CFPs: Beyond Cages and Walls

Beyond Cages and Walls: Bridging Prison Abolition and Immigrant Justice Movements

Call for Submissions – Please circulate widely
Deadline February 15, 2009


Description and Purpose:
In the US, some 2.4 million people are imprisoned while 1.6 million migrants have been deported since 1996. On a world scale, while most people’s movement is constrained by a system of global apartheid, policing strategies are shared across national borders that are commonly used to crack down on political organizing and dissent. What are the connections between the prison industrial complex and migration policies that are symbolized by deadly cages and walls? How do these different state policies both divide and connect different groups of people across nationality, citizenship, race, class, gender, and sexuality? What work do these sturdy tools of division, isolation, and control do at this moment of economic crisis? What are the ideologies that make walls and cages seem so durable, and what cracks in these edifices can movements for social justice and liberation open up?

Making links between prison policies and migration policies is important for being able to understand and challenge white supremacy, US imperialism, capitalism, and militarization. We want to understand the ways in which the prison abolition and immigrant justice movements are opposing state violence and the creative ways in which they are working to build a world without walls and cages. How might organizing around the “right to stay” be a way of bridging communities who face economic dislocation – whether through free trade policies or gentrification – and repressive state policies alike?

This collection will bring materials from people who are directly affected by these systems together with work from organizers, activists, advocates, artists, poets, and researchers. We invite a range of submissions, including poems, testimonies, visual arts, analyses, criticism, strategies and campaigns for change. We will be publishing this book with a popular independent press.


About the editors:
Jenna Loyd is a scholar-activist who is a member of the Syracuse-based Detainment Task Force, which organizes against migrant detention and raids. Matt Mitchelson is a geographer researching imprisonment and working with former prisoners. Andrew Burridge is a geography graduate student and activist working towards freedom of movement within the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and beyond.

If you are interested in learning more about or contributing to this project, please see http://beyondcagesandwalls.blogspot.com, or contact Jenna Loyd at jloyd@gc.cuny.edu, 310-490-9166, Center for Place Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth St, New York, NY 10016.