Today I am happy to speak with Ananya Roy and Veronika Zablotsky about their co-edited volume, Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion, which was based on a Sawyer Seminar they convened at UCLA. The essays collected in this book are international in scope and interdisciplinary in nature. What links them is a commitment to show that the idea of sanctuary all too often forgets its radical histories and possibilities, and lapses into a liberal humanism that not only does not solve the problems of refugees, migrants, and exiles, but even form obstacles to real and just solutions. Importantly, the many of the essays put the idea of “humanism” into question.  Most impressively, we find case histories of ordinary people building sanctuary spaces organically well outside, and even in defiance of, liberal sanctuary structures and practices.

The book is accompanied by digital materials on the Sanctuary Spaces website which are designed for classroom use and self-study: https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/sanctuary-spaces/

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which advances research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Working with social movements, the Institute seeks to build power and abolish structures of inequality, within and beyond the university. A scholar of global racial capitalism, Ananya’s research has focused on urban transformations and land grabs, global circuits of financialization, postcolonial development and projects of poverty management, and most recently the problem and promise of sanctuary. In comradeship with unhoused communities, her current research is concerned with racial banishment and counter-geographies of refusal and rebellion in Los Angeles.

Veronika Zablotsky is a political theorist with an interest in interconnected histories of migration and empire; feminist and postcolonial studies; transnational social movements; Armenian diaspora studies; and postsocialism in the SWANA region. She teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and held visiting professorships in politics and gender studies at universities in Germany. Previously she served as Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sawyer Seminar “Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism” at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She holds a PhD in feminist studies, politics, critical race and ethnic studies, and history of consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among her co-edited publications are the anthologies Decolonize the City! (Unrast, 2017) and Transforming Solidarities (Adocs, 2025). At the University of Pennsylvania she co-founded the Critical Armenian Studies Collective. She also organizes with the scholar activist collective Abolition Beyond Borders (http://www.abolitionismus.org).

In 2017, activist-scholar Robyn Maynard published her groundbreaking study, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.  Today, I have the privilege of talking with her about the second edition of this study, which has just been published by Duke University Press. Robyn tells us what has happened since 2017 that compelled her to revise the book and add important new materials to address the challenges of the present. At the core of this new edition is a powerful argument against reform and for abolition—Maynard details the numerous failures of police reform, and explains why precious time, resources, and lives have been spent trying to bring about authentic change via reform.  Her vision for abolition is bold, and expansive, reaching beyond Canada to examine both transnational apparatuses of surveillance, policing, and punishment, and vital global forms of resistance and solidarity.

Robyn Maynard is an author and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Her writing on borders, policing, abolition and Black feminism is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe.

The first edition of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, published in 2017, is a national bestseller, designated as one of the “best 100 books of 2017” by the Hill Times, listed in The Walrus‘s “best books of 2018,” shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award, the Concordia University First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction, and the winner of the 2017 Errol Sharpe Book Prize. In 2018 the book was published in French, titled NoirEs sous surveillance. Esclavage, répression et violence d’État au Canada, and won the 2019 Prix de libraires. Her second book, Rehearsals for Living, co-authored with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is a Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and CBC national bestseller and was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award for literary non-fiction, a Toronto Heritage Award, and designated one of CBC’s “best Canadian non-fiction books of 2022” and the “best 100 books of 2022” by the Hill Times. Other awards include “2018 Author of the Year” from Montreal’s Black History Month and the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQI* Emerging Writers. Her public scholarship is available at http://www.robynmaynard.com

Today I have the honor of speaking with longtime activist Silky Shah, Executive Director of the Detention Watch Network, about her new, and extremely important book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Shah provides a critical discussion about the intersection between detention, the prison industrial complex, and anti-immigrant racism. She explains how this relationship is hardly new, but stretches back at least to the Reagan presidency and through Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden.  Given the durability of this connection, Shah makes an altogether convincing case that reform does not work, and that abolition is called for. Her book and her activism give us inspirating examples of such work in the past and present, and for the future.

