Abolitionist Pedagogy within and beyond Institutions
Building an abolitionist university or museum requires more than just updating some policies. It requires rethinking from the ground up what we want out of our cultural institutions and renewing our commitment to bringing that abolitionist vision to fruition.
In episode 132 of Imagine Otherwise, I interview scholar, performance artist, and Prince-enthusiast J. Faith Almiron, whose interdisciplinary crisscrossing of academic, artistic, and activist spaces demonstrates the power of such renewal in all its forms.
In our conversation, J. Faith and I chat about what it means to renew our commitment to social justice amidst ongoing state violence, why interdisciplinarity is the future of both art and education, how cultural institutions can diversify beyond tokenism, and why harnessing the radical imagination is how J. Faith imagines otherwise.
J. Faith Almiron
J. Faith Almiron is an independent scholar, cultural critic, performance artist, and former radio deejay based in Nyack, New York.
J. Faith’s forthcoming book manuscript offers a groundbreaking portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s radical imagination and her critical essays have appeared in the LA Review of Books, Hyperallergic, and LitHub, as well as publications by the Guggenheim, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.
She has taught cultural studies and visual culture at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
