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. This concept would “make the whole world a sanctuary for all, everywhere,” especially the lives “we don't ordinarily see our connections to” like those of other species and the environment itself (Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary). Pursuing these connections, Juno Salazar Parreñas asks in Decolonizing Extinction, “What if we experienced this present era of extinction without violent domination and colonization over others, particularly nonhuman beings?” She goes on to argue that confronting the shared horizon of extinction means embracing risk and unequal vulnerability across species and recalibrating care against the reality of hospice. Along these lines, this seminar aims to cultivate a diverse contemporary archive for theorizing justice. 

Drawing from abolitionist, environmental justice, critical refugee studies, and multispecies approaches, this seminar is guided by the following questions: What does it mean to live justly at the end of the world(s)? What conventions of activism and social justice must be revisited within the horizon of extinction? How do the arts of the present reconceive justice for humans and more-than-humans? How do we build worlds that take seriously “where life is precious, life is precious”? 

This seminar invites work from writers, practitioners, artists, curators, organizers, and scholars that respond to Gilmore’s premise “where life is precious, life is precious,” and/or reflect on chronic catastrophes of the present where this sense of preciousness is absent.

Multiple and diverse avenues of inquiry are desired. Possible directions may include but are not limited to: anticarceral activism, environmental justice, critical refugee studies, liberation pedagogy, black radical thought, feminist and queer carework, multispecies relatedness, ecocriticism, black ecologies, indigenous resistance movements, climate grief or solastalgia, protest rhetoric, and coalitional politics. 

As a seminar, participants will contribute a paper, presentation, or work-in-progress and share a text for a collective bibliography. These materials will be pre-circulated (July/August) to build a foundation for discussion when we gather as a seminar group in October.

Please send abstracts (100 word max) and a short bio by Friday, March 14 to Jennie Snow at snowj@montclair.edu.