J. Faith Almiron on Abolitionist Pedagogy within and beyond Institutions

Cathy Hannabach:

Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining otherwise.

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I’m your host, Cathy Hannabach.

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.

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My guest on the show today is scholar, performance artist, and Prince enthusiastic J. Faith Almiron, whose interdisciplinary crisscrossing of academic, artistic, and activist spaces demonstrates the power of such renewal in all of its forms.

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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 key to how J. Faith imagines otherwise.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

J. Faith Almiron [00:01:19]:

Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here.

Cathy Hannabach [00:01:22]:

As the semester winds down, and the vibrancy of spring emerges from what has been a pretty intense winter, not to mention entire past year, one of the things that I’ve been talking a lot with folks about is what renewal means to them in this context.

So I’m curious, how is renewal showing up for you in your current projects?

J. Faith Almiron [00:01:43]:

Like many parents during quarantine, I found myself doing the first grade over again as an adult. And in first grade, with my six year old, there’s a lot of emphasis on weather and seasons. So the recent spring sight word poem was “In like a lion, out like a lamb.”

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In Hawai’i, there is a specific season called Kū, for war. And in Johannesburg, they have a thing called strike season where workers anticipate the time to strike.

So for me, renewal has shown up as all of these things: peace, organizing, and an ongoing estrangement to capitalism.

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In regards to my work as a teacher, this past April the 14th and the 21st mark the five-year anniversary of both the arrest and uprising at UW Madison. A collective of undergraduate and graduate students, primarily of color, queer, working folks, invited me to organize and to speak about it alongside Denzel Shabazz, who was arrested in my Black visual culture class, as well as another student graduate student in the education department and community organizers.

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Denzel is no longer a student at UW. He was there as an undergraduate when he was arrested and it was a month before he graduated. He’s now a PhD candidate at UT Austin. Meeting up again was both cathartic and necessary. I feel like in the spirit of spring and renewal, it very much felt like it was time to revisit it.

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Most universities can rely on a five-year cycle of institutional amnesia just based on the temporal nature of entering and graduating. So I felt like, especially because of the timeliness around the uprisings happening specifically in the Midwest but also the traumatic violence enacted by the police and racial violence enacted by the police in the Midwest, I thought it was important for us to process our own history-making at that time.

Cathy Hannabach [00:04:03]:

In so many ways, your career is such a fantastic example of the political and the creative power of renewal. And it’s one of the reasons why I was so excited to talk with you about this topic. I mean, you’ve moved across diverse genres, mediums, and geographies, all while maintaining a fierce commitment to creating culture and art in the service of social change.

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I’m curious what advice you have for other scholars or cultural producers on how to figure out when it’s time to have that kind of renewal, when it’s time to make a change, when it’s time to try a new thing. How do you figure that out?

J. Faith Almiron [00:04:44]:

I think that universities are increasingly coming up against the reality that transdisciplinarity is the future, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary specifically around critical race and ethnic studies as well as performance studies and cultural studies.

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Especially because of the reckonings and uprisings of not just past year but of the past decade of organizing, it’s important for all scholars and all cultural producers to tap into the multiple things that interest them. That versatility is necessary.

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My own experience of moving away from the academy was not a conscious decision. It was really a manifestation of trauma. When you do engage a particular politic in pedagogy, there are consequences.

There is a way that I’ve seen, especially amongst queer women of color, of us needing to choose self-preservation and choose integrity over the conceit that the academy offers stability, even if it’s threatening your mental health and your sense of general safety.

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Because Wisconsin is a campus carry state, where guns are permissible between buildings, and my experience of having two white policemen come to my classroom and arrest a student, I took a year off and then I returned.

The very semester that I returned, I had a predator in my classroom and it took over a month to remove him. I found out in that same moment that he was documented to have stalked and threatened other women of color faculty who had also left Wisconsin.

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So I guess what I’m saying is that my own decision to leave a coveted position in terms of a tenure-track position in an ethnic studies department at a research 1 university was a choice towards survival.

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I would also say that it wasn’t until I sort of divorced myself from the state as a worker that I finally became productive as a publishing writer.

I think there’s something to be said about having the permission in a broader sense, in the world sense. Like, do I feel safe? Am I happy? You won’t be able to actually be creative and do the difficult heavy lifting that writing requires if you don’t protect the psyche from which those words come.

