“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities…Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can…” – Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The Piano Lesson (Homage to Mary Lou) by Romare Bearden
Alia Russell (they/them) is a student of psychology, sociology and the social dimensions of health. With this knowledge, they aspire to earn their PhD in psychology to treat peripartum and postpartum parents. They are a directly impacted survivor of the family regulation system and hope to build a future where policing is replaced with robust care.
Lucien Baskin is a doctoral candidate in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center researching abolition, social movements, and the university. He is writing a dissertation on organizing at CUNY, as well as collaborative projects on Black radical education in the United States and Britain. Lucien’s writing has been published in outlets such as Truthout, Society & Space, The Abusable Past, and Mondoweiss. Currently, they serve as co-chair of the American Studies Association Critical Prison Studies Caucus, and work as a media and publicity fellow at Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center. Lucien organizes with CUNY for Palestine and is a (strike-ready!) rank-and-file member of the PSC.
Dr. Jordan Bell is a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow at the Erikson Institute. He is an award-winning Black Studies, English, Philosophy, and Teacher Education educator who teaches courses through a critical lens. Jordan obtained his Ph.D. in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. Jordan has research interests that center around Critical Race Theory, BlackCrit, Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education (CRSE), Healing Centered Engagement, and Racial Literacy. Those research interests culminate into two primary research strands: One is on developing educators’ and students’ racial literacy so that they can successfully respond to and engage in a multicultural world, and the other is in learning about and creating the conditions for Black Educational Spaces that are designed to center Black students’ healing. Jordan has been awarded a Spencer Foundation Grant, been named as a 2022-24 Cultivating New Voices for Scholars of Color Fellow by the National Council of Teachers of English, and his work has been published in journals such as Comparative Education Review and Equity & Excellence in Education.
Dr. Shani Buggs, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine with the Violence Prevention Research Program and the California Firearm Violence Research Center at the University of California, Davis. Her public health and health policy expertise includes structural and social drivers of violence and safety, firearm violence prevention, community-level violence intervention and prevention, transformative first response strategies, and comprehensive community safety. Striving to center the experiences of those most impacted by interpersonal and structural violence, she informs policies to foster equity, safety, and well-being for all families and communities. She has gained national recognition for coordinating and advising violence prevention approaches around the U.S. and has secured federal, state, and private funding to lead research projects related to inequities in violence exposure, involvement, and survival.
Erin Miles Cloud is a senior attorney at the Civil Rights Corps. She was a founding co-director of Movement for Family Power, an abolitionist movement hub and incubator, cultivating and harnessing community power to end family policing and build a world where all families can thrive. She has also been a supervising attorney and team leader at the Bronx Defenders, a holistic public defense office located in the South Bronx, where she specialized in family defense and represented adults entrenched in the child welfare system. She has published articles and given lectures on the racial disproportionality of the child welfare system and its impact on Black and Brown women and children. In collaboration with the greater fight for reproductive justice for all women of color, she works with Black Mamas Matter to increase equity in maternal outcomes for all Black women. She is a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Fordham Law School.
Atasi Das (Urban Ed Cohort 15) is an Assistant Professor in the the Early Childhood and Childhood Education program at Lehman College. Her research interests include rehumanizing mathematics, transdisciplinary approaches to critical numeracy, anti-racist teacher education, and abolitionist teaching practices in STEM.
Dr. Mia Karisa Dawson is an urban geographer and community organizer with research interests in the areas of race, policing, and housing. After receiving her doctorate in Geography from the University of California, Davis in 2023, Mia was awarded a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity in the Department of Geography at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Alongside her academic work, Mia has worked as an advocate with organizations including the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and Decarcerate Sacramento on initiatives that oppose policing and incarceration.
Adrian Edmundson is a black transgender man originally from Uganda, who has experienced displacement due to his sexual orientation. After fleeing his home country, he was granted asylum in Kenya and is now awaiting permanent settlement in Canada—a place where he hopes to finally experience the freedom and safety, he was denied in both his homeland and country of asylum.
Adrian holds a degree in Business Communication and an Associate’s degree in Science General Studies from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a diploma in Public Administration from Bishop Stuart University. He is eager to further his education with a focus on program management and services that address community needs, legal frameworks that protect the rights of marginalized populations, and the promotion of effectiveness in multicultural settings.
A committed activist, Adrian has been actively involved in advocating for LGBTIQ rights and amplifying black voices through his creative writing.
