I am a 4th generation Philadelphian, and longtime educator. After over a decade in the classroom, concurrent with my research on education through the lens of enclosure, I came to understand how schools reproduce the relations of domination manifest in all aspects of USAmerican society. Tracing the long continuity of Black and Indigenous resistance to these various forms of domination, my research and teaching experience converged in a newly minted identity as a school abolitionist.
My embrace of abolition has since expanded to prisons and labor, race, gender, and the family, all the way to the borders of the nation-state. In my current work as an organizer, situated at the intersections of land, food, and environmental justice, I seek to engage with communities in shared struggle, mutual support, freedom dreaming, and building power. I am a firm believer in the collective construction of knowledge, whether in research, organizing, or the larger project of world-making.
I am particularly interested in the coproduction of space and building networks of autonomy and self-determination, as alternative ways for people to be in relation to each other and the land. I want to explore how these arrangements might be scaled up to build the social, political, and material infrastructure for dual power, as a strategy for resistance and resilience against the intersecting and emergent crises of capitalism.
While my commitment to changing this world occupies most of my time and energy, I am also a speculative fiction writer, gradually pecking away at my first novel — UNTIL THE MONSTERS COME — a story about kids, trauma, and parallel worlds. I believe speculative fiction creates spaces where high ideals can thrive in opposition to the injustice in our everyday lives. It offers a critique of reality, a projection of our hopes for what the world could be, or our fears of how it might end up. I write to exert a creative force upon the world, an equal and opposite reaction against domination, and to escape the gravity of the status quo. Forever a dreamer, I gaze toward the singularity, where imagination and collective will converge to create the reality we all deserve.