ASAP-16 (2025) -- Rethinking Justice “Where Life is Precious…”
In recounting how she introduces prison abolition work to skeptics, Ruth Wilson Gilmore shares the principle, “where life is precious, life is precious.” This life-affirming axiom grounds a praxis that is about changing everything, breaking with oppressive power systems and making worlds that reduce harm by investing in care. At the same time, the ongoing climate crisis reinforces a horizon of extinction that reorients the relationships between more-than-human and human lives, demanding more radical conceptions of our collective world(s). A. Naomi Paik, for instance, develops the idea of “abolitionist sanctuary” out of the movement for immigrant rights.