Ayla Gelsinger is a current graduate student in the department of community and applied developmental psychology at the University of Illinois – Chicago. She received her MSW from the Columbia School of Social Work where she focused on family, youth, and children’s services. She is a first-generation college student and recently graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas with degrees in Communication Studies and Psychology. During her undergraduate career, Ayla published independent research, participated in various research labs, and presented her work at multiple conferences. Ayla was a Court Appointed Special Advocate for four children in the foster care system and volunteered with children that experienced trauma in various capacities. Ayla is interested in studying new methods of trauma detection in grade school and hopes to one day implement policy that will identify trauma earlier in life. Ayla is also interested in developing community-based restorative programs for teenagers that have experienced sexual abuse. Ayla has been a part of the Oral History and Disability Justice Initiatives.
With the aim to institute theory into action, Dr. Kaleb Germinaro works in community with folks to address issues of equity, justice and space. In addition to his responsibilities as a professor at UIC, he stewards and organizes for anti-displacement work at Estelita’s Library, a small social justice library and bookstore in Seattle, WA. He keenly pays attention to and focuses on space, how his disability and Blackness are supported and/or suppressed in spaces, and how he navigates justice and liberation through his spatial orientations. Three lines of inquiry are most pertinent now:
- The role of Black and Disability theories and knowledge in how we understand the role of learning and education in climate, spatial and social justice.
- How youth engage intersections of race, the environment, and space through community design and the built environment.
- Black knowledge, methods, and stories in qualitative methods.
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.
Asia S. Ivey is a sociologist with an interdisciplinary research agenda that centers on community violence intervention and prevention, educational equity, and racialized organizational policy. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Davis, and holds a B.A. in Psychology from Spelman College. Asia currently serves as a Research Data Analyst for UC Davis Health’s Violence Prevention Research Program.
Brian Jones (Urban Ed Cohort 12) is director of the Center for Educators and School at The New York Public Library. He is the former associate director of education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where he was also a scholar in residence. Brian writes about Black education history and politics and his first book, The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s 2023 Nonfiction Literary Award.
Shawn Koyano is a Black queer mother, survivor, and advocate for survivors and families seeking community, belonging, and healing from violent systems. She was raised by a Black single mother who worked to instill in her the value of her own life, perseverance and the will to thrive. Her work is centered and grounded in Black feminist radical care, abolition, and dreaming of possibilities for families to be safe and whole. Shawn has worked in nonprofit management for 20 years and values supporting families in community. She has served as Program Director of Families of Color Seattle (FOCS) and is a student in the dual MSW/MEd in Human Sexuality program at Widener University and strives to work with parents of color and birth giving folks to heal sexual trauma. She is an advocate for families in the public school system and has worked to implement equitable practices in parent involvement and teacher hiring. She is a member of Mandatory Reporting is Not Neutral (MRNN) and the Duwamish Solidarity Group. Shawn enjoys spending time with her family, reading, acquiring and caring for her new plants, being on the water, and growing food.
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.
David A. Maldonado is a formerly incarcerated activist and Postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley where he teaches anticapitalism and abolition pedagogy. His work is informed by being from and studying West Berkeley and the relationship of the university to it.
Edwin Mayorga is an Associate Professor of Educational Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies at Swarthmore College. As founder and co-researcher of the Education in our Barrios Project (#BarrioEdProj) in Philadelphia and New York City, a college and high school-aged, participatory action research (YPAR) collaborative, his goal is to work with and for urban, Latinx core communities. Edwin’s other major project is the Philadelphia Community, School and College Partnership (CSCP) Study where he and his students are examining various approaches and visions of community and school partnerships in the Philadelphia school district. He initiated the Critical Education Policy Studies (#CritEdPol) group, which is a space geared toward encouraging a critical policy studies approach, where they look historically and contemporaneously at educational and social problems and policy formations. He is the co-editor of What’s Race Got To Do With It?: How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality with Bree Picower and Ujju Aggarwal.
Writer, educator and organizer, Erica R. Meiners’ current books include For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (University of Minnesota 2016), a co-edited anthology The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom (Haymarket Press 2018); the co-authored Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (Verso 2020); and the co-authored Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Haymarket 2022). A Distinguished Visiting Scholar at a range of universities and centers – Erica has published articles in a wide range of publications including In These Times, Social Text, Radical Teacher, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Advocate, Boston Review. The Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, Erica is a member of her labor union, University Professionals of Illinois, and Erica teaches classes in education, gender and sexuality studies, and justice studies. Most importantly, Erica has collaboratively started and works alongside others in a range of ongoing mobilizations for liberation, particularly movements that involve access to free public education for all, including people during and after incarceration, and other queer abolitionist struggles. A member of Critical Resistance, the Illinois Death in Custody Project, the Prison+Neighborhood Arts / Education Project, and the Education for Liberation Network, Erica is a sci-fi fan, an avid runner, and a lover of bees and cats.
