Shared Horizons
The Politics and Poetics of Transnational Abolition
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︎ A Brief Note on Translation
Shared Horizons: The Politics and Poetics of Transnational Abolition is a living archive and digital platform where abolitionist collectives, groups, and organisations can present their work, share their visions, and further connect beyond borders.
In this current conjuncture of capitalism, carceral punishment, policing, war, bordering and genocide are some of the most flagrant technologies used to keep marginalised working class and working poor communities under control and killable. State violence and organised abandonment go hand in hand in the management and production of mass death of especially migrant, racialised, queer, trans and disabled working class peoples. Ongoing liberation struggles are unfolding on a global scale towards the horizon of abolition. This is not only understood as the dismantling of specific institutions like police, prisons or borders, but centrally as an internationalist anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggle against capitalism and its methods in order to manifest living alternatives.
These struggles have been taken up across various genealogies and traditions, shared and transformed beyond a singular geospecific context, in translingual, transnational, and transhistorical ways. Questions and possibilities for abolition outside of the United States and Canada—including lands forcibly occupied by those settler nation-states—have many different valences that are often not attended to. Despite this, abolitionist poetics and practices continue to unfold as a necessarily transnational project.
Shared Horizons is a platform developed as a contribution to the ongoing transnational orientation that grounds in our abolitionist poetics and politics through attention to language, meaningful/sustained connection building, collective struggles on the ground, digital and material cultures, and radical aesthetic traditions. It is a living and multi-translated digital archive dedicated to collectives and social movements that engage in and learn from abolitionist practices and poetics on an international scale. This platform encourages movements and collectives to connect further in their building and therefore contributes to the transnational dimension of abolition. It also encourages individuals who yearn for these visions to get informed and get involved by giving a sense of the work that has been done for those who wish to actively engage.
This collaborative project is organised and initiated by Vanessa Eileen Thompson and SA Smythe based on their respective research and many years of political organising. Together, they anchor this archival project in radical black, queer, trans, internationalist, and feminist genealogies to articulate transdisciplinary methods towards abolitionist and anticapitalist horizons.
In this current conjuncture of capitalism, carceral punishment, policing, war, bordering and genocide are some of the most flagrant technologies used to keep marginalised working class and working poor communities under control and killable. State violence and organised abandonment go hand in hand in the management and production of mass death of especially migrant, racialised, queer, trans and disabled working class peoples. Ongoing liberation struggles are unfolding on a global scale towards the horizon of abolition. This is not only understood as the dismantling of specific institutions like police, prisons or borders, but centrally as an internationalist anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggle against capitalism and its methods in order to manifest living alternatives.
These struggles have been taken up across various genealogies and traditions, shared and transformed beyond a singular geospecific context, in translingual, transnational, and transhistorical ways. Questions and possibilities for abolition outside of the United States and Canada—including lands forcibly occupied by those settler nation-states—have many different valences that are often not attended to. Despite this, abolitionist poetics and practices continue to unfold as a necessarily transnational project.
Shared Horizons is a platform developed as a contribution to the ongoing transnational orientation that grounds in our abolitionist poetics and politics through attention to language, meaningful/sustained connection building, collective struggles on the ground, digital and material cultures, and radical aesthetic traditions. It is a living and multi-translated digital archive dedicated to collectives and social movements that engage in and learn from abolitionist practices and poetics on an international scale. This platform encourages movements and collectives to connect further in their building and therefore contributes to the transnational dimension of abolition. It also encourages individuals who yearn for these visions to get informed and get involved by giving a sense of the work that has been done for those who wish to actively engage.
This collaborative project is organised and initiated by Vanessa Eileen Thompson and SA Smythe based on their respective research and many years of political organising. Together, they anchor this archival project in radical black, queer, trans, internationalist, and feminist genealogies to articulate transdisciplinary methods towards abolitionist and anticapitalist horizons.