Redefining Commons and Collective Futures

In this episode we talk to Dr. Rinaldo Walcott. Walcott is a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Walcott is also the author of many books, including Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies, and the co-author of BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom.

In this episode we primarily focus our conversation around Walcott’s two most recent books, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition and The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom.

In both works, and in this conversation Walcott affirms that what Black people have experienced globally is not yet Freedom, but is instead still within the confines of a process of emancipation defined by the legal system of European man and his descendants. 

Specifically we talk about why the abolition of existing property relations is a necessity for the abolition of policing and prisons. 

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