Home » Abolitionist University Studies: a provocation

Abolitionist University Studies: a provocation

by Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed

Image: Free CUNY

In Spring 2023, I facilitated a free, unaccredited study group on the theme of “Abolitionist University Studies: a provocation,” in complicity with an emerging current of radical praxis between abolitionist and university struggles. In the invitation, I intentionally centered the participation of:

  • Black, Indigenous, and people of colors in the City University of New York (CUNY) and New York City—specifically women, gender non-binary, and queer and trans people.
  • Those in CUNY and New York City who have directly navigated the impact of policing, jail, and/or imprisonment in our own, families’, and friends’ lives. 

Participants who did not identify as part of these groups were asked in advance to be mindful about not eclipsing the experiences and involvement of those being centered. People with regular access to radical study resources were asked to pass along the announcement to family and friends who may not. Priority was given to those who committed to being an active part of each conversation (barring unforeseen absences), and who also committed to creating their own abolitionist study groups after this one ended. 

When we began to meet that January, upwards of twenty Black, Latinx, Asian, Native, Pacific, and Euro accomplices across the spectrums of gender, sexuality, and abilities—located at the City University of New York and around New York City, as well as in Alabama, Cairo, and Hawaii—converged for weekly online dialogues. We were comprised of undergraduate and graduate students, adjunct and tenured college professors, academic staff workers, postdoctoral researchers, public school teachers, neighborhood organizers, un-/under-employed workers, and unaffiliated learners. From jump, we affirmed that the vision and practice of abolition remains a north star for our movements. As we discussed how to confront all forms of policing and imprisonment, we also worked to envision and construct life-affirming relationships, mutual aid, social care, communal defense, and liberatory spaces. 

The study group couldn’t have come at a more critical historical conjuncture, after the largest US uprising in generations against policing and incarceration in late Spring 2020 pivoted to the mayoral election of former cop Eric Adams in New York City, and as a new Puerto Rican CUNY chancellor and majority-Black and Brown college presidents and trustees presided over a continuing neoliberal austerity regime. Communities who had fought to close Rikers Island were devastated to learn that several new jails would be built in its stead across New York City. Comrades likewise shared how anti-colonial struggles in Hawaii, abolitionist initiatives in the US south, and post-Arab Spring repression in Egypt demanded fresh pathways to navigate the impasses of movement setbacks and state violence. The moment demanded revolutionary translocal/transnational reflections—in other words, we sought to wield abolitionist pedagogies to keep our eyes focused on freedom.

For abolitionists inside and adjacent to higher education in the United States, the question of whether to dismantle or collectively transform universities had become heightened by these last few years of insurgencies, strikes, and state repression. Our Spring 2023 study group explored this debate, intending for applicable strategic directions to emerge from our dialogues. We inquired why the field of abolitionist Black geographies increasingly embraced the tactics of fugitivity and marronage, often by citing 16th to 19th century emancipation struggles that are distant from our own time and places. To explore the practice of abolition in its more recent iterations, we pored over mid-20th to 21st century abolitionist and university movement contexts. This laid vital foundations for the study group before the release of my book, New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University, published in summer 2023 after our sessions ended. 

Altogether, this was a profoundly inspiring experience for us. It reinvigorated the necessity of accomplices coming together in rigorous study as a crucial part of effectively moving towards liberation together. Reflecting across abolitionist manifestos, communiqués, artwork, poems, zines, position papers, speeches, interviews, and music was a sacred gift that made the Spring 2023 season feel like ancestral lifetimes. Since then, the entire world has shifted. Palestine liberation is at the center of global upheavals, with massive street protests that shifted to campus solidarity encampments. Meanwhile, the ongoing Stop Cop City campaign in Atlanta has warned of the almost 70 police training facilities being built across the United States, including in New York City. 

Our group’s approach to Abolitionist Universities Studies offered not just another reformist academic discipline, but an invitation, a provocation, a commitment for militants to emplot our struggles against policing and cages in all of the spaces where people gather (including universities!) while recomposing the conditions of learning and living altogether. As our crew continues to radiate outwards with future study groups, solidarity campaigns, classroom and neighborhood coalitions, new and ongoing struggles—with uncompromising freedom as our collective heartbeat—I invite new participants to assemble, read, and discuss these materials and questions below.

