Overview

Enclosure in the original sense refers to breaking up common land into private segments and forms the underlying logic of capitalist exploitation. In this essay series, I consider wider interpretations of enclosure, starting with land, but moving to the body, community, time and space, knowledge, experience, learning and labor, and how schools in particular reproduce the enclosures found in the greater society. It is through this lens of enclosure that I advance my own definition of abolition, not merely of schools, but as a universal praxis.

Part I examines how schooling in the United States has always been an engine of state domination and control, from its origins in the assimilation of Native Americans and the indoctrination of Black people into the institution of slavery, through industrial and boarding schools, and into the present reality of resource deprivation, cultural annihilation, social engineering, surveillance, and carceral control. Part II discusses how at every historical juncture, people and communities have resisted enclosure, particularly Black and Indigenous peoples, where they resist and refuse the incursions of a settler colonial, white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchy.

Part III builds on that continuum of Black, Brown, and Indigenous wisdom and freedom dreaming, to distill and synthesize a “Red, Black, and Green ecology”, from which I sketch the initial contours of an abolitionist framework for community education and organizing. It imagines participatory action research (PAR), land-based learning, and collective narrative building as tools for reimagining the ways people can engage with each other across divides of race, gender, class, generation, and other enclosures, in the co-construction of knowledge, shared struggle, mutual support, and building community, all toward a vision of collective liberation.

Part I: Schools, Enclosures, and the Relations of Domination

• From Enclosure to Abolition: An Introduction
• Dispossession, Discontinuity, and the Enclosure of Space and Time
• Individualism, Alienation, and the Enclosure of Community
• Regulation, Commodification, and the Enclosure of the Body
• Native Assimilation, Black Subordination, and the Enclosure of Knowledge
• Capital Accumulation, Social Control, and the Enclosure of Learning and Labor
• EdTech, BigData, Surveillance, and the Enclosure of Interaction
• The Archive, the Ledger, and the Enclosure of Experience
• Needs, Barriers, and the Enclosure of Life

Part II: Pedagogies of Resistance

• Struggles Against Enclosure: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Pedagogies of Resistance
• Red Pedagogies: From Decolonization to Resurgence
• Black Pedagogies: From Emancipation to Self-Determination
• Green Pedagogies: The (Re)turn to Land-Based Learning

Part III: From Abolition to Liberation

• Moving Toward a Red, Black, and Green Ecology
• Sowing Earthseed: Toward an Abolitionist Framework for Community Education and Organizing