Pretty Heady Stuff

Dru Oja Jay is a writer, organizer and web developer. He’s currently hosting a podcast called Half Past Capitalism, and serving as both the Executive Director of CUTV, Canada's oldest campus-based TV station, and as publisher of The Breach, an independent media outlet producing critical journalism at a time when it is urgently needed. He’s written a number of stirring articles for The Breach, and he’s also the co-author, with Nikolas Barry-Shaw, of an invaluable book called Paved with Good Intentions: Canada's Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism. There’s no getting around it, though: the state of the journalistic profession is looking bleak. Dru talks about how social media has meant a “shifting of roles” for journalists and widespread “disempowerment in the sector” that runs alongside the public’s lack of confidence in journalism during the neoliberal period. More particularly, he says that social media and what he calls “algorithmic curation” is a kind “race” where “society is coming apart,” and in which a multitude of competing organizations are trying to establish the dominant “pattern of thinking.” What’s necessary, in this context, is for those on the Left to commit to radically deepening democracy, even as we labour under the force of “mega corporations” that constrain the flow of information. There are multiple demobilizing forces converging in the current moment. Jay talks about his research into the effects of NGOs, how they have tended historically, despite their good intentions, to deradicalize movements. In fact, he claims that we are currently seeing “systematic and cynical work to derail” the climate movement through the professionalization of activism in NGOs. What he laments is the loss of “direct accountability” and the constitutive links that movements have with their members as groups become incrementally more accountable to funders over time. A major theme here is the problem of how particular “patterns of thinking” are created, and then become very difficult to dislodge. We discuss the ways that geopolitical patterns of thinking have historically undermined any notion of a rules-based international order. He offers some nuanced analysis of the role of NATO in creating the conditions for the crisis in Ukraine, while necessarily dwelling with the impossible contradictions of that military conflict and the terrifying possibility that it could mean nuclear war, given the brazen ways that major powers are dealing with, and have dealt with, the prospect of nuclear annihilation in the past and present. It’s clear that, for Jay, we also need to unpack and come to terms with the “collective trauma” of settler colonialism and how it lives on in “scars” and “patterns of thought” we inherit. He underscores the ongoing violence of colonial oppression, and how, today, Indigenous peoples are “handcuffed to an objective measure” of climate collapse in ways that reinforce the ties between racism and capitalism. We talk in bluntly critical ways about how, as he puts it, capitalism is always “looking over your shoulder”—creating, commodifying and exploiting our relationships in its image. For this reason, perhaps, he stresses the importance of class as a site of social transformation, especially in relation to established and emerging environmental movements, where we are starting to realize that we share a grim fate under “the brutality of petro-states.” Wars are spreading globally and the climate emergency is accelerating. What are we going to do? Jay makes it clear that the crises we face are going to require mass mobilization to upend them, and that part of the battle involves confronting the class privilege and extreme wealth that makes it too easy for some to just basically refuse to perceive reality as it is.

Uahikea Maile is a Kānaka Maoli scholar and activist from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He works as an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Maile’s research looks at the legal constraints and decolonial activism that marks the history of Hawaiian sovereignty. His upcoming book focuses on settler colonial capitalism and Indigenous sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, and investigates the formation of settler colonial capitalism alongside the gifts of sovereignty that seek to overturn that form of domination by assuming radical responsibility for balancing relationships with ‘āina, or the land that feeds. In our conversation he talks about the meanings of Mauna Kea, which is not only the tallest mountain in the world, but also, more importantly, a place of worship and deep relationality for Kānaka Maoli that has been under threat for generations as a result of numerous telescope projects and the pursuit of profit through tourism. The struggle for Mauna Kea is a focal point of this interview for a number of reasons. Maile says that the state has shown it privileges the veneration of astronomy over the legally protected sacredness of Indigenous Hawaiians’ relationship to the place, and this is unequivocally because government funding, tourism and settler colonial capital determine what counts as valuable. Maile asks bluntly: why can’t we accept that leveling peaks of mountains is inherently a violent act of “desecration”? This is difficult, when one aspect of the struggle is the fact that the pop cultural trope of Hawai’i as a popular refuge continues to draw people in, even during a pandemic. On this point, he describes how lockdown, for a brief moment, allowed