STUDY SCHEDULE

Week 1: Introductions, groundings

Week 2: Current US contexts of abolition

Week 3: Abolish the university and/or build abolitionist counter-institutions? (Part I)

Week 4: Abolish the university and/or build abolitionist counter-institutions? (Part II)

Week 5: Fugitivity, marronage, infrastructures (Part I)

Week 6: Fugitivity, marronage, infrastructures (Part II)

Week 7: Undercommons, coalitions, land (back!) (Part I)

Week 8: Undercommons, coalitions, land (back!) (Part II)

Week 9: Autonomy, Care, Survival beyond Roe v. Wade and Title IX (Part I)

Week 10: Autonomy, Care, Survival beyond Roe v. Wade and Title IX (Part II)

Week 11: Abolition in CUNY and NYC (Part I) 

Week 12: Abolition in CUNY and NYC (Part II)

DIALOGUE QUESTIONS

Week 1: Introductions, groundings

Mariame Kaba, “So You’re Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist”

  • How does this essay model ways to recruit people into abolitionist movements?
  • Why may Kaba distinguish between an abolitionist focus on negation and creation?
  • Which examples does she give on how to reframe questions on policing and prisons? What could this say about the role of inquiry in abolition?

Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, “Abolitionist University Studies: an invitation”

  • As the term “abolitionist” is now being appropriated by conservatives, how can “left abolitionists” engage in this longtime project of emancipation while not letting the word speak for itself?
  • If universities can respond to criticism by “owning” their faults while absorbing these critiques in a regime of accumulation, what must abolitionist struggles in universities do differently to evade/transcend this cooptation?
  • What are some examples of the ways that “post-slavery” settler-colonial universities and their surrounding areas contain enduring vestiges of these systems of power? 
  • What would an “abolition university” look like, feel like, act like, sound like…?

Week 2: Current US contexts of abolition

Interference Archive, Defend/Defund (2022)

  • How does this longer view of abolitionist movements show patterns in policing and resistance, and also point to organizing methods that we can retire/improve/invent anew?
  • How are policing, mass incarceration, and militarization related to other political-economic-imperial transitions in the last 50 years? 
  • What do these movement examples show about the role of coalitions, creative arts, and popular education?

Unity & Struggle, “Big Brick Energy: A Multi-city Study of the 2020 George Floyd Uprising” (2022), Anonymous, “The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis” (2020)

  • What does the emphasis on spontaneity in “Big Brick Energy” and “Siege” suggest about the loose form of uprisings that could be preceded or followed by other coordinated forms? Where may “BBE” and “Siege” disagree about the role of militant organization?
  • How does this taxonomy of roles in an upheaval moment help us think about distinct roles in a longer abolitionist struggle?
  • What links can be made between Kaba’s call to create new selves and the on-the-ground anecdotes in “BBE” and “Siege”?

Week 3: Abolish the university and/or build abolitionist counter-institutions? (Part I)

Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle” (2016) 

  • Kelley speaks about “contradictory impulses” within the first 2013-2016 wave of #BLM: “the tension between reform and revolution, between desiring to belong and rejecting the university,” and how the language of trauma may “trick activists into adopting the language of the neoliberal institutions they are at pains to reject.” What do we think of these critiques?
  • Kelley argues that universities “will never be engines of social transformation. Such a task is ultimately the work of political education and activism. By definition it takes place outside the university.” What do we think of this assessment on the location of our political work?
  • Thinking with Kelley, Rodney, and Moten and Harney in this essay, how can we struggle with and inside the university but not maintain its centrality in people’s lives? What demands upon the university could allow us to circumvent its limits?
  • What could a curriculum, institutional practice, and movement focused on “love, study, struggle” look like?

