures of oppression both nationally and locally. This paper explores a rural abolitionist movement to stop increased surveillance and policing of youth. Using activist political education and local newspaper archives, we will apply SisterSong's reproductive justice demands to show how parents and students used "the right to raise kids in a safe and healthy environment" to demand the removal of a school resource officer. As Mariame Kaba and Erica Meiners argue in "Arresting the Carceral State": "...we won't solve the STPP [school to prison pipeline] problem by simply changing school disciplinary policies. Because many states spend more on prisons than education, we have to change funding priorities as well." For this reason, we will examine how the removal of resource officers did not offer systemic community change, and it was the demand of collective care that was able to save a youth rec center and stop the building of a juvenile detention center in rural Minnesota.