Solid pollution in the ocean, or marine debris, is not accumulating in one island in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean; rather, it is distributed throughout the world's oceans from surface to seafloor. The vast majority of this pollution is comprised of plastics, which both leach and attract other contaminants (plasticizers, flame retardants, colorants, and pesticides, for instance), and the vast majority of these are too small to see with the naked eye. Marine debris is a product of capitalism and a form of patriarchal violence. Toxicants leached by ubiquitous plastics disproportionately affect bodies sexed female at birth by acting as endocrine disruptors. The labor of maintaining life that materialist feminists call social reproduction of managing how much—rather, how little—plastic winds up in a household often falls on women in households. And this prevalence of plastics is the result of an economic system rooted in patriarchal values that was able to rise to hegemony via European colonialism. “Death to Disposability: Marine Debris as Violence” examines these political-economic violences of marine debris as a form of patriarchal violence though linguistic conceptualizations that characterize practices of enclosure and extraction in marine contexts. It does so by studying three flows of oil, water, and capital in the three water bodies of the open North Pacific Ocean, the Santa Barbara Channel, and the Skagerrak Strait. This project consists of three case studies—“Death to Disposability in the North Pacific Gyre” on the nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup, “Ecotoxicology: The Santa Barbara Channel, the California Current, and Invisible Violences” on formerly oil-producing Platform Holly, and “Still Holding: Picking up Pieces of Capitalist Expediency on the West Coast of Sweden” on the petrochemical company Borealis—and a book of poetry, Hold Fast. This project employs both qualitative and artistic research methods, namely discourse analysis, close reading, and poetry as research practice.

“Black lives unbounded: Policing, property, and the spatial practice of abolition in Sacramento” explores how abolition movements transform city space and denaturalize entrenched geographies of racial capitalism. From a human geographic perspective, I ask: how is the violence of racial capitalism cemented in city space? How does the work of abolition expose and disrupt its structures? Finally, what socio-spatial arrangements does abolition produce in its place?

My dissertation takes a three-paper format, each devoted to one of these questions. In my first paper, I argue that racial capitalism is cemented in urban space through property relationships and policing, in a continuation of a settler-colonial history rooted in dispossession, partitioning, and state violence. My second paper, following a year of demonstrations surrounding the high-profile police murder of Stephon Clark in 2018, argues that protests and collective appropriations of space expose and disrupt these relationships of property and policing, revealing the underlying violence that holds them together. In my third paper, moving from a focus on protest to a focus on the everyday practices of community-based organizations in the city, I contend that abolition is made material in city space through lived practices of collectivity, autonomy, and mutual aid, building socio-spatial arrangements that transgress the bounds of property relationships. In sum, my dissertation demonstrates that abolitionist organizers and advocates appropriate, reimagine, and disentangle city space from geographies of racial capitalism that are entrenched through regimes of property, producing novel arrangements of urban space that allow for community care, safety, and mutual aid.

My dissertation takes a mixed-methods human geographic approach based in observant participation in social movement organizing and action, ethnographic research with racial justice organizers, and archival research into urban racial histories and architectures. By exposing how racial capitalism is entrenched in urban landscapes and how abolition produces alternative, life-affirming arrangements, this project intervenes in urgent conversations among academics, community organizers, planners, and policymakers inspired by contemporary abolition movements who aim to create city spaces in which life can thrive.

The climate and environmental justice (CJ/EJ) movements have provided a voice to those suffering from environmental hazards and initiated policy change. However, geographer Laura Pulido et al. (2016) criticizes the EJ movement’s reliance on state solutionism and argues that the neoliberal political structure of the United States has stunted the necessary progress needed to address systemic injustices like racism and income inequity, both of which result in “limited gains in improving the physical environments of vulnerable communities'' (p.21). This shortcoming extends to the more recent climate justice movement. Responses to climate injustices include current mainstream regulatory actions which tend to focus on pro-market solutions of mitigation and adaptation; some popular examples include carbon reductionism, green infrastructure, and technological fixes. While this progress is sensible, it ignores the fundamental drivers of structural inequities that make certain communities more vulnerable to climate impacts in the first place. In this paper, I will extend Pulido et al.’s critique of the reliance on the democratic orientation of neoliberal policy structures to solve environmental injustices to the CJ movement. I argue that an abolitionist framework that addresses communities’ root causes of vulnerability, community history, and current social and environmental challenges could be a useful approach to the CJ movement in order to equitably and holistically address climate impacts. I use a case study of the historically disinvested neighborhood of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles County, California to explore how historic urban and social inequities play a role in community vulnerability to climate impacts. This analysis will be done by examining the spatial compounding crisis of extreme heat risk and housing vulnerabilities, while critiquing municipal governmental response to climate injustices through an abolitionist lens. The results shed light on notable gaps in current urban climate research and CJ movements on the ground, and open up opportunities for radically reimagining climate interventions through abolition. This research suggests that the field of abolitionist studies can provide a new framework that ultimately demands the unveiling of root causes of vulnerability in communities facing increasingly severe climate extremes. This research can provide a more holistic roadmap to reparations and adaptations for communities experiencing climate crisis.