Alexis Nicole Neely (@pizzagirllex) is an illustrator, animator, and does a little video, too! Her journey began at the University of Mississippi, where she majored in journalism with a minor in African-American studies. She later attended American University, where she graduated with an MFA in Film and Media Arts. She loves visual media and telling our stories with it. Alexis likes to think of herself as “creating art that moves,” because she is also an alum of the Center for Third World Organizing’s Movement Activist Apprenticeship Program. It was a unique experience where she received training in grassroots organizing and movements for social change, and it gave her a deeper understanding of the role of art in movement. In her spare time, when she’s not creating, she enjoy cozy gaming, karaoke, walks, HIIT workouts, endless Pinterest scrolling, and YouTube binges.
Charlie Overton is a Geography PhD Student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work focuses on the social dimensions of climate change adaptation in urban areas and small island states. As part of the NOAA RISA Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN) he has worked on creating a decision-making toolkit to enhance post-extreme event learning toolkit in communities recently affected by climate-based disasters, uncovering how resilience is reimagined and applied in contexts where previous interventions have exacerbated inequities that produce climate vulnerability, and analyzing effective community engagement approaches regarding cascading risks and compound extreme events. Charlie is also a fellowship coordinator at the NYC Climate Justice Hub, which is a partnership between CUNY and the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance. For his dissertation, Charlie is analyzing the relationship between international climate financing and framings of justice and vulnerability in adaptation and development projects in the Caribbean nation of Grenada. As part of this project, he is focusing on the role diasporic communities play in the movement of ideas around justice and vulnerability and the impact these communities have on development initiatives.
A founding member of the Accountable Communities Consortium, Shannon Perez-Darby is a queer, mixed, Latina, anti-violence advocate, author, activist, and consultant working to create the conditions to support loving, equitable relationships and communities. With nearly 20 years of experience Shannon Perez-Darby centers queer and trans communities of color while working to address issues of domestic and sexual violence, accountability, criminal legal system harms and prison abolition. Her work on these topic can be found in the The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Friendship as Social Justice Activism: Critical Solidarities in a Global Perspective, among other publications.
Darius Phelps is a PhD Candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University, Anaphora Arts Fellow, and 2023 Recipient of the NCTE Early Career Educator of Color Award. He is the Assistant Director of Programs under The Center for Publishing & Applied Liberal Arts (PALA) department at NYU. An educator, poet/essayist, spoken word artist, and activist, Darius writes poems about grief, liberation, emancipation, reflection through the lens of a teacher of color and experiencing Black boy joy. He serves as Poetry co- editor for Matter and an Associate Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. His work and poems have appeared in the School Library Journal, NY English Record, NCTE English Journal, English Quarterly, Pearl Press Magazine, ëëN Magazine, and many more. Recently, he was featured on WCBS and highlighted the importance of Black male educators in the classroom.
Jenna (Jennifer) Queenan (she/her) is a White, queer educator and organizer who has been living, teaching, and learning in New York City since 2011. She began working at Sunset Park High School in Brooklyn as an ENL teacher in 2013 and left the DOE in 2020 to begin a PhD in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. Jenna has been involved in the New York Collective of Radical Educators in various capacities since 2012, before joining the NYCoRE core (leadership) in 2021. She has co-facilitated several Inquiry to Action groups. She also advocated for immigrant rights in NYC schools with the Teach Dream educator team at the New York State Youth Leadership Council, the first undocumented, youth-led organization in New York from 2013 to 2023.
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.
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.
Dr. Travis Richards is an accomplished professional with over 20 years of experience in design and 15 years in research. His work skillfully integrates creativity with in-depth research, emphasizing empathy, abstract thinking, and social justice. Travis has a proven track record in community engagement, including political campaigns, and is recognized for his storytelling prowess as a recently published poetic scholar. His career interests span roles in copywriting, art direction, and international education, reflecting his diverse skill set and commitment to impactful, inclusive work.
Robert P. Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at John Jay College and Doctoral Faculty in Urban Education and Interactive Technology & Pedagogy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His broad research and teaching focus on the Black Freedom Movement, Black education history, Blackqueer studies, digital humanities, history of education, and curriculum studies. His forthcoming book project is a history of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School (OCS) as a site for understanding Black self-determination, the shift in mainstream curriculum and pedagogy, and the Black radical imagination in education.
