by Sophie Plotkin, Samhitha Krishnan, Kelly Hui, and Neomi Rao

Introduction

In August 2020, student organizers took over the quiet streets in front of the gated homes of Greenwood Avenue in Hyde Park. The student organizers were protesting for the abolition of the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD), one of the largest private police forces in the world. Members of CareNotCops, a student abolitionist group, called for the Provost to meet with them to discuss their demands. Organizers built a sprawling encampment across the street, posting colorful hand-painted signs across trees and fences, hanging up hammocks, and setting up tables with food donated by supportive community members. For seven days, the protesters danced and yelled, made art together, and when police came in the middle of the night to tear the encampment down, protestors worked together to rebuild the shelter as quickly as they could. The week-long action was the longest since CareNotCops (CNC) was founded in 2018, and the organization had garnered more public awareness and support than ever before. This sustained action was one of many such mobilizations against police violence in the summer of 2020, as mass uprisings swept the nation and the city of Chicago after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. 

Yet, by June 2021, the occupation was no longer a topic of conversation on campus. Of the almost twenty undergraduate organizers who participated in the action, only four were still active members of CNC. By June 2022, less than two years after the occupation, the number of active occupation organizers had dwindled to just one. At the same time, newer members of CNC lost all but the primary details of the occupation, and the wider campus community – the students, faculty, and staff who weren’t organizers or friends of organizers – remembered even less about the events of two summers before. Although the University preserves the memory of past student movements on campus within archives accessible only to University affiliates, the institutional memory made up of old flyers and newspaper clippings wasn’t sufficient to preserve the organizational memory of the work CNC had done. 

The same is true also of prior University of Chicago anti-institutional student groups, whose work exists in the archives but not in the continued practice of contemporary student organizing. For instance, only a few years prior to the 2020 CareNotCops occupation, a coalition of student and community groups had come together to demand that the UChicago Hospital open a Level 1 Trauma Center to provide much-needed treatment to the Southside community; a campaign that resulted in brutal violence against protestors along the way to eventual concessions by the university—the opening of a Trauma Center in 2018. Yet the specific knowledge gleaned in this fight against the university and the relationships within the coalition had been largely lost by 2020, as that generation of student organizers had already graduated. Strategies for living abolition practically as opposed to theoretically, public reactions to actions, mistakes organizers learned from, and anything intangible (that is to say, not preserved physically) are quickly forgotten between generations of student organizers. Campus campaigns start over and over again with little generational knowledge.¹ In the end, all the University has to do to erase the work of organizers is wait quietly.

We argue that institutional memory, such as the archives documenting the history of student protest maintained in the University of Chicago libraries, do not account for the deep influence of emotional and sensory feeling in sustaining an abolitionist movement on a campus space. These redacted excerpts cannot capture the richness of abolitionist spaces on campus because of dual processes: first, the always incomplete and sterilizing recollection of artifacts (such as zines, posters, and flyers from campus organizing events), and second, the impetus of the student organizers to protect the trial-and-error learnings of a radical movement space whose tactics and vision are not meant for the consumption of the institution which they fight against. Ashley D. Farmer and her work with the Blacktivists reckons with the role of the archivist, specifically those tasked with combating structures of systemic oppression, reminding us that “serious engagement in questions of preservation, memorialization, and repair means interrogating the full scope of our preservation practices, educating ourselves on existing efforts, and considering how we can materially and constructively support and amplify those already engaged in this work.” In this piece, we propose an accessible and tangible method to shape the archive through memory work and shared drawing, providing organizers with a drawing practice that can serve as both a connector and preserver of ideas.

We, the four co-authors of this piece, are each current or former students or staff at the University of Chicago. We identify as women and non-binary people who are from South Asian, East Asian, and Latine diasporas. Two of us have directly organized within CareNotCops, and the other two have been adjacent allies and accomplices. We are all carceral abolitionists—as As Abolition: How We Keep Us Safe, a zine by Abolition Action, explains: we believe in an “Abolition [that] is not creating new authorities in place of the cops, but building the relationships, skills, and trust necessary to take care of one another.”² Inspired by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s description of abolition as “constant becoming,” the four of us began a process of collective memory making in autumn of 2021 for a project on the contemporary history of campus policing and the alternatives imagined by students and university communities around the country. In this process, we delved into the University of Chicago’s own history of anti-institutional student organizing. Through our own experiences living, organizing, and participating in campus direct actions, we have a collective knowledge of the contemporary carceral landscape and anti-carceral organizing at UChicago. 

