June 23, 2024, was a sweltering hot 96-degree Sunday during a heat wave in New York City. I made my way to “A ‘Pride’ Protest,” an action organized by a coalition of queer grassroots organizations, including the Gender Liberation Movement, G.L.I.T.S, and ACT UP NY. This protest moment was a prism illuminating a logic of scarcity and violence which also applies to the university space. Higher education institutions, particularly public ones, often reinforce some of these same forms of violence and resource scarcity that disproportionately affect vulnerable students. In this post, I draw on fieldwork and participant observation from a queer abolitionist protest to gain lessons for teaching strategies to use in anthropology classrooms. Using fieldnotes and narrative, I offer a window to the sometimes linked and sometimes divided dynamic of participating and being a part of queer radical communities and higher education institutions. Ultimately, I end with a series of reflection questions that speak to the complexity of what abolitionist pedagogy is and has the potential to be in anthropology classrooms.

The following are my fieldnotes:

I arrived just past 1pm. A small, but strong coalition of queer abolitionists had assembled. Under the bright sunshine was a small stage for speakers. I counted just under 100 participants, the majority of whom were gathered at the plaza. Some stood or sat under the shade of tall trees in Prospect Park. Masked protesters sported black-and-white keffiyehs. Some held handmade cardboard signs which read phrases such as, “Queer as in Boycott, Divest, Sanctions,” “Less Jails, More Whores,” and “Stop Cop City! Abolish NYPD.”

The gathering was a nod to the true genesis of Pride Month, this idea of building on the legacy of Stonewall as a moment of riot, as an affront to the police state.

“The most dangerous thing out here is the police!” one speaker shouted to an uproar of applause. The speaker motioned to the half-dozen idling cop cars which surrounded the protest. “There is no pride in genocide,” the speaker continued. Other speakers took to the stage. They linked foreign imperialism (using the example of Palestine) with domestic imperial practices (such as anti-Black policing policies and practices). Austerity was mentioned repeatedly, referring to the budget cuts affecting nearly every sector of public city life, from parks to schools to libraries. These cuts included a $225 million allocation for a police training facility. Many protestors and activists warned this would usher in the construction of a “cop city” in New York.

They warned of the engineering of a cop city network (through reference to the organizing against cop cities in Atlanta, Queens, New York, and elsewhere) and the divestment of resources and tax dollars from public services to these cop cities.

Cheers and shouts of agreement erupted around me. I marveled at the various queer identities represented in the flags that some protesters were carrying. The different versions of queer identities were represented by the slew of colorful flags. It was, after all, a pride march. 

It is here that I met a young trans femme person waving a flag I could not recognize. I inquired about it, asking to photograph the flag. They agreed and informed me it was “the queer prison abolition flag.” “It was actually made by trans folx while they were incarcerated.”

I was in awe: a queer prison abolition flag! This queer prison abolition flag made me reflect on what I wanted to be doing and what I was doing. Between existing and working was teaching. I immediately thought about my classes, introductory courses called “Culture and Society.” For my students I define culture as “a shared social system of beliefs, symbols, and meaning. For example, flags are really important, not materially, but symbolically. They mean something to people: survival, land and bread, identity.” For queer youth, the use of the flag and rainbow symbolism can represent what Wolowic et al. describe as “boundaries of spaces and political interventions” (2017, 7), as well as nodding to shared identities. I thought to myself: What does the queer prison abolitionist flag mean for us as queer abolitionists?

This protest was meant to be an alternative to the more corporatized NYC Pride March. It was strategically located at Grand Army Plaza near the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch. Normally, the library would be open. However, it was closed due to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s administration’s proposed budget cuts. Citing these budget reforms, the city’s public libraries would no longer be open Sundays. In nearly every sector, from education to health to parks, budget cuts were announced. However, the New York Police Department’s budget soared to almost $12 billion (NYC Council Finance Division 2024, 4).

