Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of How to Survive the End of the World

Abstract

So begins the refrain of the podcast, How to Survive the End of the World (HSEW) hosted by queer Black sisters, adrienne maree and Autumn Brown. The hosts, who share the identities of being writers, healing justice practitioners and organizers, decided to begin their podcast in November 2017, to center what must be known and practiced for living, existing, and resisting interlocking forms of social oppression. The hosts argue that they and the larger world are living through apocalyptic moments such as climate change, racial terror, queer and trans antagonism, and the violences of capitalism. HSEW would grow to have over 100,000 unique listeners. Their podcast is a significant site for my exploration of embodied abolition because of their sociopolitical commitments to abolition, social change, and healing.Carceral abolition is a political project to end policing and imprisonment by cultivating a society that challenges carcerality, which include systems of imprisonment, surveillance, and criminalization that construct a punitive culture that affects one's embodiment in a carceral state. Embodied abolition links carceral abolition with healing justice, the work of centering individual and collective healing in movements for social change. I believe embodiment is deeply linked to healing one's body, mind, and soul, because the embodiment of liberation is healing justice. I introduce the term embodied abolition to analyze the affective conditions that shape the ways individuals know, understand, and practice liberation through their bodyminds within the carceral state.1 Carceral abolition must be concerned with healing because carcerality crafts punitive ways of being in relationship to our own bodies and the bodies we exist with.The experience of HSEW becomes healing for participants as liberatory strategies are shared, learned, and taught. Through an analysis of HSEW, I argue that podcast(ing) expands our understanding of abolition praxis.2 I center the healing justice conditions of the podcast that construct noteworthy digital ecologies. By analyzing the digital ecological elements of this podcast, grace, rigor, and curiosity, one comes to understand how HSEW creates a digital healing space that creates transformative possibilities for embodied abolition.Because I am interested in how collective healing can challenge how the carceral state attempts to break communal bonds to perpetuate carcerality, I am concerned with how we rebuild, preserve, and cultivate intimacy. In terms of podcast(ing) one can define intimacy as, “efforts to create and reveal emotional experiences and personal connection” among podcast participants.3 Sarah Florini argues podcasts create spaces that, “enable participants to reaffirm community and collectivity, engaging catharsis, and, at times, even find a brief reprieve.”4 My own chosen family brought me to HSEW, and we often share how the podcast has positively influenced our healing journeys. In my experience as a participant of HSEW, I feel the intimacy. Beyond the intimacy of their own personal bond, the Brown sisters invite individuals they trust, respect, and often know onto the show. I have often remarked that when the world feels overwhelming, I can enter an episode of HSEW that becomes therapeutic in the ways that it holds grief, terror, and the difficulty of existing as a person harmed by carcerality, while also fiercely believing a different world is possible.In my discussion of ecology, I borrow from Christina Sharpe's understanding of ecology. Sharpe utilizes climate and weather as metaphors to describe the current spatiotemporal conditions of Black people: “In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies.”5 Ecology serves as a concept for the strategies, communities and networks of survival and resistance Black people created in response to the climate of anti-Blackness.6 I argue HSEW, in its digital ecosystem of primarily episodes but also live shows and social media, builds digital ecologies, anchored by grace, rigor, and curiosity, that encourage embodied abolition.Through an autoethnographic analysis, I argue HSEW is a significant digital space that constructs the ecological conditions for healing justice and abolition by centering communal, intimate relationships. If, to seek the abolition of policing and prisons is to seek the end of the world, constructing a new one requires new ways of being and living and caring, perhaps with grace, rigor, and curiosity.What would it mean to extend grace to others and yourself? What spaces would it open in your life? Can grace help to liberate us? I begin my analysis of HSEW with the ecological condition of grace. I understand grace as compassion, kindness, understanding with elements of fluidity and malleability. I am not arguing that one can love themselves enough that they will never be harmed by carcerality or that one listens to a few episodes and forever knows how to hold and extend grace. Rather, the ecological