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Transformative Justice

Mia Mingus is a Bay Area activist and community organizer and educator with the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. In this episode, Mia talks about the important work of love and transformative justice in order to foster community healing and accountability without the use of the criminal justice system.

*This segment includes conversation around child sexual abuse and may be triggering, so please take the care that you need before, during and after listening.

For more information on the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, and for a full transcript of Episode 2, visit the website at inplainsightradio.com.

Producer: Geraldine Ah-Sue
Advisor: Alice Wong

Music by:
Podington Bear – Chimera
Podington Bear – Firefly
Podington Bear – No Squirell Commotion
Chris Zabriskie – We Always Thought the Future Would be Kind of Fun

Episode 2 - The Work Of Love

Sins Invalid is a performance group whose work centers on disability and sexuality, highlighting the work of artists of color and queer artists.  Writer s.e. smith talks with Sins Invalid co-founder Patricia Berne about the how the group helps create more dynamic and dimensional perceptions of people with disabilities. 

Sins Invalid has a brand-new show debuting this October in San Francisco: "Birthing, Dying, and Becoming Crip Wisdom" is going up at the ODC Theater. Details here: https://www.odcdance.org/event_view.php?param=717

The photo on this segment is of performer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

Birthing, Dying, and Becoming Crip Wisdom

In this episode we focus on the ways women are organizing against gendered violence and mass criminalization -- and for a world free of domination. We speak with Mariame Kaba, long-time abolitionist organizer and writer, about her work with groups like Survived and Punished and Project NIA, and the criminalization of women under capitalist heteropatriarchy. We also talk to Adrienne Skye-Roberts from the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), on specific challenges faced by women behind bars. We close today’s show with the voices of two women from from CCWP’s multimedia project, A Living Chance: Storytelling to End Life without Parole.

Survival and Resistance: Women Organizing towards Abolition

In this episode we explore the relationship between the abolitionist horizon and the defense and reinvention of the commons. We speak with author and historian Peter Linebaugh about the ways the carceral state is founded upon enclosure and dispossession, and about hidden histories of collective resistance.

We also speak with Reverend Edward Pinkney, imprisoned activist and community leader, who discusses his experience of fighting racist enclosure and dispossession in Benton Harbor, and the possibilities for building collective power.

We wrap up the episode with an abolitionist poet who is currently imprisoned at the Women’s Huron Valley Prison in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her poetry traces a genealogy that moves from the emergence of capitalism as the enclosure of the commons, and passes through the rise of the penitentiary to our present day.

Abolition and the Commons

In this episode we examine the relationships between carcerality, gendered and sexual violence on the one hand, and on the other: queer and trans liberation and the abolitionist horizon.
Josue Saldivar and Karolina Lopez from the Arizona-based organization Mariposas Sin Fronteras discuss the ways that migrants fleeing heteropatriarchal and transphobic oppression in their home countries are re-subjected to this abuse through the gendered and sexual operations of the U.S. carceral state and its militarized borders. We also speak with abolitionist scholar and activist, Treva Ellison, who examines the ways in which racial capitalism has continuously reproduced queer criminality, and how queer abolition may fundamentally shift our understanding of the geographies of carcerality.

Queering Abolition

Abolitionists are committed to creating a world without police and prisons, but what alternative visions and practices of addressing intimate harm might point the way toward such a world? In this episode we explore efforts to re-imagine the politics of violence, harm, safety, and redress, spearheading practices of accountability and healing that move beyond the punitive logic of the carceral state.

Mia Mingus from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective discusses alternatives to carceral feminism, and how the movement to end child sexual abuse points the way toward radically re-imagining practices of justice. We also speak with Claudia Garcia-Rojas, co-director of The Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women, and Maya Schenwar, Editor-in-Chief of Truthout and author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.

Beyond Punishment: The Movement for Transformative Justice

Speaker(s): Professor Christine Bell, Dr Aisling Swaine | ‘Conflict-related violence against women’ is often understood to mean sexual violence, specifically rape used as a weapon of war. But this is only one part of a broad continuum of gender violence which must be understood and addressed within and across conflict settings. In her new book, Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition, Aisling Swaine examines the contexts of Liberia, Northern Ireland and Timor-Leste to identify a spectrum of forms of gender violence. She analyses their occurrence, and the relationship between them, within and across different points of pre-, mid- and post-conflict. Swaine proposes that a transformation rather than a transition is required in the aftermath of conflict, if justice is to play a role in preventing gender violence. Christine Bell (@christinebelled) is Principal Director of the Political Settlements Research Programme, Assistant Principal (Global Justice), Co-Director, Global Justice Academy, and Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Edinburgh. Aisling Swaine (@AislingSwaine) is Assistant Professor of Gender and Security at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE, where she teaches primarily on the MSc in Women, Peace and Security. Christine Chinkin is Director of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security. The Centre for Women, Peace and Security (@LSE_WPS) is a leading academic space for scholars, practitioners, activists, policy-makers and students to develop strategies to promote justice, human rights and participation for women in conflict-affected situations around the world.

From Transitional To Transformative: justice for conflict-related violence against women [Audio]

Rustbelt Abolition Radio (RAR) is an abolitionist movement-building media project. Full episode transcripts are available on our website.