Practicing New Worlds: Abolition & Emergent Strategies

Book
Written By David Nala

By Andrea J. Ritchie
Foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Introduction by adrienne maree brown.

Publication date: October 24, 2023
Order the book: Bookshop | AK Press

How can emergent strategies help us meet this moment, survive what is to come, and shape safer and more just futures?

Practicing New Worlds invites us to explore what lies beyond traditional top-down organizing and campaigns for legislative and policy change, illuminating the potential for shaping more just futures that is present in nurturing critical connections, decentralized networks, strong communities, and transformative movements.

Drawing on decades of experience as an organizer, litigator, policy advocate, and researcher in movements for racial, gender, reproductive, economic, and environmental justice, Andrea J. Ritchie takes readers on a journey of unlearning and relearning, experimentation and imagination. Rooted in Black feminist abolitionist politics and richly fertilized by intergenerational conversations, complexity science, and visionary fiction, Practicing New Worlds cultivates curiosity about how emergent strategies can support our survival amidst the ongoing catastrophes of racial capitalism, rising fascism, and the cataclysms to come, and offer hope for shifting the complex systems that shape our lives toward liberatory possibilities.

Practicing New Worlds offers both practical tools and creative inspiration to dream the worlds we long for into being, free from violence of any kind — including surveillance, police, prisons, jails, cages, or borders — in which we all have everything we need to survive and thrive.

Read an excerpt from the book:

Merch Fundraiser

We are offering beautiful Practicing New Worlds apparel and goods, featuring artwork and design by cover artist Amir Khadar (amirkhadar.com, @amir.khadar). Visit the store to purchase posters, notebooks, totes, and more for a good cause!

All Practicing New Worlds merchandise proceeds will be donated to API Chaya, Breathing Room, Creative Interventions, and Queer the Land.

Reading & Discussion Guide

Have a copy of Practicing New Worlds? Reading the book together with other people? Check out the Practicing New Worlds: Reading & Discussion Guide, which includes guiding questions, prompts, and links to videos and additional resources.

Events

Practicing New Worlds IG Live Series:

Taking place September 12-October 17, 2023 on Tuesdays at 2 PM ET, this IG Live Series (virtual) featured short conversations between author Andrea J. Ritchie and abolitionist organizers about emergent strategies. All conversation were hosted on the @interruptcrim Instagram account:

10 Days of Practicing New Worlds:

Incredible conversations and events featuring author Andrea J. Ritchie and a ton of really rad people across the country to celebrate the official launch of Practicing New Worlds!

  • October 24:

    • 12-1 PM ET — Official Launch (virtual) — with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and adrienne maree brown. — Watch the video recording.

    • 6:30-8:30 PM ET — Official Launch (in-person) at the LOVE Building in Detroit — with Sage Crump, Wes Taylor, and ill Weaver of Complex Movements, Diana Nucera (aka Mother Cyborg), Curtis Renée from Detroit Safety Team, and Michigan-based Palestinian filmmaker and organizer Ryah Aquel. ASL and child care provided, masks required, scent-free space. — Watch the video recording

  • October 25: 7:30-8:30 PM ET — Charis Books (virtual) — with Micah Herskind, Kamau Franklin, and Dr. Mariah Parker of #StopCopCity. — Watch the video recording.

  • October 27: 12:30-1:45 PM ET — National Women's Studies Association conference (in-person) in Baltimore — with Robyn Maynard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Brittany Brathwaite.

  • October 28: 7 PM ET — Red Emma's (in-person) in Baltimore. Masks required.

  • October 30:

    • Resourcing Emergent Strategies toward Safer Futures: A Conversation With Philanthropy

    • 7-8:30 PM ET — Firestorm Books (virtual) with Shane Burley. — Watch the video recording.

  • October 31: 2-4 PM ET — Emergent Strategies and Anti-Violence Movements — with Mimi Kim of Creative Interventions, Kalayo Pestaño from API Chaya and Queer the Land, Matice Mooore from Brown Boi, and Stas Schmiedt from Spring Up. — Watch the video recording.

  • November 1: 7-9 PM ET — Practicing New Worlds x Let This Radicalize You (virtual) — with Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes. CANCELED: We canceled this event and invited everyone to join us in attending the Abolition Means No More War: Free Palestine Now! event hosted by our friends at Critical Resistance and Haymarket Books.

About the Author

Andrea J. Ritchie (she/her) is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, reproductive, economic, environmental, and gender justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and co-author of No More Police. A Case for Abolition, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, and of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. She co-founded Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of over 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people, and led INCITE!'s work on law enforcement violence. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub and National Black Women's Justice Institute she works with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and secure deep investments in community-based strategies that will produce greater public safety.