In fact, as university students and residents of Hyde Park in Chicago, we experience hyper surveillance by the city and university police and are enmeshed in a system of deeply ineffective responses to keeping the community safe. The University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) is one of the largest private police forces in the United States, yet the details of their budget and operating procedures are not publicly available nor subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. UCPD patrols a large swathe of the majority-Black neighborhoods of Woodlawn, West Woodlawn, Kenwood and parts of Bronzeville, ranging miles beyond the university campus. Of the 65,000 people under UCPD’s jurisdiction, only 15,000 are affiliated with the University.³ The undergraduate-led #CareNotCops campaign that began in 2018 in response to the University of Chicago’s police department’s shooting of Charles Soji Thomas, a student having a mental health crisis at the time of his attack. Initially, the campaign demands included calls for increasing transparency and accountability for UCPD, disarming and defunding UCPD, and increasing the provision of mental health services for the campus and Southside community.⁴ Subsequently, CNC has continued to advocate for the abolition of the University of Chicago’s police force and the intentional reallocation of their budget to fund mental health care resources and better community care for students of color and the South Side community. The current iteration of CNC redistributes resources for rotating mutual aid campaigns. Therefore, CNC is an abolitionist organization, not just because it seeks the abolition of UCPD, but because the demand to reallocate resources away from police violence subjected upon Black and brown Southside neighbors and radical student movements and towards resources and care for all is a demand to fundamentally transform the neoliberal university.

Inspired by the expansive abolitionist call for submissions, we began writing this piece with the aim to present a theoretical framework for maintaining a continuity of abolitionist organizing on campus — a framework which would include an analysis of conversations with CareNotCops organizers past and present. Abolition animates our research, writing, and everyday lives because we are surrounded by the effects of carcerality. We are not motivated by a need or want for the “academy” to collect or validate the experiences of organizers. As our writing process unfolded, we realized that the specific history of CareNotCops organizers, powerful and organically built from the experiences of abolitionist visioning in Chicago and across the country, might speak to the need to build collective memory making processes across movement spaces. The strategic efforts, power mapping, targets, and campaign goals are fundamentally important to a specific campaign in the weeks leading up to and during a specific direct action—but what sustains the vision of abolition beyond that? What are the intangible ways that feeling and memory, safety and collaboration contribute to the sustainability of organizers working toward a shared cause and bringing others in to share that approach? What began as a loving attempt to document the timeline of CNC organizing work from 2018 to the present transformed into this nonlinear toolkit and notes on a methodology. Our hope is that this methodology can be one tool in the praxis of current and future generations of abolitionist organizers, to be implemented both in the midst of movement work and as a historical meaning-making process in the always unfolding aftermath. 

The guide offered here describes our approach to this art-centered, non-linear process which we feel can be used to uphold, revisit, and validate the abolitionist ideals of CNC and other organizing groups who struggle in global solidarity to reimagine a world without carceral systems. As such, we have decided that while there is power in presenting our findings with the approval of the University and the Institutional Review Board, it is more important to us in this present moment to reflect on the works of other abolitionists and imagine what abolitionist continuities might look like alongside organizers within our communities and beyond. The specifics of these conversations and drawings are for us and our communities to use, and the specifics of the conversations and drawings that we hope you, our readers, will create are yours to use in whatever capacity helps your movements and communities survive.

 

How does abolition survive, or, imagination as the lifeblood of abolition

This is a toolkit that grew organically from a simple question: what is abolition? As is so often the case with abolitionist research, it didn’t take us long to come back to the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Abolition is about building the future from the present, in all the ways that we can.”⁵ Similarly, Mariame Kaba understands that abolition starts by asking: “what can we imagine for ourselves and others?”⁶ These provocations led us to the question that we were ultimately most hoping to answer — that is, the question of how we help abolition and abolitionist movements survive, especially in repressive carceral environments like university campuses. 

