Document Type
Grant
Publication Date
9-1-2023
Department
Psychology
Abstract
Abolition feminism offers guiding blueprints to dismantle structures of oppression both nationally and locally. This project explores a rural abolitionist movement to stop increased surveillance and policing of youth. Using activist political education, local newspaper archives, and interviews with local activists, we applied 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 examined 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. Following the research process grounding the work in theoretical frameworks and the interview process documenting the voices of activists and organizers most impacted by these effortss, a presentation was created and shared at the Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium Conference and at the WSU Ramaley Celebration presenting our findings. The project allowed for the accurate portrayal of the rural organizing efforts to protect spaces for children and promote reproductive justice and education on the impact of community organizing.
First Advisor
Klinker, Mary Jo
