Practicing New Worlds
Abolition and Emergent Strategies
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- US$10.99
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An exploration of how emergent strategies can help us meet this moment, survive what is to come, and shape safer and more just futures.
Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive.
Drawing on decades of experience as an abolitionist organizer, policy advocate, and litigator in movements for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice and the principles articulated by adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Ritchie invites us to think beyond traditional legislative and policy change to create more possibilities for survival and resistance in the midst of the ongoing catastrophes of racial capitalism—and the cataclysms to come. Rooted in analysis of current abolitionist practices and interviews with on-the-ground organizers resisting state violence, building networks to support people in need of abortion care, and nurturing organizations and convergences that can grow transformative cities and movements, Practicing New Worlds takes readers on a journey of learning, unlearning, experimentation, and imagination to dream the worlds we long for into being.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this probing volume, lawyer and prison abolition activist Ritchie (Invisible No More) moves away from the top-down, policy and litigation-centered organizing strategies that previously characterized her activism and turns her attention to the decentralized, community-centered frameworks elucidated in adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy. Though still committed to the importance of policy work to address immediate harms to individuals, Ritchie shows how an "emergent strategy" approach (which entails following the unplanned initiatives that emerge organically from within a group) is more likely to yield real cultural change, pointing to the uprisings in 2020 following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as examples. She describes abolition activism as fractal, like a fern, and synchronized without centralized leadership, like a flock of starlings. Emphasizing the importance of fiction in imagining a radically better future, she analyzes among other works two stories from the science fiction anthology Black Freedom Beyond Borders that envision a world without prisons and police, and spotlights creative work being done by various projects and cooperatives, such as Harm Free Zone experiments in Brooklyn, N.Y.; New Orleans; and Durham, N.C. Ritchie convinces the reader as she convinces herself that leaning into emergent principles is the key to shaping a more equitable future. Old-school organizers and newly inspired activists would do well to consider what Ritchie has learned. Correction: An earlier version of this review had the wrong titles for adrienne maree brown's book and the science fiction anthology from which the author selected two stories to analyze.