Indigenous Hawai’ians to see what places like Honolulu Harbor, Waikiki and others would look like as they began to “heal” from the “degradation” caused by this influx of tourists. Another theme here is the idea that we should take pop cultural representations seriously, but perhaps not too seriously. We talk about South Park’s reductive depiction of Indigeneity in Hawai’i and what it means to engage with the satirical representation of cultural appropriation itself. Maile insists that “Satire is not a metaphor” and “cannot be used metaphorically for decolonization.” Ultimately, the conversation zooms out to think through the ways that state governments look to bureaucratize control of the land to further occupy and control Indigenous sovereignty. In particular, the presence of the US military in Hawai’i is, for Maile, undoubtedly part of a broader process of territorial command by the settler colonial nation. He says that we need to start engaging with this in relation to the general need to slow down the pace of development in order to stave off climate change, and recognize the ways in which Kānaka Maoli and other Indigenous communities demonstrate an unwavering commitment to this reality. There are many moments, he says, where he’s called upon to teach settlers, using his particular expertise, but he still doesn’t believe that there is reciprocity in these relationships a lot of the time. While he trusts the intelligence of scientists, for example, he doesn’t feel that trust returned. And when his hospitality is met with hostility, it is hard to avoid taking a position of refusal. Refusal is maybe the overarching concept in this conversation. “No,” he says, is frequently the means through which Indigenous peoples affirm a right to the land. He doesn’t believe, for example, that existing in relation to the sacredness of the land, or “mastering what the sacred means” can or even should be taught in the university. He sees this when he’s asked to speak on behalf of other Indigenous nations in Canada. Not only is this not an ethical practice, he points out that it ignores the extent to which Indigenous politics is particular, not abstract–a fact that remains woefully misunderstood within settler colonial culture.

Shannon Miedema is Director of the Environment and Climate Change team with the Halifax Regional Municipality and one of the chief architects of the city’s climate plan, the subtitle of which is “Acting on Climate Together.” In this conversation she defines what that means in terms of what is increasingly referred to as a “just transition,” or a transition that, as she says, isn’t interested in “leaving anyone behind,” one that rejects the idea that we can simply embrace mitigation of climate change or adaptation to climate change without “putting equity first.” This means devising material solutions with and for the disadvantaged communities in our city: racialized and underserved communities, the poor, the uniquely vulnerable. She wants us, on this Earth Day 2022, to recognize the unprecedented momentum the climate justice movement now has, in a context where we no longer talk about just “climate change” or a “climate crisis,” but a “climate emergency” and even a coming “climate catastrophe.” What we need are plans like the one that Regional Council just adopted in HRM: HalifACT (https://www.halifax.ca/about-halifax/energy-environment/halifact-2050-acting-climate-together) acts on the knowledge that the climate emergency is going to take everyone, it’s going to require an “army” of people capable of “deepening” and “increasing” engagement across the board. Shannon talks about the risk that was inherent in even bringing their plan and projections to Council originally. The choice was made to initiate the plan, despite the knowledge that, as she acknowledges, the COVID-19 pandemic had and has municipalities very worried about their “financial future.” But the future is, of course, what’s at stake in climate change, both immediate and long-term. So they moved forward, pushing seven core areas of actionable, conceivable counter-action, mitigation and adaptation. And the goal is to inspire confidence that there are so many things that can be done: against a dangerous attachment to business as usual and a deadly conviction that it is already too late. One of the big themes of our conversation is this idea that–in spite of the globe-spanning scale of the climate emergency, and the desperate need for a still-unrealized form of “multi-level climate governance”--cities are a crucial space where mobilization can materially happen. Especially in Canada. Cities need to be consulted, Shannon tells us, because large-scale plans to act against climate catastrophe which don’t attend to cities will not have “policies and funding programs” that actually meet the needs of people in cities. Cities are important, as well, because places like Halifax, with a high GDP and a lamentably very “dirty grid,” where the majority of our power comes from coal, can and should do more to decarbonize. Another major theme is this unresolved problem of communication: how do we craft messages and create engagement that causes people to care and feel capable of action, rather than encouraging them to turn away or tune out because it’s too late or because they’re too wracked with doubt? What does it mean to inspire stakeholders at every level to not just understand, but commit to the preservation of the local environment, out of love for the land and a knowledge that we can’t go on the way we’re going?

