Description
Critical penal scholars, abolitionists, and activists have noted that the necessity of documenting and critiquing the harms of incarceration can act to limit our capacity for developing truly transformative alternative visions and practices of justice. This paper reflects on findings from Prison Break (2021-2022), an interdisciplinary research project that used creative writing workshops to support UK-based activists and scholars involved in prison abolition and transformative justice to create ‘social science fiction’ (Penfold-Mounce et al., 2011) to help imagine and enact a more just future. In this presentation, I will focus on the content and themes explored in the collection of short stories written and shared by participants as part of the project, discussing what they demonstrate about the (international?) contemporary abolitionist imagination, social justice, and visions for a future without carceral spaces and practices. I will also discuss the activist practice of collectively writing and sharing ‘visionary fiction’ (Brown and Imarisha, 2015) that inspired the project, and the methodological approach I developed to ‘fictioning’ (Burrows and O’Sullivan, 2019) critical utopias.
