Keynote Speakers

Closing Keynote by Dr. Verónica Vélez
Friday, October 27

Centering Intergenerational Possibilities in Service Learning & Community Engagement: The Urgency of Abolition as Praxis

We are living in a moment when abolition has come to the fore in public discourse in an unprecedented way. As Karissa Lewis of Movement For Black Lives (M4BL) argues, we find ourselves in “a culmination of multiple storms converging...COVID-19, police violence, racial capitalism in crisis, [and] intensified white supremacy,” resulting in mass uprisings across the country and the world. Black abolitionists and those involved in M4BL, Dream Defenders, Critical Resistance, and many other collectives are working relentlessly to steer the conversation away from reform and instead “chart a new path forward” that demands an end to all systems of policing and a redirected focus on community care, accountability, and self-determination. While abolition has recently gained unthinkable mainstream appeal during this time, we know that this work has a long lineage emerging directly out of collective freedom struggles. 

Abolitionist demands grapple with the interrelatedness of supposedly “distinct” struggles and issues. For example, “the prison” does not refer to a discrete institution; rather, the prison regime always exceeds its own materiality to also include the “fundamental organizing logic of the United States in its local, translocal and global enactments.” Within this framework, that which needs to be abolished is not simply the prison, but all that it stands for. Furthermore, abolition is as much about building up other institutions and social relations as it is about dismantling the obsolete ones. Abolition reminds us that getting rid of police and prisons means nothing if we do not abolish the ideologies, practices — and affective economies, and intimate ties of policing in our interpersonal relationships and communities. We must, in short, collectively transform the “intimate investments” within the prison-industrial-complex that come to saturate our very desires, relationships, and modes of relation to one another and ourselves.

In her talk, Vero will engage abolitionist demands to consider what needs to be dismantled and what needs to be built to cultivate reciprocity and generative engagement in our work and partnerships between campus and community. She will draw from her organizing work with migrant mothers in California and her most recent work with high school youth using Ethnic Studies to advance the J.O.Y (justice-oriented youth) lab that (re)imagines schooling by pivoting learning as a responsive praxis to community needs rather than state-sanctioned accountability structures. In the process, care becomes an intergenerational struggle toward the not yet, which she argues is necessary for “creating inclusive and accessible service-learning and community engagement opportunities at a time when educational institutions have needed to be adaptive and nimble to meet the needs of students and faculty.”