Ivo Nieuwenhuis works as a Professor of Dutch literature at Radboud University in The Netherlands. He’s also a comedy critic for the national Dutch newspaper Trouw. He’s currently writing about the politics of humour, with a specific focus on humour’s political implications in terms of gender, race, and class relations. We talked about these implications, and the unresolved question of whether humour is inherently subversive, or just as often conservative and regressive. He’s published a bunch of articles on these subjects, but a main focal point of our dialogue was this new issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies that he co-edited with Dick Zjip, which contains some new approaches to the politics of comedy. The reason this issue is so exciting is that it comes at a time when, as Nieuwenhuis explains, the “post-political” worldview that characterized the zenith of liberalism has been supplanted by a sort of “hyper-politics,” the point-of-no-return moment we now occupy where everything is inescapably political and a more diverse panoply of funny voices can be heard in comedy. And one of the things Nieuwenhuis points out in this conversation is that while “there has always been humour,” it is “very difficult today” to be “humorless.” In today’s system of compulsive entrepreneurialism where cultural capital is a question of social survival, the “saturation of every aspect of life with comedy” has reached a unique stage. If comedy is everywhere and if humour is an obligation, can we still be critical about it? When we’re surrounded by forms of funny communication that are predicated on boundary-pushing and offensiveness, do we have to look at it as “brave” or “challenging,” or can we speak up and shut it down? This obviously opens onto this thorny situation that’s been crudely dubbed “cancel culture,” which we note is not just about cancellation of certain kinds of humour, but as often about the emergence of new comedic styles that do consciously criticize conventions in comedy. Fundamentally, Ivo says, comedy is still about power, but not in the assumed way that it’s typically been thought about: yes, comedy can challenge dominant power structures, but it can also, and often does, reinforce them… in fact, Ivo suggests that both things can often happen in the same comedy special! Because, as he points out, the “form [itself] is very persuasive,” we need to, as audiences and avowed appreciators of comedy, be critical about the “aggressive side” of humour, and the co-optation of its truth-telling function for pernicious purposes. Ivo is sort of an expert in the history of humour scandals. In this interview we talk about these moments as “flashpoints” – controversies that emerge as a way of allowing us to assess changing cultural norms. Politicizing mockery which claims that derisive stereotypes are somehow a form of inclusion, we look at the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle’s horribly transphobic and unfunny Netflix special The Closer, we talk briefly about the flashpoint of Joe Rogan being officially sponsored by Spotify, among other key sites of struggle over what’s acceptable in comedy and what constitutes overt hate speech. And, beyond that, how the debate itself has been both accelerated by and attenuated by algorithmic media and platform capitalism, where corporations like Netflix and Spotify, ByteDance and Google, and an increasing number of other Silicon Valley behemoths, “make money from our debates.” It’s tough to know how to proceed in this context, when we feel compelled to identify and confront the defensiveness of the old guard, knowing that our discourse has been captured by a “binary model” that encourages individuated clashes for cash. The point, in part, is just to be conscious of how we’re ensnared, and go from there.

Theresa Stewart-Ambo and Keolu Fox are the co-directors of the Indigenous Futures Institute at the University of California San Diego. K. Wayne Yang is a critical theorist and social critic who writes about popular culture, social movements, urban education, critical pedagogy, decolonization, and many other subjects. Stewart-Ambo and Fox are two authors with wildly divergent research interests. Fox does work in genomic research and is an assistant professor at University of California, San Diego, affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Global Health Program, the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, the Climate Action Lab, and the Indigenous Futures Lab, while Stewart-Ambo is an Assistant Professor in the Education Studies program at UC San Diego. Despite these distinct research focuses, they co-direct the Indigenous Futures Institute with a visionary sense of collective purpose: for the Institute to signify beyond the individual demands of each member's disciplines. IFI is exceptional for the projects that are being worked on there, but it is also important because it is Indigenous-run at the highest level. This is not something that we encounter very much, and certainly not enough. The Institute is about imagining Indigenous design hubs outside of the constraints of, as Yang explains, the nation state, because that social formation, and its obsession with borders, cannot grasp the vital nature of living and interconnected bioregions. When I asked Yang, in this conversation, about what demilitarization could mean from an Indigenous perspective, he didn’t talk about any one conflict, but instead focused on the land and the context of a total war on nature, and how this language of interconnected bioregions allows us to think in radical ways about demilitarization beyond the “removal of troops.” While there is a discursive shift, among critical people, toward decolonization in the form of land acknowledgments, Stewart-Ambo talks about how universities are still clearly not structured with Indigenous prosperity in mind. She argues that so much of the language around equity, diversity and inclusion is about diversion, and either overlooks Indigenous peoples or actively plays into stereotypes. She demands “respectful engagement” at the highest levels and wants land acknowledgment statements to materialize relationships, with institutions actually stepping up and doing their part. No more superficial land acknowledgments, Fox says, because they so obviously function as a form of misdirection, a way of distracting the public from the persistence of privatization, extraction and harm done to Indigenous communities. What is so different, then, about the Indigenous Futures Institute, from their perspective, and I'm starting to see, as an outsider, how stark this difference is from the ways in which people are taught in the traditional Eurocentric university, what's so different is perhaps embodied by this idea of dream tanks: in direct opposition to the notion of think tanks, where, as Yang puts it, we are told how to think, rather than given time and space to explore what may be thought. Fox talks about the idea of a futurist fluency, against the nightmare scenarios that we face under settler colonial capitalism, and gives us this incredible vision for a moment where, in the “husk of colonialism,” communities can make something “beautiful,” innovating out of the remnants of militarism and industrialization.

