Our one meeting since offering our last update was important because it was agenda-setting for the whole year. Our meetings are typically divided into two parts: a common activity in which all community members participate together and then working groups meet to advance their current project.
We regularly reserve a meeting to solicit and deliberate over proposals for what we will do for our common activity. Members bring ideas for either a one-off or a set of meetings. After each proposal is explained, the community asks clarifying questions, offers friendly amendments to address concerns and interests, weighs pros and cons of our options, and seeks a consensus about our plan. Consensus is not always straightforward or easy, and the meeting facilitator takes a lot of care not to close discussion too quickly or call for consensus before a clear and mutually understood agreement has been reached.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we often have a wealth of options and a dearth of time. Therefore, we have to make choices like cutting back on one proposal so we can mix in another, or table some proposals for the future. Saving a proposal for future consideration is a profound moment of hope that we will be permitted to continue to meet until such a time that the proposal can be adopted.
We are excited to have Elizabeth Shatswell, Corrections Education Manager at JSTOR, visit our meeting on October 6 to discuss information literacy, why and how to use JSTOR, and her own journey from incarceration to freedom. Ms. Shatswell will be visiting OSU’s Columbus campus for several days thereafter and has some time available for consultations. If you would like to meet with her, please contact me at shuster.67@osu.edu to see if I can accommodate your availability in her schedule.
From mid-October to the end of December, we decided to read most of Reiko Hillyer’s A Wall is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2024). Having read a bunch of philosophy, we are excited to be digging into some history. We wager that having a richer appreciation for how the carceral system has been constructed and how it has changed will help us to hone our analysis and vision for a more just future. A better understanding of possible futures will in turn enable us to more effectively add our voices to the many calls for abolitionist reforms.
For our spring meetings, we will read Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) alongside Critical Resistance’s Abolitionist Toolkit, assembled by Shana Agid, Brooks Berndt, Rachel Herzing, and Ari Wohlfeiler. We hope this will help us to connect our work to a wider movement of community organizers and partner organizations working toward abolition.