Silky Shah is the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the United States. She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for nearly 20 years.

Ever since its publication, Abolish Silicon Valley—How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism has proven to be more urgent and insightful. Today I talk with author Wendy Liu about how developments like AI and LLM, further erosions of intellectual property, and increased invasions of privacy make the case for abolishing Silicon Valley even more important. We talk about how abolition is critical at a time when more and more the private sector has come to eviscerate the public good. Turning to the genocide in Gaza, we discuss the ways Capital has enlisted technology in deadly and horrific manners. We end with a meditation on the commons and how one can live with fewer commodities and find value in common projects to make life more valuable and worthwhile outside of the logic of the market.

Wendy Liu is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism, a memoir/manifesto about the tech industry from the perspective of a former believer. She lives in San Francisco and is working on a novel.

Today I am delighted to have Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on Speaking Out of Place to discuss their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. We talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms.  It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children.

Maya Schenwar is a writer, editor, and organizer who serves as director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. She is also Truthout‘s board president and editor at large. Maya is the co-editor of We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition and co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, among other books. In addition to Truthout, Maya’s work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The Nation, and she has appeared on Democracy Now!, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NPR, and other television and radio programs. Maya is a cofounder of the Movement Media Alliance, as well as Media Against Apartheid and Displacement. She lives in Chicago.

Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the cofounder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.

Today we speak with two scholar-activists who are using satellite technologies and other tools to work for environmental justice, with specific attention to prisons and prison populations. They monitor air quality, water quality, extreme weather and other quantities relevant to EJ. Ufuoma Ovienmhada and Nick Shapiro show how people of color and other socio-economically marginalized groups in the United States experience a disproportionate burden of environmental challenges such as exposure to air pollution, contaminated water, habitat loss, and disrupted livelihood due to natural hazards and climate change. They challenge the idea of scientific neutrality and objectivity, uncover multiple ways that power works to dominate these populations in many guises, and they speak compellingly about listening to and working with communities on projects for liberation and abolition.

Ufuoma Ovienmhada is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Arizona, School of Geography, Development, and Environment where she researches satellite data and machine learning applications for measuring flood exposure inequity. Prior to beginning this position, Ufuoma completed a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department. In her dissertation, she employed a multi-method approach to research the distribution of environmental hazards in carceral landscapes, co-design Earth Observation technologies to support environmental justice advocacy, and make recommendations for how the Earth Observation ecosystem at large can better serve environmental justice goals.

Dr. Nicholas Shapiro, Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics, is a multidisciplinary environmental researcher that studies, and designs interventions into, issues of chemical contamination and climate change. He is the director of Carceral Ecologies, a lab focused on the environmental health conditions of carceral institutions. His first book, Homesick, about how housing became a seat of toxicity and what we can do about it is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Today we speak with two scholar-activists who are using satellite technologies and other tools to work for environmental justice, with specific attention to prisons and prison populations. They monitor air quality, water quality, extreme weather and other quantities relevant to EJ. Ufuoma Ovienmhada and Nick Shapiro show how people of color and other socio-economically marginalized groups in the United States experience a disproportionate burden of environmental challenges such as exposure to air pollution, contaminated water, habitat loss, and disrupted livelihood due to natural hazards and climate change. They challenge the idea of scientific neutrality and objectivity, uncover multiple ways that power works to dominate these populations in many guises, and they speak compellingly about listening to and working with communities on projects for liberation and abolition.

Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, “Sanctuary for All,” calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. A member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, she has co-edited four special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” with Ashley Dawson (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution with Sam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a member of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.

Arianna Salgado is a queer immigrant who was born in Morelos, Mexico and arrived in the United States at the age of 6. She began organizing in high school with the West Suburban Action Project, Nuestra Voz, and the Immigrant Youth Justice League; undocumented-led organizations that sought to create safe spaces for undocumented people and resources for higher education. Arianna is a founding member of Organized Communities Against Deportations, a grassroots organization that fights against the criminalization, detention, and deportation of undocumented people. She currently lives in Chicago in the South Lawndale neighborhood with her two pups and is the executive director at Prison/ Neighborhood Arts and Education Project.