Yuliya Yurchenko is a senior lecturer and researcher in political economy at University of Greenwich. She is currently in Ukraine on an extraordinary leave. And while she writes that she is, for the moment, in relative safety, that could change any moment. Being a Ukrainian, an activist and an academic, Yuliya traveled to Ukraine on Feb 19, 2022 as part of a fact-finding and solidarity mission with a number of MPs, trade unionists and journalists. The goal, she says, of this mission is to connect with civil society organizations, trade unions, activists and politicians, and “to express direct, cross-border solidarity from the UK working class to the Ukrainian working class.” She not only demands that Ukraine’s foreign debt be canceled, but that the international community also provide reparations for 8 years of inaction on Russian aggression. If we want to understand this war, Yuliya points out, it is going to be necessary to look past the headlines. The simplistic black and white portrayals we’re receiving do not do justice to the complexity of the situation. And although she recognizes that this lack of nuance largely results from a desire to give the public a “coherent frame,” it’s just patently the case that, right now, “conventional frames don’t work” and for that reason, she says, we need to deeply reassess “what constitutes evidence” even, and evolve methods of analyzing disinformation, emotion, belonging, statehood and aggression beyond traditional Western scholarship and standard modes of political science. While we’re still encouraged to think in terms of the rule of law when trying to understand these sorts of conflicts, Yurchenko emphasizes that societies without the rule of law require us to “be more flexible” in our theorizing. Why can’t we incorporate “interdisciplinary and open-minded… frameworks” to understand what’s happening? This is what I kept hearing in my conversation with Yuliya: a tension between wanting to, herself, offer clarity, and knowing that the whole situation is, on some level, hopelessly complicated. So, for that reason, in part, she says she is necessarily hopeful that peace is possible, but has to be pragmatic about the evidence, which suggests that the war is going to drag on. So she continues to communicate publicly for peace. She talks at the beginning of our conversation about the fact that she derives a lot of strength from just fighting for the future through care – that these contributions to collective living-on have become a kind of personal coping mechanism, It speaks to the spirit of Yurchenko’s writing. Her book Ukraine and the Empire of Capital (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745337371/ukraine-and-the-empire-of-capital/) is not only full of profound analysis, it also, importantly, centres the living labour of workers, people who are focused not on extraction, profit, and domination, but on trying to care for themselves and their families. These people are not, as she puts it here, just “pawns in imperialist games.” They deserve collective ownership of their own future. In the end, she argues that we must stop “competing for the crumbs of Empire,” “we need to imagine a future” of demilitarization, we need to imagine a world in which hate and resentment and competition for those crumbs no longer drives world affairs. In short, as she puts it, “we need to imagine the future before we can build it.”

