Respair is kicking off the year by sharing a new project that we're proud to partner with and share with you! Welcome to Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities, a series of narrative essays that reflect on emergent themes from conversations with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to abolition of police and prisons.

This is Episode 1, entitled Alienation from Ourselves, Each Other, and Our Needs. Joined by a chorus of voices and visionaries, Detroit-based artist Lauren Williams invites us to consider roadmaps to futures we hope for, through a focus on the everyday & the contradictions of neoliberal philosophy. Should everything really be for sale, will the market protect the worthy?

First, a foundation: How do our ways of working separate us from our power and possibility? What exactly is neoliberalism, how did it become the dominant social and economic logic of U.S. civil society? What does any of this have to do with abolition?

To answer that last question first, it comes down to criminalization and control. Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy and civic fights about water access serve as examples of how accepting a logic of separation weakens our ability to challenge social problems that affect people in very connected ways. Williams illuminates the short path from privatization to deprivation, before limning the difference between the state’s compulsion to watch & the human need to be seen.

The series is presented in partnership with Making Room for Abolition, a body of work that imagines a world without police and prisons by making speculative worlds through the lens of a home. It was dreamed up, written and produced by Lauren Williams; essays were co-produced by Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Featured guests include Nick Buckingham, Curtis Renee, Tawana Petty, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic, Monica Lewis-Patrick, Nate Mullen, Sirrita Darby, Kim Sherrobi, Monique Thompson, and Myrtle Thompson-Curtis. Voice actors who read various excerpts from references are credited on each episode. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

Full time-stamped transcripts are available at www.makingroom.online/essays. This show is presented in partnership with Respair Production & Media.