Making Room for Abolition is a body of work that imagines a world without police and prisons by making speculative worlds through the lens of a home. This work explores the contours of possible abolitionist worlds by crafting speculative domestic artifacts; imagining, writing and reading speculative stories; and interweaving those dispatches from abolitionist imaginaries with conversations about present-day abolitionist practices.

This work and many of the artifacts collected here first materialized as an installation of a living room from a world without police and prisons at Red Bull Arts in 2021.

About this Site

This website is an archive of abolitionist realities—futures and alternate presents—expressed as artifacts, dispatches, and essays. It presents a distributed storytelling project comprised of three different types of media that are connected in various ways: 

  • Artifacts are specific objects and sounds from (various) abolitionist realities, they may be situated in alternative pasts, presents, or futures; 

  • Essays are big-picture thematic narratives that bring artifacts in conversation with real-life interviews with abolitionist organizers, other references, soundscapes;

  • COMING SOON

    Dispatches are short stories that offer a glimpse into the world(s) in which these abolitionist realities are imagined;

Contributors

Lead Artist | executive producer

Lauren Williams (she/they) is a Detroit-based designer, researcher and educator. They work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power over Black life and death.

Co-Producer | essays

Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (he/him) is an organizer turned strategist whose work is story-driven: cultivating and protecting people's voices and self-perception as capable of changing their environments or circumstances. As a multimedia storyteller, they use voice to shift culture, engaging with communities through listening, memory-making, and movement.

audio engineer

Conor Anderson (he/him) is an Audio Engineer and Producer for 101.9 WDET, ensuring quality audio content for the station from underwriting to live bands, podcasts, and broadcasts. Before joining WDET, Anderson was an ethnomusicological documentarian and the lead audio engineer for Red Bull Radio Detroit. He is a graduate of The University of Michigan, where he received a degree in Sound Media and Culture. 

Web Designer

Em Woudenberg (they/them) of Strike Design Studio offers frank consultancy and striking solutions for print and screens. With over a decade of experience, they have worked with notable brands and have exhibited their work across the world.

Studio Photographer

Radical Play, led by Na Forest Lim, they/them, is a photo and film studio that makes art to share unique + beautiful truths of Detroit artists, BIPOC, queer, disabled, immigrants, sex workers, & other marginalized individuals. Their creative purpose is to shift unbalanced personal narratives and transform societal issues.

Acknowledgments

This work, from 2021 through today, was made possible with funding from the Detroit Justice Center, Art 4 Justice Fund, The Center for Cultural Power, Race Forward, and Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Essay
Imagination
February 5, 2025

Essay
Time
Carceral Chronopolitics
January 22, 2025

What are memories of lands, waters or peoples, without time? What is the future? And, if we are unequipped to view time, like rivers, as currency to be manipulated, resource rather than relation, what have we already lost? In this episode, Lauren Williams shows us that these questions too, are political, introducing to the broader archive the concept of chronopolitics. She asks us to consider the question of Grace Lee and James Boggs: “What time is it on the clock of the world?” while her guests chime in with considerations of kinship, urgency, and magic. She also highlights the relationship between time and punishment in a world that may itself be more temporary than dominant narratives suggest.

Essay
Nature: Part 2
Phantom Waterways & Unstable Geographies
January 8, 2025

Human made infrastructures always eventually crumble, lost to time and memory. The 21st century has brought these concerns uncomfortably close to ‘First World’ or technologically advanced societies, societies which tell themselves that they have mastered nature. Levees break, power grids overload, and suddenly a highway is a river. As we wade through the layers of deprivation, segregation and allocation that make it so, we uncover that some of these roads had always been rivers, and their memories may still be stronger than our methods. In this episode Lauren Williams points to human designs nearing failure tolerance, and calls us back to a different relation with Nature and each other.

Essay
Nature: Part 1
The Fictions of Real Estate
December 18, 2024

In this episode, we meet neighbors and residents who have organized themselves to nurture lands they belong to, while Lauren Williams outlines seductive narratives of pioneerism, emptiness and care that beg the question of whether all property might be virtual. In her eyes, land speculation, the financialization of housing markets, and urban “blight,” all feel more than a little esoteric, as if confusion is the point. Here, Williams clears the smoke and cracks the mirrors, braiding histories of property valuation, colonialism, and displacement from the Detroit River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Essay
Safety & Interdependence: Part 2
Disappearance
December 4, 2024

Something sinister ties the pristine to the policed: landscapes, bodies, and the neighborhoods born from their mingling. In this second meditation on safety & interdependence, thoroughly cited from both academy & community, Williams draws our focus to disappearance as an evolving method. Put another way, employing violence workers to delete the native, the trafficked, the poor is American as cherry pie, and the attendant systems of prison and policing may actually be working just as designed. What would our world look like if we reconstituted safety as connectedness, freedom as togetherness? Will there even be a world if we don’t?

Essay
Safety & Interdependence: Part 1
Alienation from Ourselves, Each Other, and Our Needs
November 20, 2024

Joined by a chorus of voices and visionaries, Detroit-based artist Lauren Williams invites us to consider roadmaps to futures we hope for, through a focus on the everyday & the contradictions of neoliberal philosophy. Should everything really be for sale, will the market protect the worthy? First, a foundation: How do our ways of working separate us from our power and possibility? What exactly is neoliberalism, how did it become the dominant social and economic logic of U.S. civil society? What does any of this have to do with abolition? To answer that last question first, it comes down to criminalization and control. Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy and civic fights about water access serve as examples of how accepting a logic of separation weakens our ability to challenge social problems that affect people in very connected ways. Williams illuminates the short path from privatization to deprivation, before limning the difference between the state’s compulsion to watch & the human need to be seen.

Essay
Introducing
Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities
November 13, 2024

Welcome to Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities, a series of narrative essays that reflect on emergent themes from conversations with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to abolition of police and prisons. Interweaving research with brief dispatches from speculative abolitionist futures, each episode draws together the voices of people working toward food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice, and Black liberation to connect thematic currents surrounding the abolition of police and prisons. In each episode, we look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons, and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you’ll hear us explore abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.