Toward what does the “prison abolitionist” identity or identification strive? This thread is organized primarily around Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s essay, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” And we think there is not a better place to begin staging the relation between abolition and that to which we refer as “teaching”, with all the compromised valences such work can carry given the state of the educational system today. Indeed, as if to answer the above question about whether there is something affirmed by prison abolitionism, Moten and Harney seem to answer “yes”, there is something. In this essay, I would like to explore this “yes” as it emerges in Moten and Harney’s essay, and how it might unfold in how we imagine our engagements with law.
Articles by Sora Han
\Sora Han is an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law & Society, and core faculty of the Culture and Theory Ph.D. program at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of History of Consciousness at University of California, Santa Cruz, and her J.D. from University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. Her research concerns philosophies of punishment, legal interpretation, and critical race and gender studies. Her monograph, Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Her publications have appeared in Theoretical Criminology; British Journal of American Legal Studies; Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties; and the edited collections, Beyond Biopolitics and Feminist Interpretations of Adorno. She has worked as a legal advocate for women prisoners in California, and is the co-editor of a law casebook, Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, from Foundation Press.\