Yulia Gilich and Tony Boardman, “Wildcat Imaginaries: From Abolition University to University Abolition” (2022)

  • “Slavery, police, prisons, university”—are these apt comparisons? What may occur if we elide significant differences between these historic and contemporary relations of power? (110)
  • If the call to abolish the university “does not mean immediately dismantling all institutions of higher learning,” and is instead about “building life-affirming institutions,” what does that concretely mean for us in our respective struggles? (114-115)
  • What do you think of the “abolitionist steps” people can take to move from abolition universities to abolishing universities? (116-117)
  • Both Kelley and Gilich and Boardman focus on the physically felt elements of abolitionist struggle, but Kelley warns how the language of trauma or bodies may individualize and re-objectify people who could otherwise draw from a long memory of freedom. How can we focus on mental health and embodied experience without limiting our demands of freedom?

Conor Tomás Reed, New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University, Introduction (2023)

  • What do you think of some themes presented here: a coalitional framework of identity formation, a focus on how writing shapes our self/social compositions, and how history can prophetically operate like a “boomerang”?
  • This introduction mentions how the “floating tactics” of exodus, fugitivity, marronage, pessimism, and refusal from previous epochs of struggle have gained popularity in the present, which has inspired a broader “anti-institutional” analysis in movements (10-11). How could we draw from past movement lessons without uncritically reapplying them in different conditions? What does the debate over whether we can transform institutions suggest about the scales and locations of our struggles?

Week 4: Abolish the university and/or build abolitionist counter-institutions? (Part II)

“Abolish the UC!” Zine (2022)

  • Like Defend/Defund, how does this zine use specific imagery to articulate the strategies, tactics, and visions of abolition? What do we think of such tensions as between the opening image of a university building in flames and the text’s call to “radically reimagine institutions” (11)? 
  • What kind of spatialized power-mapping is at play with how the zine identifies specific sites of rupture and reclamation, i.e. the dining commons, classroom, and picket line? 

“Abolish the University?” collective essay (2023)

  • What do we think of the essay’s distinction between universities and higher education systems to identify which infrastructures could (or could not) be transformed by abolitionist movements?
  • How do we receive these ample question-invitations-to-reflect along the way? Similar to Kaba’s essay, how does a practice of open curiosity relate to the constructing of a new emancipated world?

Tavia Nyong’o, “The Student Demand” (2015)

  • What do we think of Nyong’o’s call to reconsider Black and Native radical student speech and demands-making as both a rebuke and a gift?
  • Reading Nyong’o alongside “Communique, “The Demands,” and these other student texts forged in university struggles, what do we think are the most effective ways to make abolitionist demands upon universities? What kinds of non-reformist demands—i.e “abolitionist steps”—can be waged so that administrators ultimately lose power, rather than retain their centrality to grant or refuse these demands?

Week 5: Fugitivity, marronage, infrastructures (Part I)

Jay Gillen, Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty (2014), Preface & Chapter 1  

  • What do we think of Gillen comparing the political role of young Black fugitives escaping enslavement with that of Black youth in impoverished schools today? (41-42)
  • Thinking alongside Gillen, what are ways that youth rebellions adopt a style that could be consciously wielded in abolitionist struggles? (47)
  • Instead of teachers acting as overseers or colonizers in the classroom, how can the legacy and politics of abolition encourage us to become complicit in these youth insurgencies? (72-73)

Nikki Giovanni, “I Fell Off the Roof One Day (A View of the Black University)” (1970)  

  • How do Giovanni’s examples of where the Black University already exists across our communities say about the potential for bridging formal and informal infrastructures of radical learning? (170)

Gil Scott-Heron, “Running” (2010)

  • How does Scott-Heron’s definition and direction of running influence our understanding of fugitivity and marronage? If he suggests that we can run toward scenes of conflict, not run for cover, what might this suggest in response to some radicals’ call to flee the university?

Week 6: Fugitivity, marronage, infrastructures (Part II)

Bianca C. Williams, Dian D. Squire, and Frank A. Tuitt, eds., Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (2021), Introduction & Chapter 8

