Abolitionist Futures Digest: April 2026
Abolitionist Futures Online Reading Group returns
After a year off, the Abolitionist Futures Reading Group is back. This year the readings have been updated to include some brilliant new publications.
With genocide in Gaza, Israel’s and USA’s attacks on Iran, and intensified state oppression and violence across the globe, now is a time to explore how an alternative can be conceived and built. If you don’t think that prisons, borders and police are the solution to the problems and harms we face in our lives, then join us to explore abolitionist possibilities.
Sessions will be held on zoom starting 5th May 2026, every second Tuesday evening (7.30 pm - 9:00 pm - UTC+1/BST). We usually start the call together, then break out into smaller rooms with a facilitator in each group to discuss the readings, and then return to the larger call.
We will have six sessions covering the readings and a seventh to reflect on how we take things forward:
5th May 2026Session 1: Introduction to Abolition
19th May 2026Session 2: What’s wrong with reform?
2nd June 2026Session 3: Feminist, Queer, Antiracist Abolition
16th June 2026Session 4: Policing, Anti Racism & Abolition
30th June 2026Session 5: Transformative Justice
14th July 2026Session 6: Everyday Abolition
28th July 2026 Session 7: So what do I do? From reading to action
Click here for audio versions of the readings (currently being updated)
Abolitionist Futures Online Reading Group: Call for facilitators:
For those of you who have joined us before we’d love to see you again! If you fancy joining the facilitation team please email us at abolitionistfutures@gmail.com. We will be having a facilitation briefing session on Thursday 23rd April (7pm-8pm UTC+1/BST).
Event happening soon: Occupations of Uninhabited Space 02:
No Data Plan with Miko Revereza
Date: Saturday 11 April
Time: 7pm
Location: SET Social, 55a Nigel Road, Peckham, SE15 4NP
Tickets: Pay What You Can (£3-£10)
'Earn Settlement' and migrant rights in the UK for Kanlungan Filipino Consortium at SET Social next Saturday. It will be followed by a discussion with the Kanlungan and the filmmaker Miko Revereza, who is from Manila and had lived in the US as an undocumented migrant for over 20 years.
Join us for a creative community resistance against the far-right narrative — from the ongoing atrocities committed by ICE in the US to the recent introduction of the classist and racist ‘Earn Settlement’ plan in the UK — and stand with migrants across the globe through an evening of film and conversations.
Event: book launch in London
The path of revolution is not a straight line. It will be like a streak of stars, a series of conflagrations lighting up the night, each one pointing the way more clearly than the last, until we finally pass the point of no return.
New from The Peoples Want, a network of collectives, organisations and individuals around the world committed to an politics of solidarity, mutual aid, and internationalism from below, we are delighted to share Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto, now in stock!
Follow the links below for our upcoming launch events online and in London!
DATE: Thursday 16th April
TIME: 6pm – 8pm (with time to socialize after)
PLACE: Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green London E1 5QJ
RelatedPanel, online streamed to YouTube
Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto
Tue Apr 14, 2026 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM EDT
Hybrid Talk by Alison Phipps
'Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism'
23 April, 1pm UK time
On April 23rd, Alison Phipps will be doing a talk on the forthcoming book, hosted by the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at the University of Manchester. The talk is free, hybrid and open to all, whether in person or online – you just need to sign up
ABSTRACT:
What are the relationships between sexual violence, sexual fear, social control, and surplus value? What is the role of sexual violence as racial capitalist systems corral, mould, use, and discard the workers they require? Sexual violence is key to the enclosure of bodies, and to the extraction of productive and socially reproductive labour. Sexual violence is a technique by which resources are expropriated, and communities and peoples terrorised and dispossessed. Sexual violence is also a pretext for the disposal of unwanted populations through criminal punishment, militarised border regimes, neo-colonial wars, and genocide.
This talk is based on the forthcoming book Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism (Manchester University Press), which brings together assorted case studies including the Early Modern witch hunts, reproductive accumulation in transatlantic slavery, sexual harassment in drop-shipping warehouses and sweatshops, far-right Islamophobia and ‘anti-gender’ activism, the manosphere, and the Gaza genocide.
Podcast
The Death Panel 'Abolish ICE Means Abolish the Police’ with Mariame Kaba & Andrea Ritchie (Unlocked)
Beatrice speaks with Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie about how we should understand the spectacular violence of Trump’s ICE surges as an extension of the violence of everyday policing, lessons in resisting proposed “reforms” that would actually give more power to ICE, and how community care and community defense help build a world toward abolition.
Podcast
Rupture and Repair Under Fascist Conditions
“We have a great opportunity in our movements to learn how to be opponents without being enemies,” says Tanuja Jagernauth. In this first of a two-part conversation, Tanuja and Kelly discuss the language people use to describe harm and conflict, the difference between disagreement and abuse, and how organizers can move through conflict with more clarity and care under fascist conditions.
Article and podcast
The rise of facial recognition policing, by Mark Wilding
The technology is being rolled out by forces across the country—and there are no obvious limits on how it can be used.