In the case of CNC, much of the responsibility of maintaining the movement intergenerationally⁷ has been left to archives within the University’s library and created by organizers in the form of the yearly Dis-Orientation guide, an annual fall program series designed by UChicago United “aimed at educating first year students about the real University of Chicago” through workshops about race, gentrification and policing.⁸ However, an archive cannot sustain a movement, instead functioning as a means to “commune with the dead” and “a reminder that there is a cyclical process that connects and makes us responsible for one another.”⁹ The longevity of a movement requires that memory function beyond just recording the facts and flyers of an action. In other words, abolitionist organizing requires that its lifeblood be sustained by something as dynamic as abolition itself: the imagination. Lola Olufemi, a Black feminist writer and researcher from London, suggests that “revolutionary movements require a teleological pool from which to draw from. The imagination is that teleological pool: it not only creates liberators drives; it sustains, justifies, and legitimizes them.”¹⁰

The concept of the imagination being the lifeblood of liberatory movements is one that has been written about extensively by abolitionists like Mariame Kaba and Noname,¹¹ and scholars like Saidiya Hartman.¹² But understanding imagination as a requirement for abolitionist movements is not an answer so much as provocation to more is not an answer so much as provocation to more questions of how to sustain a movement, and how to use and how to use imagination as a tool for disrupting the cyclical blooming, wilting, and forgetting of abolitionist movements that we, the authors, have experienced first hand with CareNotCops.

 

Collective imagination through participatory drawing

One of the authors of this paper, Sophie Plotkin, also has worked as an art teacher in Chicago, and while planning this paper, we realized that the pedagogy they had developed over the years could be re-applied as a strategy for sustaining abolitionist movements. Inspired by Bianca Xunise’s workshop, “Comics as Resistance,”¹³ Plotkin’s students were introduced to comic drawing as a genre and then were guided through a collective art-making process to explore their own identities and how that informs their every day. Much like the photography lesson in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the class was devoted to “dialogic pedagogy,”¹⁴ a dynamic and transformative process of learning that works to do away with hierarchy in the classroom. Despite the many years since the class was first taught, Sophie not only retained what she learned from her students but was also able to teach some of the experience back to the rest of our research team — consequently planting the seeds for the development of our memory-making practice.

Participatory drawing, or what is sometimes called “drawing as interview,” is a strategy that has been used to some success in research on children’s development since it allows children a means by which they can “explore, pose questions, reflect, interpret, and share findings and implications.”¹⁵ However, we did not find any documentation of participatory drawing with adults, and one scholar, Ioana Literat, goes so far as to claim that participatory drawing can only be used in one-on-one settings.¹⁶ Interestingly, Literat also points to Noreen Wetton’s use of participatory drawing to explore the world-making practices of children.¹⁷ We believe that a one-on-one approach is an individualization of world-making practices that fails to take into account that worlds are built communally, abolitionist or otherwise. Also important to note is that not all world-making is liberatory, and socially constructed concepts like race have been used to the benefit of white people, and to the detriment of Black people.¹⁸ However, if we understand imagination to be at the heart of world-making and abolition, then could we create space to imagine challenges to what worlds have already been created? Can we engage the long history of fugitive, revolutionary, abolitionist world-making to draw new liberatory worlds together?

 

Our process

We have expanded the “drawing as interview” approach to encompass abolitionist views of collective meaning-making, largely drawn from the work of our comrade and co-author Sophie Plotkin. We push back against the idea that these approaches can only be used in strictly academic contexts and offer our process as a toolkit to engage in organizational memory-making. The spaces we reference can be any convening of “members,” comrades, allies or people drawn toward a shared vision. The process of drawing and discussion offers a free-flowing and unstructured way of bringing people from various backgrounds and experiences into a space of deeper interrogation of ideals and approach. We suggest using this as a reflection point before, during or after moments that have informed your collective’s work. Some suggestions include before a direct action, after receiving news about a political decision that impacts your work, when onboarding new members into the collective, to process tragedies, or simply as a means for joyful convening with members of your organizing space. Here, we describe a process and offer parallel reflections from our first community art discussion, convened with the goal of offering us a chance to experience and explain our approach. 