Christopher R. Rogers, Ph.D., is a Philadelphia-based cultural organizer and educator hailing from Chester, PA with more than a decade of local experience in supporting radical arts, culture, and community-building. He’s currently a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction and co-coordinates the Friends of The Tanner House, incubating a revitalized National Historic Landmark rowhome that Dr. Carter G. Woodson once dubbed the “center of Black intellectual life in Philadelphia.” He has previously served in key roles with National Black Lives Matter at School, Cops Off Campus Coalition, Philadelphia Student Union, Paul Robeson House & Museum, and more.
Pam Segura (she/her) is a political educator from New York City. She has also taught as a New York City public school teacher in the Bronx and a community educator in southwest Yonkers. She organize with the New York Collective of Radical Educators.
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.
Kushya Sugarman has been an elementary school teacher for 15 years, focusing on student-centered pedagogy and play as a pathway to liberatory change. She has collaborated with both traditional and community educators and artists. Currently, Kushya is a PhD candidate in Urban Education at the Graduate Center (CUNY). There, she collaborates with teachers and children to study how play, storywork, and art support fugitive and abolitionist pedagogies. Her work aims to co-create environments that nurture Black futurity, embracing social visions of radical freedom beyond systems of oppression.
Cynthia Tobar is an artist, activist-scholar, filmmaker and oral historian passionate about creating participatory stories documenting social change. A first-generation Ecuadorian American born and raised in NYC, she strives to blend rigorous research with diverse artistic mediums to shed light on marginalized narratives and forgotten histories. She is the founder of Cities for People, Not for Profit, an oral history project documenting gentrification and displacement in Bushwick. Cynthia is Associate Professor/Head Librarian at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor at Queens College where she teaches oral history and archival research courses.
Van is passionate about the abolition of the Family Regulation, specifically for the sake of adoptees and children everywhere. They graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with a degree in Public Policy. During their time at UMD, they researched family policy and education policy, later leading to an internship about underaged marriage in the United States and another with their local government Department of Community Resources and Services. This prompted them to seek out opportunities surrounding how children and families are treated, the institution of parenting, and how the government responds to people they label to be in crisis.Van started working with Movement for Family Power in 2020 as a summer intern, assisting with operations and research. There, they received vital political education explaining the depths of violence caused by family policing and re-contextualizing their own lived experience as an adoptee. That following fall, starting a social work master’s program proved to be in conflict with their values. They left their program and rejoined MFP in the summer of 2022 as a Team Coordinator and spent time early in 2023 as a Research Assistant for a project on mandated reporting.
Jasmine Wali, MSW, is the Director of Policy & Advocacy at JMACforFamilies, a nonprofit working to replace the child welfare system with better support for families. She manages JMAC’s city, state, and federal policy advocacy, and projects around mandated reporting and Know Your Rights outreach. She was a Fisher Cummings Policy Fellow at the federal Office on Trafficking in Persons in DC and served on the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse project committee to make program eligibility recommendations for federal funding. She is also a practicum instructor at Columbia School of Social Work.
Gabrielle Warren is a Ph.D. student in Curriculum and Pedagogy at OISE/University of Toronto. She is deeply interested in the history and politics of Canadian education, with a specific focus on policy research. For the past eight years, Gabrielle has worked with Start2Finish Canada, an organization dedicated to alleviating the effects of poverty for school-aged children through community connection and educational enrichment. In her role, she has developed programs, collaborated with researchers, engaged with volunteers, and participated in anti-poverty campaigns, integrating her academic work with direct action and advocacy.
Cinnamon Williams is a poet and a student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York where she is completing a degree in Criminology.
Imani Wilson is a current Doctoral student in the Sociology of Education program at New York University. Born and raised in Chicago, she has a background working with youth in classrooms and out-of-school settings in addition to serving as a community organizer. Imani is committed to understanding radical Black pursuits for liberation through educational and community-centered movements. They focus their work through a historical, Black studies, and abolitionist lens. Imani currently works as a Research Assistant at the NYU Metro Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. She also serves as the Graduate Student Coordinator for the Race and Public Space Working Group through NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.
Karen Zaino is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry at Miami University of Ohio and a recent graduate of the PhD program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include teacher education, youth participatory action research, anti-oppressive education, open pedagogy, and queer and trans studies in education.
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