Please find my article here! It’s been three years in the making and I couldn’t be more excited to see it out in the world. Let me know what you think!
Abstract. This article considers the significance of disrespecting property as a long-standing practice of abolition. As an organizer, observer and participant, I consider a series of Black Lives Matter protests in Sacramento that transgress the dictates of property in the city. I apply Cedric Robinson’s under-examined theory of the terms of order to understand these transgressions as fundamental threats to assemblages of capitalism, whiteness and policing. As the ruptures caused by protests and riots reveal, property is neither static nor infallible as an arrangement of space. Rather, it is relational and contingent on state force and self-disciplined social behavior. I argue that transgressing the physical markers of property reflects a more revolutionary practice of destabilizing the ideologies of social order upon which property depends. Such interruptions desanctify property by refusing its legitimacy as an arbiter of social life and movement in space. Desanctifying property practices the forms of collectivity, autonomy, and deviant kinship that abolition demands. In situating my methods in this work, I offer a framework of abolition geography as a way of study that participates in social movement, focuses on everyday practices of revolution, and refutes hegemonic ideas of social life and scale.
Acknowledgements. My work is made possible by the organizers and visionaries who fight every day for abolition in Sacramento and beyond. They have inspired my imagination and my dedication to fight for the world we deserve. I would further like to thank everyone involved in the Racial Regimes of Property paper session at the 2019 American Association of Geographers meeting for their inspiration. I extend special thanks to Anne Bonds, Malini Ranganathan, and Neil Agarwal for their generous readings, kind encouragement, and thoughtful feedback. I thank Julie Sze for our crucial conversations in clarifying my argument and its significance. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful and important feedback.