UC Davis

“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.