  • Educators have used many different metaphors to describe the university and classroom: “factory,” “locomotive,” “laboratory,” “ritual.” What does the invocation of “plantation” allow us to differently confront in the university, while also maintaining that the plantation university is not a place of enslavement, but still operates from its vestiges (6-7)? Applying this analogy, what power relation roles do various people in the university choose or are forced into? 
  • Thinking with this anthology and “The Demands” website of 2012-2016 #Black Lives Matter campus demands that these co-editors compiled, what does it say about “plantation politics” that many of the Black students’ demands waged during this insurgent period were almost identical to those of their forebears in the 1960s and 70s (12)?
  • Using Chapter 8’s attention to how practices of the Underground Railroad persist today, what are some specific examples of safe houses, conductors, and passengers in our campuses and neighborhoods (199, 209-211)? What are some potential tactics for the inconspicuous movement of travelers and their accomplices, as well as courageous raids upon those in power? 
  • Earlier we discussed how marronage and fugitivity entail physical flight, an entangled relationship to institutions to wrest resources from them, and an emotional/mental/spiritual rebirth of people escaping enslavement. If university cultural centers are places to defend (and expand) from racist attacks, how may these sites inform our sense of a marronage and fugitivity that could hold insurgent ground within a plantation university? 

Celeste Winston, “Maroon Geographies” (2021)

  • Winston historicizes how maroons were created in terrains that were “deemed undesirable and inaccessible” to the enslaving power elite (2186). What spaces in the university and our neighborhoods may also be described as such that could be clandestinely repurposed for freedom? 
  • Winston gives various examples of maroon place-making in Montgomery County, Maryland, such as community-shared goods, not registering land titles with the government, and having community patrols instead of the police, while also negotiating with the state trash collection and installing streetlights. How could we scale up and outwards this autonomous yet entangled ethos in a dense urban space like New York City? Where could demanding the redistribution of hoarded wealth from the state and commerce also play into our strategies?

Week 7: Undercommons, coalitions, land (back!) (Part I)

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “The University and the Undercommons” (2013)

  • Harney and Moten illustrate a motley coalition of maroon communities that can steal from the university within its “unprofessional” margins (30). How may this inform our sense of the scales and locations of abolitionist organizing in the university, and which resources could be liberated? 
  • The authors argue that “perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence.” What do we think of this formulation in contrast to the more recent call to create “abolition universities” from within these existing institutions?

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Studying through the Undercommons” interview (2012)

  • In this interview, Moten offers a capacious articulation of the different kinds of study that we create together in our lives. In affinity, what is the vast range of ways that we could define abolition that includes—but is not limited to—undoing policing and incarceration? 

Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century” (1981)

  • Starkly differentiating between a diverse coalition and a homogenous familiar home space, Reagon writes, “Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort.” What do we think of this distinction? Which aspects of care within our home lives may we want to see practiced in coalitions? Which aspects of coalitional work across differences may improve our home environments as well?

Week 8: Undercommons, coalitions, land (back!) (Part II)

la paperson, A Third University is Possible, Introduction through Chapter 3 (2017)

  • “Within the colonizing university exists a decolonizing education” (xiii). How does this opening sentence, and elaborated framework in this book of “hotwir[ing] the university for decolonizing work,” help us think differently through the contradictions we’ve named so far about what abolitionists should do about/within/against the carceral university? 
  • la paperson rearticulates the triad of settler/native/slave not as identities but technologies (5-12). What do we think of this argument? What may it open up in abolitionist and anticolonial coalitional work inside/outside the university? How does it challenge other schools of thought/practice that we may have encountered?
  • How does the analogy between first, second, and third world universities and first, second, and third cinemas help us strategize what could (or could not) be done in different kinds of institutions, what scales of organization may be needed, and what a shift in thinking about “decolonizing the university” to a “decolonizing university” could activate (35-46, 53)? 

Sandy Grande, “Refusing the University” (2018)

  • In dialogue with Robin Kelley’s “Black Study, Black Struggle,” how does Grande urge activists inside universities to avoid the trap of seeking recognition and inclusion, and instead to engage in a refusal of colonial management? How may this argument trouble familiar practices of making demands, identifying movement spokespeople, changing admissions and curricula, etc? In relation, how may Indigenous and anti-colonial aversions to recognition also unsettle/complicate the demands of other movements such as for LGBTQ rights? 
  • What do we think of Grande’s closing suggestions—commit to collectivity, commit to reciprocity, commit to mutuality, collectively write under nom de guerres in a kind of Zapatismo scholarship of balaclava politics (61-62)?