For more information, visit Andrea’s personal site, and Invisible No More. You can follow Andrea on Twitter @dreaNYC123.

Praise for Practicing New Worlds

“Practicing New Worlds is right on time. As organizers look for different ways to navigate multiple crises, here comes Andrea Ritchie offering us generative ideas at the intersection of emergent strategy and PIC abolition. This is the time for creativity, for experimentation, and for imagination, she suggests. We need courage to resist relying on the same tools that we always have. Practicing New Worlds calls on us to be braver. Change is scary in the best of times and these are not the best of times. Yet we must embrace change and let go of what feels familiar. Let this book be a life raft for you as you swim a little farther from shore. By the end of the book, I promise that you’ll be inspired to try the deep end of the organizing ocean. Andrea’s invitation is to come on in, the water will hold you. I’m very grateful for this offering.”

— Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This ’Til We Free Us

“In Practicing New Worlds, Ritchie brings her wisdom — drawn from decades of researching, theorizing, organizing, and convening movement spaces — into an altogether new kind of dream work. In a feat of originality, Ritchie stretches the conceptual paradigms of emergent strategy into entirely new places, grounding it deeply in struggle: specifically, Black feminist, abolitionist movement work. Combining the nuance and rootedness of a seasoned organizer with the kaleidoscopic vision of a practiced imagination worker, Ritchie reminds us that if movements take work, that work needs to be fed by our imaginings of otherwise. And in doing so she accomplishes a rare feat, gifting us with a text that is both expansively visionary and pragmatic at once.”

— Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives and co-author of Rehearsals for Living

“This is a necessary book, and I can’t think of a better person to take us on this journey than Andrea. For decades, her organizing and scholarship have been foundational in creating the conditions for liberation and abolition to feel possible and tangible. I’m honored to have my ideas in conversation with Andrea’s abolitionist brilliance. In this book, Andrea puts hands in dirt to collectively grow more liberation for us all.”

— Walidah Imarisha, author of Angels with Dirty Faces and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood and Another World is Possible

“Andrea demonstrates both her brilliance and generosity through her broad and deep respect for a vast expanse of teachers and comrades, woven intricately and intimately throughout this book. As always, she lifts up so many others, not to submerge herself (though she sometimes does), but to buoy all of us in the wisdom of and reverence for ancestors, those still present, and those yet to come. The world Andrea so richly moves us towards in her vision of an ever emergent and abolitionist future is definitely worth our collective lives, loves, and struggles.”

— Mimi E. Kim, founder of Creative Interventions and co-founder of INCITE!

“With this book, Andrea draws on her hard-earned wisdom and her deep web of relationships with organizers to create a gift for all of our movements. With equal parts rigor and vulnerability, she offers a set of tools worthy of the challenges of our time. I thought I understood emergent strategies, and then I read this book. She offers us a breathtaking theoretical exploration of the principles of emergent strategies alongside examples grounded in the everyday practice of creating abolition. Practicing New Worlds left me hopeful, curious, and eager to keep practicing the possibilities Andrea so powerfully describes. I know I will turn to it again and again in the years to come. “

— Angélica Cházaro, Seattle Solidarity Budget and Mijente

“Andrea Ritchie delivers a succinct, crystal clear, practical toolkit to organizers for conceptualizing the conditions we are facing and the work we need to do, but this time it is braided with her creative magic. … While words and phrases related to abolition and emergent strategy circulate widely these days, their meanings have become elusive. Andrea firmly grounds Practicing New Worlds in the collaborative practices that people are engaging in right now to dismantle state violence, showing us why making our work local, decentralized, interdependent, nimble, responsive, relational, and adaptive is the way forward for survival and liberation.”

— Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid and Normal Life

“Practicing New Worlds is essential reading for all who don’t merely dream of a better world but who have embraced the daunting task of bringing one into being. Ritchie draws crucial insights from organizing victories, setbacks, and especially the tireless groundwork—behind the scenes and out of the spotlight—required for all advances in social justice. She emboldens us to address the burning questions Grace Lee Boggs posed to movement builders, ‘How can we make the ideal more real? How can we make the real more ideal?’”

— Scott Kurashige, co-author of Grace Lee Boggs’s The Next American Revolution

Details

Publisher: AK Press
Format: Book
Binding: pb
Pages: 304
Released: October 24, 2023
ISBN-13: 9781849355117

David Nala https://studioitzi.com
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