"Dismantling conditions of violence requires rebellious imagination, and the most powerful and revelatory ideas emerge from grassroots social movements. Thinking collaboratively with survivors of violence, organizers, artists, scholars, and care workers about transformative politics, radical care, and strategic action is a practice that is at the heart of my work."
Alisa Bierria is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. A Black feminist philosopher who has been active in the feminist anti-violence movement for more than 20 years, Bierria’s writing, advocacy, and collaborative projects focus on racialized gender violence and critical acts of survival.
Her forthcoming book, “Missing in Action: Agency, Race, & Invention,” highlights insights from Black women’s agentic practices in conditions of violence and proposes a pluralistic framework for agency. She is also a co-founder of Survived & Punished, a national organization that challenges the criminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and advocates for the abolition of carceral systems.
This groundbreaking anthology engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control.
In this expansive companion to Abolition Feminisms Vol. I, contributors confront multiple paradigms of punitivity—the foundational logics of family, borders, heterosexuality, colonial violence, and more—to disengage us from root systems of carcerality.
What to learn more about the Freedom Scholars?
Questions about the Freedom Scholar awards can be sent to freedomscholars@caseygrants.org.
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE FREEDOM SCHOLAR AWARDS HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY THE INATAI FOUNDATION.