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen about their new book, The Black Antifascist Tradition, which uses a vast set of archival materials to show how Black intellectuals and activists regarded anti-Black racism as inseparable from fascism. This is brought out vividly in the ways the law was constructed, labor was extracted, culture oppressed, and lives curtailed.

Struggles for Black liberation are therefore connected across national boundaries, just as fascist and racist laws and practices are shared by oppressive regimes globally. Hope and Mullen show how these cross currents work in examples like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War, and the momentous 1951 document, “We Charge Genocide,” that linked fascism in the US to violations of international humanitarian law. Ultimately, we talk about how peoples’ movements must always acknowledge how racism and fascism are baked into the law, and unite in world-making projects that lead to liberation for all peoples.

Dr. Jeanelle K. Hope is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. She is a native of Oakland, California and a scholar of Black political thought, culture, and social movements. Dr. Hope is the co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Her research has been published in several academic journals including The American Studies Journal, Amerasia, View, and Black Camera, and her public scholarship has been featured in Voices of River City, Essence, and the African American Policy Forum.

Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue.  He is co-author with Jeanelle Hope of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-lynching to Abolition.  He is also author of James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press) and We Charge Genocide!: American Fascism and the Rule of Law (forthcoming September Fordham University Press).  He is a member of the organizing collective for USACBI (United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).

Today we speak with Harvard professor Robin Bernstein about her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit. While researching a book to develop her earlier interests in race and childhood, Bernstein came across the case of Afro-Indigenous teenager William Freeman, who in the late 19th century was convicted of stealing a horse and sentenced to five years in the federal prison in his home town, Auburn, New York. Forced to work for only nominal pay, beaten so much he lost the hearing in one ear, when released Freeman had the audacity to sue to recover lost wages. He stated repeatedly, “I am not going to work for nothing,” meaning both that he had not committed the crime he was convicted of, and that as a free man, he was not going to work for nothing. Bernstein’s book quickly became about the intimately connected stories of Freeman and Auburn prison, about the ways the prison insinuated itself into the town’s economy. So much so that any one who might testify against Freeman would likely be compromised by the way they benefitted financially from the prison. This remarkable study has everything to do with today’s abolitionist movement, and Bernstein tells how, in the course of writing this book, she herself became an abolitionist.

 Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her previous books include Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, which won five awards. Her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, was written with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has published in the New York Times, African American Review, Social Text, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and many other venues. She recently published the forgotten 1897 slave narrative of Jane Clark, who liberated herself from slavery in Maryland by undergoing an arduous three-year journey that ended in Auburn, New York in 1859. The full text of the narrative, along with annotations and an introduction, was published in Commonplace.

How does the automobile—the All American symbol of freedom–become part of a “cascading” process of unfreedom for recently incarcerated people?  Livingston and Ross, members of the NYU Prison Education Research Lab, talk about how cars, a necessity for securing work for so many and a symbol of independence and mobility, are enmeshed within interlinked systems that create and perpetuate debt, precarity, and sometimes death.  Through predatory lending, unscrupulous auto dealers, revenue-seeking and gratuitously harassing traffic stops and citations, and data systems built into the hardware and software of vehicles that feed into a number of dangerous data bases, the “open road” can become dangerous and deadly, especially for Black and Brown peoples, who often succumb to what Livingston calls the “power of capture.”

Against that bleak picture, Ross and Livingston tell stories of support networks and offer us important ways to bring about what they call “Mobility Justice.”

“As cornerstones of life under racial capitalism, the automobile and prison exemplify the ease with which the quotidian can become deadly. Livingston and Ross, with the support of formerly incarcerated peer researchers, have produced an extraordinary example of how critical carceral studies can enlighten, complicate and inspire.” Angela Y. Davis.

Andrew Ross is a social activist and professor at NYU, where he teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Prison Education Program. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including, most recently, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing.

Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Her previous books include Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa; Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic; and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, in 2013 Livingston was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.