The library’s closure, especially on a day this hot, signaled what activists were naming as a consequence of austerity politics that adversely affected the most vulnerable New Yorkers. One of the public library’s many functions is a neighborhood cooling center during high heat days, offering air-conditioned spaces for New Yorkers who might otherwise be suffering under heat advisories and living in neighborhoods designated as heat islands. Sofya Aptekar points out, “public libraries are buffeted by budget cuts as they attempt to cover expanding gaps left by the failing social safety net … [and] to provide a myriad of services and a safe space for struggling urbanities” (2019, 1203). According to Aptekar, public libraries have the “emancipatory potential” to be an “alternative to the capitalist market” since they “distribute[d] resources based on need” (2019, 1211–12). While this Sunday closure meant that this Brooklyn Public Library space could not be utilized as a cooling center, Grand Army Plaza, the public space directly across the street, was being utilized as a protest space.

The political moment had become spatially manifest. A public institution made less accessible due to budget cuts, budget increases that inflated an already large police department, that same police department deployed to police a protest that called out those budget cuts, linking them to imperial domestic policies of over-policing and under-resourcing neighborhoods. The organizers pushed the viewpoint that New York’s social, political, and economic transitions produced a city hostile to its most vulnerable citizens. This hostility manifested as economic violence against the most vulnerable of New Yorkers, including austerity measures that govern the closing, limiting, or surveillance of public spaces.

This protest intended to signal two realities. The first is that New York City’s official pride march had lost its purpose as a political march against police brutality of queer communities, and particularly queer sex workers, faced in the public spaces of New York’s West Village neighborhood. Instead, the official pride march emphasized partying and drinking while corporate sponsors raked in profits from pinkwashing campaigns. The second is that while “corporate” pride was lauded as an indication of social acceptance of queer communities, it simultaneously washes over the real marginalization that groups within queer communities face, such as increases in interpersonal and state violence (especially the murder of Black trans women), increased discrimination in housing for those who do not subscribe to homonormative values, discrimination in hiring and at work, and increasingly restrictive legislation on access to lifesaving medical interventions for trans individuals.¹

Protest Lessons for the Classroom

I left with two insightful takeaways from this protest that I would like to translate for specifically abolitionist educators. The first is creation; the act of bringing change into fruition is crucial to larger societal change in abolitionist movements. The second is that abolition always requires a sense of mobility and openness to change. Abolition is just as much about the creation of new types of communities and relationships as it is about the destruction of oppressive systems rooted in empire and settler colonialism. After we burn it all down, we need to train our creative capacities to be able to imagine and implement systems that sustain freedom.

1. Creation as Abolitionist Pedagogy

Reflecting on the creation of the queer abolitionist flag, I recognize how important it is to encourage students to create: ideas, things, art. Anthropology classrooms should have an emphasis on creating culture. This can be done in multiple ways. One of the most successful among my students is by offering them creative ways to produce a final, whether that be creating a film, zine, podcast, or poem. I have guided students through an open-format creative final in which they choose the topic. In encouraging students to create and engage in material culture, we offer them paths to imagine liberation beyond what they already know. These assignments are less about creation and output, and more about honing a certain creative capacity. Creativity at its best can lead us to freedom. This is why harmful systems attack our creative faculties first. If you cannot creatively imagine freedom (individually or collectively), then you certainly cannot transform it from abstract imagination into tangible creation.

For students who come from educational environments that are carceral—involving police in schools, regular searches, or going through metal detectors—this process often validates their experiences as wrong and gives them language to understand how carceral logics impact them as students. At best, my students have been able to create profound connections. One student of Lebanese descent wrote a poem connecting Lebanese anticolonial graffiti in Beirut to similar graffiti in Palestine, noting the ways in which both cultures resist colonization. Another group of women students, one from Sudan, one from Yemen, and one from Indonesia, explored the feminist possibilities of Islam in an informative podcast. A young white male student explored how cultural and racist assumptions of addiction impacted how communities in New York embraced or rejected ideas of safe injection sites and harm reduction. Countless queer students of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds have created websites, podcasts, or zines exploring radical queer histories, public spaces for LGBT youth, and the relationships between culture and acceptance of queer people.