Joshua Cotter’s debut book Skyscrapers of the Midwest was nominated for an Ignatz Award. His book Driven By Lemons is a challenging and deeply personal exploration of unstable psychological states. We talk about how creating Driven By Lemons informed his breakout book Nod Away, which was on many top ten lists in 2016. And how reading a random article about the transference of consciousness into an electronic medium provided the “spark” for the Nod Away series (https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/nod-away), which is this massive, expansive story that considers the reductio ad absurdum possibilities of that sort of still science fictional, but increasingly more plausible, technology. He says that he wishes he could find the specific article that sparked the idea for Nod Away, but also seems to suggest it’s less important than just being open to the things in the world that are going to “click with you.” Incidentally, I really liked the way he admitted that he can’t exactly explain how his stories develop. He says it’s mostly intuitive, and compares his creative process to a rock tumbler, in the sense that there is a necessary but indeterminate process of refining your ideas. One of the things he notes-–and I think this is relatable for any artist or writer--is that he now feels more confident with his rendering of this epic story, and that he attributes the level of confidence he feels right now to the experience of being in one place, in a fixed space with a reliable routine. That might not work for everyone—others might be more nomadic–but I’d say that I think I function in the same way. The second installment in the Nod Away series (https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/nod-away-vol-2), released in 2021, advances the plot in exhilarating ways. To give you a sense of what the books are about–since I really tried to avoid spoilers in this interview, here is a summary from Multiversity Comics: “Nod Away is set on a near-future version of earth. A deep space transport has been developed to take a small crew to an earth-like, habitable planet in a nearby system in an attempt to begin colonization/repopulation. The internet is now telepathic and referred to as the “innernet.” When the hub is revealed to be a human child, Melody McCabe is hired to develop" a new nexus to replace that human hub. The books are really beautiful. And I ask Josh a number of questions about his specific cartooning style. The wireframe chaos that has become sort of a trademark, for example, is rooted in a dedication to Representing psychological states that can’t be expressed in words. It was amazing to hear that, while these panels seem to be frenetic and out of control, they’re actually conscious, controlled experiments in abstraction. We talk about how those choices are always in service of the story, despite the temptation to lean heavily into the aesthetics of splash panels and spectacle. Overall, he says the goal is to explore the “true costs of technology” without resorting to “didacticism.” I think the books definitely do that–-there are all these suggestive ideas surrounding technology-–the way it can act as both a source of escapism and serve as a site of destruction.

Tari Ajadi is an Assistant Professor in Black Politics at McGill University. El Jones is an Assistant Professor of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, and Julia Rodgers is a PhD Candidate studying patient-oriented healthcare and public engagement in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie. They are three of the four lead authors of the high profile and politically impactful report Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM. (https://www.halifax.ca/sites/default/files/documents/city-hall/boards-committees-commissions/220117bopc1021.pdf) In our discussion we unpack that important document, but we also try to look at some of the historical roots of defunding and divestment as tools for achieving social justice, the complicated challenge of trying to gain public support for policies that strike the public as “too radical” because a prior set of cultural assumptions, ideologies and biases blind many of us to the need to go radically in a different direction from the system that we have: which blindly wastes a fortune in public funds financing a broken status quo. We talk about the ongoing fiasco of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that has terrorized Canadian cities, and especially Ottawa, for the last several weeks. They make it clear that the public’s disgust with the response from political leaders and law enforcement should not be read as necessarily about a desire for more authoritarian measures to keep the peace–though there is likely a lot of that within Canadian public opinion–it should be seen as, first off, a moment where the police demonstrate they are here to “uphold the social order,” as El puts it, to protect “white conservative movements,” but it should also be interpreted as another example of a “long history of ignoring white nationalism” in Canada, in Julia’s words. In many instances, social movements and counterprotests organized by communities–these forces that “exist outside the system”--were able to accomplish what the police couldn’t. This just confirms, from their perspective, that we need an alternative model of public safety, one that trusts communities enough to work “in concert for the good,” to quote a particularly powerful turn of phrase from Tari that he makes near the end of this discussion. He makes that turn in the context of describing the Defunding the Police report as a “love letter to the city.” And admits that love can be “complex” and “conflictual,” but due to the fact that the evacuation of love from the social in a carceral nation allows “space for domination to exist,” we need to reengage with the public as an act of redemptive love. Things did not have to turn out this way, and they could still change. But achieving that alteration of social reality will necessarily mean, as El teaches us, working to achieve that change at the social level. It’s not going to happen without knowledge translation and civic engagement. As Julie succinctly puts it at one point: “language matters so much” in negotiating the attachment to authority that prevents many people from imagining a more radically democratic means of fostering healthy communities. So often the struggle is less about evidence and data and more about arguments, established doctrines, ideas that have been embedded in institutions for so long they come to count as unreflexive forms of common sense. Moving forward in a transformative way, they stress, might mean looking back in time at misremembered or deliberately forgotten movements, the voice of black women, for example, who Tari tells us “were truth-tellers in their time;” taking up their words and recognizing the prescience of their ideas rather than just “producing the same violence while citing [their] names.”