Land-Grab Universities

  • In dialogue with la paperson and Grande, how does this website help us entwine abolitionist and Indigenous/anticolonial struggles around universities? What campaigns can we visualize around wresting university lands back for Indigenous people’s sovereignty, along with infusing universities with Indigenous Studies, teachers, students, communities? For those of us in New York, how could this mean targeting a “land grant” university like Cornell, as well as “non-land grant” universities like CUNY which operate on unceded Lenape and Canarsie lands?

Week 9: Autonomy, Care, Survival beyond Roe v. Wade and Title IX (Part I)

​Nawal Arjini, “Don’t Defend Title IX. Replace It.” (2018)

  • As Arjini highlights, Title IX is an anti-discrimination—not anti-rape—policy that protects schools from liability rather than implement restorative justice between survivors and aggressors, and it disproportionately targets Black men instead of ​campus ​assault epicenters (i.e. wealthy white fraternity houses). As an exercise in reverse-engineering, what kind of Title IX policy—or other structural/interpersonal initiatives to address harm—could abolitionists propose instead? 

M.E. O’Brien, Melissa Gira Grant, LV, Sheila T., and Max, “On Political Violence: A Conversation on Fascist Mobilization and Queer/Trans Community Self-defense” (2022)

  • This dialogue focuses on fascist threats, anti-fascist strategies, varying levels of conflict inside radical movements (interpersonal, coalitional, against fascists, against the state), and how to build collective defense skills within a turbulent landscape. Thinking about community defense outside of/against state intervention, how would we enter this dialogue from our own organizing experiences—what trainings could we prioritize, how could we implement anti-fascist defense​s​ against fascists and cops (and fascist cops), how could we create commonalities with broader sympathetic publics, etc?

Camila Valle, Sherry Wolf, Emily Janakiram, and Holly Lewis, “The Fight for Abortion and Reproductive Justice after Roe” (2022)

  • This dialogue highlights lessons from Argentina and previous periods of US struggles for abortion and reproductive justice. Since then, abortion rights have been even more dramatically eroded in states across the country. What abolitionist strategies could we uplift to recover legal protections for abortion, but to also go much further in making them free, safe, and broadly available, while also highlighting demands/mutual aid projects for anti-racist trans-affirming childbirth, free childcare, robust maternity and paternity leave, mental health resources for gestating people, ​campus and ​labor struggles for abortion rights, etc? What could abortion rights organizers learn from ​anti-fascist ​collective defense tactics in confronting anti-abortionists? 

Week 10: Autonomy, Care, Survival beyond Roe v. Wade and Title IX (Part II)

Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, eds., Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (2020) excerpts (pps. 27-41, 119-125, 141-155) 

  • These writers detail how movements can focus sustained accountability for sexual harassers and abusers across organizations, how to develop support “pods” in communities to mitigate and heal from harms, and an array of tangible alternatives to calling the police in situations of conflict. How could these transformative justice methods be applied from below in university settings, interactions with neighbors and co-workers, and between friends and families? 

Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan, eds., Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators (2019) excerpts (pps. 2-33, 56-61, 84-85)

  • Drawing from the abundant lessons in this text, how can abolitionist movements move through a survivors-led, facilitation-focused, harm reduction, healing justice framework? What examples here show how community accountability and transformative justice are different from the criminal legal system?

Njera Keith, “Making the Case for Reproductive Revolution” (2020)

  • In the tradition of the Black feminists-led reproductive justice movement—which expanded demands from abortion rights to full bodily autonomy—Keith argues that “[a]uthentic reclamation of the Black body can only come at the dawn of Black political power,” and thus, achieving full reproductive rights is contingent upon the overthrow of capitalism. In affinity with this claim, how could abolitionists envision and practice a reproductive justice movement that is also anti-capitalist?

Week 11: Abolition in CUNY and NYC (Part I) 

Toni Cade Bambara, “Realizing the Dream of a Black University” (1969) and Lost & Found chapbook Introduction (2017)

  • Toni Cade Bambara emphasizes the need to change the curriculum, teaching access, and overall learning intentions in constructing a “Black University.” How does this relate to our discussions of an “abolition university”? What kinds of “skills banks,” potential courses, and participation could be offered inside of it?   