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I don’t know. It’s weird. I feel like I don’t always have wisdom in this as much as experience and that I’m still sort of coming back to the lessons about those experiences.

Cathy Hannabach [00:07:59]:

I think that’s really common. When we look back at these kind of storied careers, it’s tempting or easy or maybe even an accomplishment to stitch everything together in a linear narrative.

“Oh, here’s the through line. Here’s what it all added up to. Of course we were trying to do that all along.” But of course we’re not, that’s not how careers work. That’s not how lives work. That’s not how experiences work, it’s not how bodies work. So I think what you’re talking about in terms of it being a much more complex and windy and contradictory road through one’s career, through one’s work in the world, both within and beyond the academy, I think that is a very common experience for people who traverse those kinds of spaces.

J. Faith Almiron [00:08:43]:

Yes.

Cathy Hannabach [00:08:44]:

So speaking of traversing a lot of academic, artistic, creative, and activist spaces, you have a really long history of working with museums and community art spaces to craft programming that not only brings different groups of people into art spaces but also to really rethink the role of cultural production in social justice movements and refusing to separate those things.

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Given how much the pandemic has changed arts programming over the past year, what are you excited to see arts and cultural spaces focus on in the coming years?

J. Faith Almiron [00:09:23]:

I think that similar to the academy, it’s been a funny time for the art sector. Everybody has experienced this big reveal, which is the overwhelming whiteness of it, from the over-representation in the aspects of leadership and administration and staffing of these places. I feel like there’s sort of been this scramble around like, “Oh, we need to finally hire a Black curator at the Guggenheim,” you know, or “I think this might be a good time to have the board member who engages in poisoning protestors step down.”

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I mean, one of the things that I would like to challenge museums and cultural institutions would be to do more than just hiring one or two more chips in the cookie and also opening these spaces for socially-engaged art practices and curriculum.

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I think a lot of times, it’s still quite tokenizing and it’s not enough. I mean, representation is still vital and representation is part of the first step but it’s also about having political commitments that run broadly.

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The other thing, too, that I learned with Wisconsin was that after the arrest, after the uprising, there was this push for more cluster hires around both ethnic studies and women’s studies, but there wasn’t any kind of reflection around retention.

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So it’s like, you can bring people in, but if the space remains toxic, abusive, and violent towards educators or artists who are doing the difficult work around racial justice and gendered inequalities, then it’s like having a hole in a boat. It’s just going to sink. We’re not actually rebuilding anything. We’re just patching up vessels that go nowhere.

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I like to think about what does an abolitionist museum look like? What does it look like to really uproot the colonial origins within these places? What would it look like, you know, thinking about community control over the police, what would community control over the museum look like?

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What if the stakeholders were actually people who lived in the neighborhoods or in the cities that these museums inhabit? So yeah, those would be the things I would be excited for museums and cultural institutions to really look at beyond just hiring, but also like, what is the actual culture within these spaces?

Cathy Hannabach [00:12:10]:

I think that’s a really nice segue into the question that I like to close out every conversation with, which gets at those broader social and structural and political transformations. What kind of world are you working toward? What kind of world do you want?

J. Faith Almiron [00:12:26]:

This is such a beautiful question. And I feel like it’s a question that you could ask every morning when you wake up, because it’s a question about vision. It’s a question about the radical imagination.

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In April 1964, for his speech called “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X says “we’ve got to change our own minds about each other. We have to see each other with new eyes. We have to see each other as brothers and sisters.”

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For me, that’s a world without cages, without borders, without war.

It means a world that is healthy and nourished, where everyone has homes that are safe, intact. It is a place that nourishes creativity, where creativity is king instead of disaster, instead of death. That we are excited about every day because we are free to be who we are.

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I will fight for a world where love is not just a Pollyanna notion but a principle that guides our every consideration.

Cathy Hannabach [00:13:40]:

Well, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing all of these amazing ways that you imagine and you create otherwise.

J. Faith Almiron [00:13:48]:

Thank you. It’s been an honor and a joy.

Cathy Hannabach [00:13:56]:

Thanks for listening to another episode of Imagine Otherwise. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire and this episode was created by me, Cathy Hannabach. You can check out the show notes for this episode on our website at ideasonfire.net, where you can also read about our fabulous guest as well as find links to the people and projects we discussed on the show.