Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies

All Michigan social workers are invited to a virtual CE event on Wednesday, October 15 from 12-1:00pm.

FREE | 1 Implicit Bias CE

Overview:

Join us as we discuss Andrea Ritchie’s Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies.

Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization, and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive.

Drawing on decades of experience as an abolitionist organizer, policy advocate, and litigator in movements for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice and the principles articulated by adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Ritchie invites us to think beyond traditional legislative and policy change to create more possibilities for survival and resistance in the midst of the ongoing catastrophes of racial capitalism—and the cataclysms to come. Rooted in analysis of current abolitionist practices and interviews with on-the-ground organizers resisting state violence, building networks to support people in need of abortion care, and nurturing organizations and convergences that can grow transformative cities and movements, Practicing New Worlds takes listeners on a journey of learning, unlearning, experimentation, and imagination to dream the worlds we long for into being.

Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies is available through your favorite bookseller.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe impacts of white supremacy on social work education, practice, and scholarship
• Describe and contextualize decolonization within the context of the social work profession
• Identify strategies for disrupting white supremacist norms within social practice
  

Presented by Chris Fike, Region 5 Representative on the NASW-MI Board of Directors.

About the Author(s) --

Andrea Ritchie. Andrea Ritchie 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 four decades. She is a nationally recognized researcher, policy analyst, and expert on policing and criminalization. Ritchie lives in Detroit.

More about the Decolonizing Social Work Book Club:

Decolonization in social work is the undoing of hegemony, the latter being the process whereby white supremacist values impregnated foundational social work theories, research, and practices. In recognizing that white supremacy is a mechanism of social control, that our current social structure is grounded in liberal-patriarchal capitalism, and that social work confirms to prevailing social norms, we, as social workers, must acknowledge our complicity in perpetuating a white supremacist ideology (Crudup, Fike, & McLoone, 2021; Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014). One strategy for disrupting white supremacy in social work is to develop a counter-narrative (Crudup, et al., 2021; Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014), a history that details the experiences of perspectives of those who have been oppressed, excluded, and silenced. The Decolonizing Social Work Book Club will meet on the 3rd Wednesday of each month starting in September 2024 and concluding in December 2025.

The voices highlighted in this book club offer counter-narrative perspectives across a range of issues and topics immediately relevant to social work.