 

The following are suggested principles for drawing as meaning-making, accompanied by additional context from a collective drawing interview and discussion we conducted with CareNotCops organizers: 

• All those present (including facilitators) should draw/doodle as part of the community process. 

1. 1. 1. Our first community discussion included three members of our writing team and two additional participants, including one of the founders of the group on the University of Chicago campus. These members were also part of the CareNotCops alumni network,¹⁹ which is how we shared our call with several generations of CareNotCops organizers. We found it incredibly meaningful to have all members participate in the prompt, including those of us who designed the prompt in advance of the session. This breaks down a power dynamic that sometimes exists in formal research spaces, wherein the academic facilitator oversees or watches the participants work as an “unbiased” observer rather than engaging in the process on their own. The undergraduate-led organizing space sometimes results in a short three or four year memory as organizers from prior years graduate and move away, so an additional benefit of this process was the opportunity for older organizers and current members to contribute their memories. 

• Facilitators can offer some options regarding the desired outcome of the art created within the session, and prepare to decide with the collective how or if any artifacts from the session will be retained.

1. 1. 1. Initially, our proposed design involved an empirical, qualitative approach in which the artifacts created from the session would be preserved as part of an archival documentation of CareNotCops. However, through conversations with members of the organizing collective, we realized the specifics of the art did not necessarily need to be shared because those details are most relevant to this particular organizing space. Indeed, this goes against the logic of mainstream academic production, which always assumes the imperative to expand and accumulate across everything that can be turned into capital, including knowledge, land, and art. Instead of operating by these logics, we chose to prioritize the strategic needs of radical movement organizers. Indeed, this goes against the logic of mainstream academic production, which always assumes the imperative to expand and accumulate across everything that can be turned into capital, including knowledge, land, and art. Instead of operating by these logics, we chose to prioritize the strategic needs of radical movement organizers. In future iterations of this approach, we collectively decided that we collectively decided that the shared drawings and discussion that followed will be shared with the participants first, and then taken back to the organizing collective to be shared as a way to retain the emotional depth of abolitionist organizing across years of a movement. 

• Prompts should be broad enough to be inclusive of all members, but should include some concrete follow up questions to allow members to make full use of the drawing time.

1. 1. 1. The writing team of this paper discussed a few versions of the prompt before deciding on the one presented at our first community feedback session. We shortened the length of the convening based on the schedules of the organizers, so our goal became to conduct a trial run with those present, and then ask for their thoughts on the prompt we hope to reconvene with a larger community of CareNotCops and allied organizers later this summer. In our trial drawing round, we took about three minutes to independently draw in response to the question “What does abolition look like to you today?” It was presented as intentionally broad because we wanted everyone to be able to think literally and abstractly in their response, a capaciousness that is possible with the drawing format. 
      2. The prompt that we have planned for a longer drawing session is “How do you keep abolition alive on campus?” This more targeted prompt brings ideas that might connect to specific actions and strategies that organizers may have used and offer a chance to doodle to reconnect the concrete actions back to the broader goals of abolishing campus police and the carceral financial models that uphold their current power within university spaces. The feedback that we received for this prompt was enthusiastic and positive, and encouraged us to reconvene with more time, ideally in person, to share this prompt and draw together again. 

• Silent, individual doodle time should be followed by a chance for all members to converse while finishing their doodles. 

1. 1. 1. Based on our experience and the feedback that we received from organizers who gathered with us, the individual drawing time was an important starting place. It allows each participant in the process to mull over the ideas that come to them and begin to make sense of how they might articulate it in a drawing fashion. While our ideas overlapped and intermingled with each other in the final share out, we kept drawing discussion to mostly neutral topics about the process itself as opposed to commenting on the content of our art. We discussed our different choices of medium (one of us used a pen, one of us on an iPad, and the rest of us using some combination of colored markers on printer paper) and laughed at our own doodles, which set the scene for rich and meaningful dialogue while we looked at each others’ work. We felt connected by the idea of rushing our ideas out onto paper in the shortened five minute drawing window, and even the more reluctant drawers among us felt comfortable drawing in an easygoing and casual conversation space. We found it would have likely been more awkward to go from silent drawing to group sharing without the buffer of open draw and talk time. 

• All members should try and share at least one aspect of their doodle to the collective, but the length and detail of the sharing out can be determined by each individual member. 