2. Motion as Abolitionist Pedagogy

My second takeaway is a reflection on a characteristic of abolition: motion. When reflecting on movement work, I recognize that revolutionary ideas often become co-opted by political establishments and diluted from their revolutionary potential. Shift and change are key elements in ensuring movements resist this co-option. Abolition has to be fluid, open, and embrace change for it to endure. As educators, we can easily fall into stagnation, assigning the same ethnographies and assignments. This can be especially true when the working conditions under which we labor are at odds with our political beliefs. For example, teaching at the City University of New York (CUNY) has opened my eyes to the exploitation of adjunct workers, particularly the simultaneous overreliance on adjunct labor and the unfair compensation adjuncts receive compared to full-time faculty, despite adjuncts teaching the same classes. This creates conditions of exhaustion, and when educators are exhausted, we do not show up as our best selves.

In the classroom, I encounter students who are increasingly apathetic about the world at large and their own positions within it. In my experience, many learners express a fatigue or disdain towards the violent realities of the globe, especially when learning about conflicts that so often get reduced in cultural terms (Palestine, Sudan, Tibet, etc.). A student once asked me if we were only going to learn about “the depressing shit” of the world. I was teaching a world cultures course which covered global decolonization movements, U.S. militarism and coups, and revolutionary movements. In my effort to teach truthfully, I had forgotten a core component of abolitionist thought. When we destroy the systems that oppress, what will we forge in their wake? I had become stagnant in my anti-policing, anti-detention centers, and anti-borders lectures, and had not actually moved through that to the ways in which abolition offers a path to create and construct systems of care, systems of mutual aid, and systems of resource distribution. Abolitionist pedagogy has to be fluid just like abolitionist responses have to be fluid.

Thus, I implore that we as educators shift, cancel, and disrupt. Motion implies movement, and I am suggesting we learn to flow. Flow implies a movement towards something else, hopefully a forward flow toward freedom. Since going through the motions is exactly what capitalism requires of us, movement without direction can be counterintuitive. For example, toeing a line requires a lot of motion but does not actual move anyone anywhere different. Abolition will require us to break rules. For example, if  the word “genocide” is banned in higher education, we need double down and flow.

Teach about it more. I find myself coming up against the expectations of professionalism: that as educators we are unbiased, objectively looking into the world rather than experiencing it. In this sense, professionalism upholds white supremacy. Abolitionist educators have a duty to flow toward change, and it helps to adopt a sense of motion in our teaching. This means that it’s okay to cancel class if the world is exploding. This past semester, I cancelled a lecture after the Brooklyn College administration called the police on its students who set up a pro-Palestine encampment on the quad. The very next class, I gave students space to talk about it with each other, to ask me questions, and to reflect. I needed to move in that direction, away from the standard curriculum. I believe it was this class in which they began to comprehend Frantz Fanon’s chapter “On Violence.”

Conclusion

This piece began with an ethnographic vignette describing a rally organized by radical queer organizers against New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams and his administration’s continual reduction of budgets supporting public social services. These social services provide survival services impacting Black and brown queer and trans people including youth, sex workers, and immigrants. Speakers at this rally linked budget cuts to critical social services to the inflated police budget and doubled down on calls for (police) abolitionism.

In the time since this rally in June (from June 2024–September 2025), I have taught approximately 200 students at the City University of New York (CUNY). As an adjunct, I am simultaneously exploited by the same system that I rely on to survive. This contradiction stays with me in the classroom. I offer some ending reflection questions to consider:

• How can I show up to educate (and really to facilitate communal education) if I am struggling to meet my needs?
• How do I bring in lessons into the classroom, a classroom that is predominantly populated by students of color?
• What do I do when students are (rightfully) upset, confused, and concerned, wanting to learn about Palestine (and Sudan, and the Congo), despite the college’s (reflecting wider neoliberal society) efforts to censor and silence?
• How can abolitionist pedagogy work toward collective liberation, both upholding the students’ desires as well as mine (as an educator)?