conditions of HSEW, as a digital space that creates an expansive, intimate form of community curated by two queer Black healing justice practitioners, fosters a different way of being and existing for their participants. This holds especially true for their Black queer and trans participants who face exceptional harm by the carceral state. In the end, I am interested in how alternative forms of embodiment provide new practices to care for oneself and others and aid in resisting carcerality.Let us bring this understanding to two episodes. “Being with Terror” (2020) discusses learning how to grieve and find community care. In “Being with Terror,” Malkia Devich-Cyril argues that Black people must continuously encounter and experience unnatural death: “You know, I think, you know, number one, that death is a part of life, it's natural. But the deaths that we have been subject to as oppressed people, they're unnatural. Um, and that, you know, deaths that are coming too early, deaths that [are] unequal, that we have an unequal relationship to death and loss, um, that's not natural, that's not okay. Um, I think that I want people to understand that when you live with generations of colonial terror, that you will fall subject to generations of colonized grief.”7 The grief and terror that arises in witnessing death, especially in the year of a pandemic that hit Black communities particularly hard, landed hard in my body. I felt held, understood, and comforted by this episode as I was recovering from a summer of an uprising in Minneapolis, being displaced due to carceral violence and the ongoing pandemic. I felt encouraged to give grace to myself for the colonized grief I was and am carrying. Malkia validates the heavy emotions felt by participants and offers tools to work through and within. Autumn and adrienne hold space and inspire me to sit with my feelings of colonized grief. Colonized grief alerts us to how we do not simply live through apocalyptic events, like slavery and mass incarceration, we feel them within. We need to hold space to understand the violence of carcerality, have grace to attend to its harmful impact on our bodyminds, and make space to practice that which allows us to abolish carcerality. As participants, we are moved into the intimacy of sharing grief with those we are listening to, especially if we are also queer and Black like adrienne, Autumn, and Malkia.The 2018 episode, “The Impossible Things about Us” is a conversation between the hosts about their vulnerability and improving their relationships with their bodies amid burnouts. In the episode, adrienne states, “I feel like affirming that naming, what's going on in my body and how can we attend to the body as a way towards that soul growth.”8 That soul growth that adrienne speaks of, I understand as embodied abolition. And I understand it deeply in my body. I often return to, “The Impossible Things about Us” and share it with others when I recommend the podcast because it serves as a reminder to offer myself the kindness and grace that carcerality teaches us we do not deserve. I heal through grace. Grace in the digital ecologies of HSEW encourages experiences of embodied abolition. Grace to tend to our bodies, to be kind to each other and ourselves and to reject the colonial logic of the carceral state that dictates that certain bodies, such as those that are trans and/or queer and Black are destined for unnatural death. HSEW inspires grace in our intimate relationships so that we move from punishment being our only mode of being with each other.At first rigor seems to stand out in relationship with grace and curiosity. From these definitions, it becomes a query why it was included by the hosts. Abolition asks us to reconsider the ways we engage in the world, to seek alternative possibilities. So, can I encounter the word rigor differently? HSEW changed the way I understand rigor. Moving beyond rigor's dictionary definition, the Brown sisters encourage me to understand strictness as a dedication to a task, an uncomfortable condition as the uneasiness that accompanies growth and precision as the training necessary for living in a new world.In “Beyond Survival,” Autumn and adrienne interview Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ejeris Dixon about their anthology, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. Leah and Ejeris share how they both came to and the lessons they've gathered from transformative justice work. Ejeris describes transformative justice as a commitment to relationship building because we cannot truly hold accountable those whom we have no connection to. They argue that we stay deeply attuned to rigorously practicing learning, deepening, and moving forward: “It's pretty impossible to commit to TJ without also committing to the relationship building work and the practice of like, um, like the small and big parts of practicing transformation.”10 My intimate engagement with the podcast is made possible through a practice of relationships from my discussion with loved ones about the podcast to returning as a