Abstract
Abolition is a theory, a dream, a relational ethic, and a practice oriented toward a future in which the entwined systems of carcerality, coloniality, and capital have been dismantled. In their place emerges what has variously been envisioned as an abolition democracy (A. Y. Davis, 2005; Du Bois, 1935), a community of care (Knopp et al., 1976), and the beloved community (King, 1963; O’Brien, 2023). Yet how might such abolitionist imaginaries be realised? Drawing on a wide range of abolitionist scholarship, this thesis argues that such dreams materialise through practices of care, refusal, and prefiguration, grounded in fugitive imagination and the ghostly knowledges of those who have gone before and those yet to come. These knowledges are held in the everywhere of the protest kitchen, the nowhere of stories, and across the urgent, slow, expansive temporalities of transformational change. These claims about the onto-epistemologies and methodologies of abolition are applied to the abolition of carcerality in Aotearoa and to the (im)possibilities of social service NGO contribution to this liberatory future. This thesis examines how neoliberal contracts, managerialism, and unavoidable structural complicity with carcerality constrain such efforts, while also highlighting the creative and determined abolitionist practices of social service workers.
Based on interviews with 29 abolition-aligned practitioners, this thesis argues that such practitioners are constrained from fully engaging in abolitionist ways of being and knowing by the structures of colonial carceralism. Despite these constraints, possibility remains in organisation-level protection of abolitionist practices. This ‘meso-level’ protection is more likely within kaupapa Māori organisations, where abolition-aligned ways of being and knowing are often already embedded. At a practice level, this thesis identifies the strategies practitioners have developed to disrupt their structural complicity with carceralism. I name these strategies anti-carceral practices – acts that offer vital care to community members, shielding them from some of the harms of the carceral state, even if they do not directly challenge the structures that make such care necessary. In contrast, some practitioners move toward abolitionist praxis – acts that both provide care and challenge structural oppression. Ultimately, this thesis contends that although abolitionist practitioners face significant limitations in refusing carcerality and embodying their transformative politics, their work nonetheless holds emancipatory potential. Through the provision of care to those entangled in the carceral system and subtle acts of misbehaviour that disrupt carceral logics, these practitioners enact fragments of abolition in the present. In these ways, abolitionist social service workers can contribute to abolition.