This is an external event that is NOT required, but might be of interest to some of you. I will be attending; you are welcome to join me if you would like to and are available. If you haven’t seen CUNY’s graduate school, this is a good opportunity to do that as well. I’d be happy to give a brief tour ahead of the event if folks are interested.

Note: While the event is free, you will need your CUNY ID to enter the building. If you decide to attend, I am happy to convene outside of the building first and walk in together.

DESCRIPTION:

How can we humans, planners, designers, educators of all kinds, truly make a more just society?  What does it take to build and sustain movements in the millions? Through research, practice and an exploration of the concept “abolition”, I lift up and amplify an answer which appears all around us: it takes the spatial practice of abolition and simultaneously understanding these labors as the love we ultimately seek and must make.  These spatial practices are found in our “undercommons” – those spaces inhabited and produced by we, black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people, and it is where and how we say “…that we want to tear down the structures that…limit our ability to find each other, to see beyond…we want to feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming” (Moten and Harney, 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study).   Our work is in better understanding that abolition-based “love” is a spatial, erotic and embodied practice of collective freedom pursuits, and that they most clearly appear through mutual trauma-healing in our haunted places (our bodies, the land, our relations).  These are the revolution.