frequent participant. Over several years, I choose to return to share and honor vulnerability, intimacy, and capacity with the hosts and their guests with each episode. As the podcast continuously returns to themes like the practice of relationship, we understand how the hosts are imagining and practicing a commitment to social change. Their commitment is perhaps what they mean when they commit to learning from apocalypse with rigor, by communally practicing liberation. It inspires not just my continual participation with the show but expanding it to my own life when I encounter conflict and harm. And to be a student of my experiences so I may train for a new world. HSEW led me to attending a Minneapolis Emergent Strategy training, adrienne's theory for social change, that led to in person connections with healing justice practitioners in my community that deepened my understanding of the link between healing and abolition. Through the digital ecosystem of HSEW, we learn the ecological importance of staying attuned to the work of building and maintaining relationships, so that less people are disposable, and more people can heal.Curiosity, which I understand as being open, available, and maintaining joy and excitement in our imaginations, encourages us to speculate. In the episode, “There's a New World Comin’ with Toshi Reagon,” Autumn and adrienne interview Black queer performer and artist Toshi Reagon, the librettist of Octavia Butler's opera, Parable of the Sower. Like the novel and opera, this episode implores us to be curious about what can be.A note on sound. Autumn and adrienne's conversation with Toshi is quite different from other episodes. As I listen with my eyes closed, I do not simply experience a conversation; I intimately experience and am transported by the soundtrack of the Parable of the Sower opera which I had the opportunity to see live—The words of Butler performed and expanded by the singers come alive through the podcast and come to sit next and within me. The inclusion of the music creates a transformative experience for HSEW participants as we can integrate our understanding of the music with the conversation taking place, expanding concepts that encourage our curiosity like imagination, change and intergenerational organizing. The title of the episode comes from the lyric, “there's a new world coming, everything gonna be turning over; where you gonna be standing when it comes?”11 How can I be curious about where I will be when change comes? Imagination, and dreaming and visioning alone will not transform the world we live in. They do encourage me to engage in communal efforts to organize for material changes. If we can imagine ourselves in a world without prisons, believe that it is truly possible, and remain curious about what practices can get us there, then we can embody those practices.Toshi describes how the work of Butler encourages her to approach situations in her life differently. The questions she asks are embedded with abolitionist possibility: “And I'm always saying, what can we shape in this situation? I'll be like, do we have to do this? Can we shape something else?”12 As an abolitionist, I am invested in the else of it all. When I teach about carceral abolition, I often bring paper and crayons and ask students to draw their vision of a world without police and prisons. Autumn and adrienne often discuss how we are in an imagination battle that they combat through their writing and this podcast. The podcast energizes my curiosity and encourages me to believe in the power of imagination in my teaching, writing, and art. To combat the carceral imagination battle, we should nurture curiosity, inviting others to lean into their own minds and understandings of what can be possible. Rather than simply argue for the possibility of alternative ways of being and existing, HSEW takes it as a given that a new world will be made and inspires participants to imagine with the hosts and their guests. For me, the ecological condition of curiosity of HSEW is incredibly healing as it validates my own desires to envision a different world, rebelling against other sources that tell us that the world is incapable of change.Through an autoethnographic analysis of HSEW, I have traced its digital ecological layers of grace, rigor, and curiosity that create possibilities for embodied abolition. I have conveyed how podcast(ing) is a noteworthy media form that molds intimate relationships. Though the micro topics and guests of HSEW change, I argue that the core of this podcast, hosted by two siblings who live at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalization that propels alternative ways of being, is about the transformation of relationships. I also argue HSEW is about the encouragement of possibility. adrienne maree and Autumn Brown convey that ultimately the current way our world exists is unsustainable and harmful. When I look to those constructing alternative ways of being, I can embody abolition by practicing freedom. And I, we and us can heal towards and beyond the end of the world.