1. 1. 1. As facilitators of the trial drawing session, the writing team tried to create an environment where everyone was comfortable sharing their work. As we went around the virtual room sharing out, we were able to pull on ideas from each other’s ideas about abolition that were referenced in our own doodles. The sharing out vacillated between concrete and sensory depictions of times we had organized together, literal snapshots of our experiences on the ground, to more abstract and even meme-ified versions of how we perceived abolition in our lives today. During the share out, we noted how geographic space played into our memories, as all of us had come to some version of our abolitionist beliefs through our engagement with the University of Chicago. Sometimes the dream of abolition as we envision it cannot be captured through past experience. Drawing and doodling followed by the opportunity to share out allows us to expand beyond the types of oral histories we’ve connected in before, because reality and imagination mixed on the page to bring forth a novel combination of visions and experiences that no single organizer could encapsulate in an individual drawing or interview. 

• Before wrapping the session, revisit the goals and outcomes discussed previously. Does this still match the intentions of the space?

1. 1. Our sharing of doodles transitioned easily into a broader debrief. The writing team asked a few questions in response to the community art session to help us better understand what it felt like to be presented with an unknown prompt, the amount of time that was given, and the media and form of our participants’ art. We came to the conclusion that our first approach, individual drawing through a virtual format, offered an opportunity to connect with people who may no longer be based in Chicago, or people who are immunocompromised and need a safe way to participate in this meaning-making journey. For future sessions, we are thinking about safe ways to convene together in person in Chicago and create art together on a shared canvas or doodle pad. We eagerly anticipate a new richness of recollection that comes from the opportunity to bring together our ideas on shared pages. 

 

Continuing thoughts: abolition on campus and organizing methodologies

We join the proponents of abolitionist university studies in consciously responding to the “epistemological refusal of [self] knowledge” that universities have long participated in.²⁰ Through abolitionist university studies we can find a constructive abolitionism on our campuses, conceptualized through the foreclosed social institutions of abolition democracy theorized by Angela Davis (via W.E.B DuBois), the possibility for radical creativity in conflictual relationship with the academy theorized by Dylan Rodriguez, and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s positive, world-making abolition theorized from the university’s undercommons.²¹ Thus a constructive abolitionist approach encourages us to imagine a different construction of safety in and around the university, not as a function of racialized policing, surveillance, violence, and control but as a community project of knowledge creation and study that harkens back to the vision of the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State or the 1962 Congress of Racial Equality sit-in at UChicago demanding the end of the university’s racist housing segregation policy. We can begin to prefigure a world of liberatory knowledge creation by engaging in alternative methodologies for remembering, passing on experiences, and building relationships with each other. Our hope is that a pedagogy and practice of drawing as abolitionist meaning-making can be one such component in our toolkit for liberation. 

 

Coda: On Encampments

In the last week of April 2024, University of Chicago organizers re-engaged in the tactics of encampment, creating a Popular University for Gaza on the main quad outside Levi Hall, which hosts the offices of the president and upper administration. Responding to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, UChicago United for Palestine joined the student movement across the country to take action against the war machine funded by institutions of the state and private capital, including the neoliberal university. What started with a few tents turned into a beautiful and solemn space for art, programming and community mutual aid as an action of solidarity with Palestinians facing forced removal and death. Many members of CNC (past and present) were involved with both the spring 2024 encampment and a prior building occupation in November 2023, recognizing that the fight for abolition includes the fight for a free Palestine. 

Even more so than the 2020 CNC occupation at the Provost’s house, the Popular University for Gaza encampment at the geographic and symbolic heart of the campus brought into stark relief the contradictions inherent in the neoliberal, carceral university versus the possibility of liberatory collective knowledge creation. A glimpse of the latter is what we found in the teach-ins, trainings, shared meals, direct action planning, song circles, and the entire experience of the collective life of the encampment. The former brutally attacked and destroyed the latter. 

Each of us affirms our commitment to a free Palestine and we urge our readers to join us in this fight in the following ways:

1. Sign the petitions demanding that the University of Chicago grants degrees to the student organizers who are being selectively targeted and prevented from graduating as they rightfully deserve to. You can also directly contact the university with this demand, using this template.
2. Support Palestinians directly, either through Gaza Funds, which links a different unmet Palestinian GoFundMe campaign each time the page is opened, or through the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), which provides free medical care to the hundreds of thousands of children injured during the ongoing genocide. 
3. Join the CareNotCops mutual aid network which redistributes funds and resources to different campaigns each month.