Gina Dent is an associate professor of feminist studies, history of consciousness, and legal studies at UC Santa Cruz in California. Erica R. Meiners is professor of education and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Dent and Meiners are two of the four creators of a pivotal new book from Haymarket entitled Abolition. Feminism. Now. (https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1546-abolition-feminism-now) It’s an essential text that was also co-written by Angela Davis and Beth Ritchie, two central thinkers on the prison industrial complex and its deep connections to racial capitalism. Abolition. Feminism. Now. is an invitation to enter a conversation about how we might respond as a society to the dehumanizing and brutal system of policing and punishment that we’ve more or less come to accept as the only means of ensuring public safety. Rich with examples of strategies for liberation, this book offers an authoritative analysis of not only the forgotten place of the incarcerated in contemporary society, but many other timely social problems that feel, at times, like they have no solution. The trick is, they say, the solutions are hard to imagine because of the way that ideology and a “carceral aesthetics” blind us to the urgent necessity of abolition. In this conversation, I tentatively ask Gina and Erica whether there might be a way for abolition to become more insistent on proactive change, rather than only emerging in response to particular crises. Their response reminded me of how little I really know about the movement for abolition. This is not about some historically new force in global politics; it is not the case that abolition feminism right now represents the reactionary emergence of something that wasn’t there. Abolition feminism has been here for a very long time, it is just that this history has been purposefully and perniciously forgotten. This moment of increased mobilization that we’re seeing today is the product of what Gina calls a “widening [of] the circle” to include people that have been “awakened” by recent events, and who are trying to respond to “multiple temporalities” coexisting at one time. They suggest that striking back against the normalizing of state violence requires the work of pushing the public’s sense of what the prison industrial complex is, past the specific space of unfreedom we imagine, and insisting on “having a longer [and more complex] conversation” about the system of racist mass incarceration we inhabit and are complicit in. That’s a lot to take in, but it’s necessary, they argue, to stay with the complexity, with the trouble. As they write in Abolition. Feminism. Now., it feels like “historical time is accelerating.” Crises are escalating and crashing violently onto the poor and precarious. So we have to try to respond with radical solutions to the emergencies that envelope the vulnerable first, while also remembering that, as they try to explain, we are always going to struggle to “learn in the space of emergency” because of the sometimes suffocating intensity of emergency. This is a problem if the goal and challenge of our times is no less than to fundamentally rework the very way in which society is structured.

Ardath Whynacht is an activist and writer who works for and with survivors of state and family violence. She’s also a professor of sociology at Mount Allison University and the author of a new book called Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/insurgent-love). The radical, utopian and absolutely necessary prospect of abolition is on people’s minds. As Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth Richie argue in the new book Abolition. Feminism. Now: It would be “Inconceivable to many even ten years ago, [that] jail closure, the elimination of money bond, clemency, and ‘compassionate release’ [would be] debated in mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post and lauded in progressive public policy forums as examples of necessary change.” But that is what is happening -– a deep quaking of the conceptual foundation upon which our carceral, punishing society has been built. And yet still, at the centre of that tremor in the social fabric is a concern over safety: how do we do the difficult work of imagining a means of keeping especially the very vulnerable in society safe, rather than using the prison and police to ossify the roots of violence? Insurgent Love is an important political statement on the meaning of this broad global shift toward adopting an abolitionist framework, and so much of the book’s critical power comes from thinking in both practical and radical ways about what abolition could mean locally. There’s no question, she says, that it is “tough” to be an “abolitionist scholar on domestic violence research in Canada.” There is not much of an “appetite,” as she puts it, “for… non-carceral” solutions. But an abolitionist answer might be the only one, despite the fact that it is a hard argument to make in a country that still, like so many others, actively “worships” and “reifies” the police and the military as the indispensable sources of our safety. Ardath makes clear that the reason we need abolition feminism now is that the level of analysis Black and Indigenous feminisms can offer right now, and the “level of prediction,” too, as she puts it, means that we don’t need to be condemned to the reactionary politics of punishment. As white settler academics, we talk about what it means to be a “permanent students” of these forms of feminist thought that radically reject the system that was constructed to directly benefit us, and how to do this without passively accepting the underacknowledged and unearned “rewards for being an opportunist.” We can move in a totally different direction if we can begin to conceptualize meaningful multiethnic, multiracial solidarity that builds that different world out of a respect and reinforcement of difference: different cosmologies, different conceptions of justice, of resistance. And if we accept that we need to divorce ourselves from a carceral system that dehumanizes people and perpetuates violence. Davis and the other co-authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. suggest that one of the things we might need, in this context, are “movement spaces for people to learn, to be wrong and unlearn, and to be accountable and change.” This idea of “reclaiming accountability” from an unaccountable regime of state violence and punishment might be the central tenet of abolition feminism. It’s a challenging idea that I’m still wrestling with, and will be for a very long time. It’s the challenge that I think we should all be confronting, and Insurgent Love gives us a vital engagement with it, in all of its messy, historically rooted reality.