June Jordan, “Ocean Hill-Brownsville Speech” (1970) and Lost & Found chapbook Introduction (2017)

  • In connection with Harney and Moten’s above-definition of study, how does Jordan’s invocation of “life studies” and “community machines” envision abolitionist studies in schools and neighborhoods? What kinds of strategically timed radical invitations could we make to young people in the present?

Audre Lorde, “Deotha” (1980s) and Lost & Found chapbook Introduction (2017)

  • How does a day in the life of Deotha offer a glimpse into Lorde’s experience teaching at John Jay College while raising two children? What do we think of her focus on the bathtub ritual, the complications-layering regarding Connors College, and microaggressions/desires with her son’s teacher, as also important aspects of the overlapping daily interpersonal and institutional work of abolition?

Adrienne Rich, “Diving Into the Wreck” (1972) and Lost & Found chapbook essay (2013)

  • How does this fraught and potential-filled space of a mythologized classroom offer a condensed, granular view into creating abolitionist coalitions across differences and positionalities? How is the poem’s narrator transformed by their exchanges with the mermaids and mermen “who have always lived here”?

Week 12: Abolition in CUNY and NYC (Part II) 

Rachèl Laforest, Luz Schreiber, Lenina Nadal, Suzan Hammad, and Tamieka Byer interview, “A Culture of Resistance: Lessons Learned from the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM)” (2009)

  • How does SLAM’s emphasis on radical women-of-colors leadership, relationship- and coalition-building across revolutionary tendencies like anarchism and Maoism, cultural links to Hip Hop, learning through failure, and a refusal to silo CUNY issues to only tuition and budget cuts offer lessons for the “million experiments” in abolitionist movements?
  • What does SLAM’s reflection on running the Hunter College student government for eight years connote about the contradictions of radical movements becoming institutionalized?

Teona Pagan, Daniel Vázquez, Elizabeth Bazile, Hailey Lam, and Diana Kennedy, “It’s Time for CUNY to Say Goodbye to Cops: Fighting for a Free University” (2020)

  • The co-writers debunk the myriad ways that campus police and city police in surrounding neighborhoods purportedly make us “safer.” In dialogue with transformative justice materials we recently read, what kinds of alternative programs could be practiced on campuses to make calls for police safety irrelevant? 
  • Even though the article details multiple examples of campus police violence in close collusion with city police, it also seems that policing at universities assumes a different daily character than more overt police harassment, terror, and murder in impoverished neighborhoods of colors outside of the gates. With this in mind, how can we consciously strategize distinct forms of militancy both on and off campuses?

Lucien Baskin, “‘We Must Learn What We Need to Survive’: Making Abolitionist Presence at the City University of New York” (2022)

  • Baskin highlights the contradiction that universities are contested sites of power with many possible outcomes, including the creation of “abolition universities”. How do institutions like CUNY offer a temporal model for the destruction of one carceral order and the creation of another in the same place? Is this simultaneous, transitional, episodic, sustained?  
  • How are CUNY movements’ “citational practice” also a concerted part of abolitionist intervention? What does solidarity in study/publication help us practice off the page? 

Free CUNY research in Cops off Campus Coalition (2020)

  • Reflecting on the aesthetics of abolition via Defend/Defund and other artworks we’ve discussed, how do these Free CUNY infographics present data in a way that could differently rouse people to action? 

Notes on Contributor

Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed (all pronouns) is a Puerto Rican/Irish, gender-fluid, scholar-organizer of radical cultural and educational movements in the Americas and the Caribbean. They are the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Common Notions, 2023) and a 2023-25 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Coco is co-developing the multilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones) with co-editors Diarenis Calderón Tartabull, Makeba Lavan, A. Tito Mitjans Alayón, Violeta Orozco Barrera, and Layla Zami. They are the current co-managing editor of LÁPIZ Journal and a contributing editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, as well as a co-founding participant in CUNY for Palestine, Free CUNY, and Rank and File Action. Coco’s work can be found in print and online via AK Press, ASAP/Journal, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Distributaries, El Centro Press, The New Inquiry, Verso Books, Viewpoint Magazine, Wendy’s Subway, and elsewhere.

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