 

Notes

1. A parallel could be drawn to the immortal jellyfish, a jellyfish which is biologically immortal because of its ability to reverse its own life cycle when damaged or stressed (linked here). On campus abolitionist groups function similarly, dissolving as students stop organizing due to burn out or graduation, only to be reborn when a new generation of students is radicalized.
2.  Abolition Action 2020, 15.
3.  Gold 2014.
4.  Kartick-Narayan 2018.
5.  Gilmore and Lambert 2019.
6.  Kaba 2020.
7.  For the sake of this toolkit, we understand one generation of students to be the time between when the organizers start a specific campaign and when the last organizer originally involved graduates. To use the case of the occupation mentioned in our introduction as an example, the generation of students involved in that action began in 2020 and ended when the last involved organizer graduated in 2023. Generations of student organizers therefore are significantly shorter than generations by birth, or even the standard four-year tenure of University of Chicago undergraduates.
8.  UChicago United.
9.  Hall 2001.
10.  Olufemi 2021.
11.  Madden et al 2020.
12.  Crenshaw et al 2020.
13.  Xunise 2020.
14.  Freire 1993. Freire used photography in his liberation pedagogy in the favelas of Brazil. He would give youth cameras and ask them to photograph poverty, then to reflect on the meanings of the images and the deeper significance of the circumstances.
15.  Brown et al 2020.
16.  Literat 2013.
17.  Literat 2013.
18.  Smedley 2005; Harris 1993.
19.  The alumni network currently exists in two forms, a group chat where calls for alumni can be sent out, and by word of mouth—many of the current CNC organizers remain friends with the former organizers who acted both as mentors and allies and something as simple as a text can connect generations of students together. That being said, the network is subject to the same pitfalls that all text communications are: a dependency on folks checking their phones, and the inability to communicate anything deeper than requests for action. It is not a network that inherently sustains inter-generational knowledge production though it can be leveraged to aid such work.
20.  Boggs et al 2019. 
21.  Boggs et al 2019. 

 

Notes on Contributors

Sophie (any pronouns) is a devoted doodler and researcher. Her master’s thesis utilizes an interdisciplinary framework that draws from linguistic anthropology, cinema and media studies, the Black feminist tradition, and the knowledge produced by Chicago organizers to explore how the language ideologies of abolitionist student organizers and conservative universities co-constitute each other. She currently works in HIV prevention research and as an organizer who hopes to see a free Palestine and an end to the prison-industrial complex in their lifetime.

Samhitha Krishnan is constantly thinking about creating community spaces of radical joy, intergenerational learning and queer liberation through art, education and food. Samhitha currently works on developing collaborative research partnerships at Chicago Public Schools and as a colloquium coordinator at Beyond Schools Lab. Samhitha enjoys growing tomatoes, reading sci fi and speculative fiction, and dreaming of abolition (a world without police or prisons) through mutual aid and community care. A Midwesterner who calls Chicago home, Samhitha prefers to spend their time organizing open mics of South Asian and allied artists with the Chicago Mehfil, and playing outside in the garden with their partner and dog.

Kelly X. Hui is a fiction writer and abolitionist community organizer. She is a Mellon Mays fellow at the University of Chicago, where she studies English, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and Creative Writing and works as a barista in the basement coffee shop of the divinity school. She is working on a short story collection on Asian American girlhood (and an undergraduate thesis project on literary ghosts). You can find her on Twitter @halfmoonpoem and contact her at kellyxhui@gmail.com.

Neomi Rao (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago. Broadly, her research focuses on how organizers and activists create and disseminate transformative ideas and practices in the contemporary movement to abolish carceral systems. She is presently a union steward with GSU-UE Local 1103, an organizer with the South Asian arts collective Chicago Mehfil, and works with the Beyond Prisons Initiative and Prison-Neighborhood Arts + Education Project assisting with the Justice, Policy, and Culture Think Tank at Stateville Correctional Center.

 

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