Research request for participants
Law, transformative change and abolition feminism to address gendered violence
Dr Nikki Godden-Rasul at Newcastle Law School
‘I want to understand how feminist organisers, activists, lawyers and gender-based violence sector workers who do not rely on prisons and policing to address gendered violence engage with law for transformative social change. While community-based alternative forms of transformative justice are being practiced, there is still a question about using law as part of wider strategies to dismantle harmful institutions and change the social, political and economic conditions which enable gendered violence.’
Resources
Takatoat and South Feminist Futures’ second joint session 'Imagining and Living Justice in a Feminist Future.'
This panel focused on the meanings and manifestations of justice in the feminist imaginary, while centering the lived experiences of feminists organising in contexts of war and crises. We started from Takatoat’s Voices from a Feminist Future publication to set the scene for our guests who will share with us visions of feminist justice from the contexts of Sudan, Syria, and Lebanon. We want to think about complex and challenging questions for our feminist organising in the Global South: How do we redefine justice beyond punishment? What does a feminist vision of safety look like? What role do care and collective responsibility play in shaping societal accountability?
South Feminist Futures (@southfeministfutures)
Exhibition
‘Criminal: An untold history of homelessness, resistance and survival’
Graphic design by Matt Bonner
Dates: May/June/July
Museum of Homelessness, London
Criminal is a historical exhibition exploring the causes and criminalisation of homelessness from the 1600s to today and featuring new works by 10Foot, Gemma Lees , spellingmistakescostlives, mattbonner.art and surfingsofas
This exhibition has been cooked up by our crew, community and our artists over this winter and we cannot wait to share it with you.
The exhibition, staged in an English perennial meadow at the museum’s site in Finsbury Park, will show that how we think about homelessness today comes from ideas that were created long ago.
When people talk about the criminalisation of homelessness, it’s usually the Vagrancy Act of 1824 that is the focus. But there is much more to this story.
Researchers at Museum of Homelessness have identified the Homelessness Big Bang in the early 1600s and the exhibition starts there. Criminal explores the intertwined histories of people made homeless and transported from England, Ireland and Africa to the early plantations. Visitors will be taken on a journey exploring land enclosure, rebellion in the colonies, Elizabethan Rogue literature, Victorian institutions, resistance movements and modern-day disinformation.
The museum’s interior will be transformed into a space of resistance, with Surfing Sofas Publishing House offering people an alternative to social media.
The rise of the far right all over the world is being matched by increasing rates of homelessness. This exhibition matters today because criminalisation as a ‘solution’ to homelessness has never gone away. Right now, in 2026, it is ramping up in many places on earth. We have put this exhibition on as a cautionary tale and an act of resistance.
Featuring some of the UK’s foremost activists and artists including a new sculpture by the UK's most prolific graffiti writer 10Foot, Criminal will give you the facts and the feelings for what is really going on right now.
Event
Writing Hope on the Threshold
Saturday 25th April 2026
Chapel FM, Old Seacroft Chapel, 1081 York Road, Leeds, LS14 6JB
A Remember Oluwale & Chapel FM Creative Writing Workshop + Live Radio Broadcast with Emily Zobel Marshall and Abdullah Adekola. Supported by Leeds Beckett University.
We invite you to join us on a unique writing journey. Bring your ideas, pens and an open heart to a poetry workshop facilitated by the Remember Oluwale anti-racist charity and Chapel FM community radio and arts centre and supported by Leeds Beckett University.
The theme for the Chapel FM Writing on Air festival this year was thresholds. David Oluwale, a Nigerian migrant who was hounded to his death by two Leeds police officers in 1969, lived his life on the threshold.
A stowaway who crossed the ocean to live in Leeds, David was rejected by the city’s gatekeepers. He slept in doorways, existing both inside and outside society, until his tragic end.
In this dynamic poetry workshop, we focus on writing about lives and moments on thresholds – between continents, states of being and belonging, the uncanny (unheimlich), doors, portals, liminal spaces, the in-between and passing places.
We unpick and respond to moments of change and transition, for it is also in the liminal, in the betwixt and between, that great transformation can occur. A stunning 10-meter sculpture of a ‘Hibiscus Rising’ was erected in Leeds in 2023, challenging the narrative of despair often associated with Oluwale’s life and pointing us towards a more hopeful future. We ask how much room there is for hope in our contemporary Northern cities – how much do we dare to dream?
As part of this event, participants will cross another threshold: from page to airwaves. The workshop will culminate in a live broadcast from Chapel FM’s beautiful radio theatre, where writers can join the studio audience or share work created during the session, alongside other pieces that respond to the theme. In carrying words from private reflection into collective listening, we open a space where stories of transition, resistance and hope can be heard across the city.
2.00: creative writing workshop
5.15: share a light meal with us
6.30-7.30: live studio broadcast
This is not an exhaustive list of upcoming abolitionist resources or activities and many more exist beyond this short digest. We will continue to share as many resources on our social media as we can - please get in touch if you have something to share.