In recent years, the United States has witnessed growing interest in a global prison abolition movement that seeks to defund police, free all incarcerated people, and reinvest in communities that have been disproportionately disenfranchised under racial capitalism. Abolitionist scholars and activists argue that prison abolition is not just about destroying carceral institutions but is fundamentally about building new relations that are equipped to intervene at the root of institutional and interpersonal forms of violence and harm. While abolitionists take up this worldmaking project in many ways, this dissertation focuses specifically on Disability Justice and how disabled queer and trans people of color (QTPoC) contribute to prison abolition through abolitionist forms of care. I define abolitionist care as the often unseen and undervalued reproductive labor of reimagining and enacting care beyond carceral logics of surveillance, punishment, and abandonment of bodyminds marked criminal or pathological. I argue that by reimagining forms of life beyond the disabling, carceral, settler colonial state, abolitionist care is an exercise in crip of color worldmaking. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2018-2019 and more than seven years of grassroots organizing in San Diego, CA, I show how QTPoC attempt to prefigure a world where prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and other detention facilities no longer exist. One of my major arguments, however, is that abolitionist care and carceral care are not rigidly divided. Many QTPoC regularly navigate carceral institutions as part of their abolitionist care work, while carceral, medico-juridical logics are unconsciously reproduced by many QTPoC who are working towards abolitionist projects. Approaching these contradictions as generative of abolitionist knowledge production, I chart the complex ways that QTPoC experiment, compromise, and (re)negotiate their strategies and tactics, mapping the emotional and affective contours of this work along the way. Ultimately, the dissertation offers critical reflections that are meant to be useful for organizers, activists, service providers, and others who are invested in building abolitionist worlds.

Travel is becomingly increasing associated with self-work, in the form of self-discovery,

self-transformation, or self-documentation through writing and photography. In light of this expansive social trend, I argue that tourism research would benefit from an exploration of the existential self. I suggest that by discovering the self, anthropologists can connect tourism research to broader theoretical questions, such as: What is the relationship between structure and agency, subjectivity and power in an individual’s self-experience? I draw heavily on Douglas Hollan, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu to propose a critical phenomenological paradigm that moves to address this complex set of questions. To demonstrate the utility of this paradigm for tourism research, I analyze two contemporary ethnographies, one on young Israeli backpackers and the other on multinational pilgrims who walk and cycle the Camino to Santiago, Spain.