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Joined by a chorus of voices and visionaries, Detroit-based artist Lauren Williams invites us to consider roadmaps to futures we hope for, through a focus on the everyday & the contradictions of neoliberal philosophy. Should everything really be for sale, will the market protect the worthy?

First, a foundation: How do our ways of working separate us from our power and possibility? What exactly is neoliberalism, how did it become the dominant social and economic logic of U.S. civil society? What does any of this have to do with abolition?

To answer that last question first, it comes down to criminalization and control. Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy and civic fights about water access serve as examples of how accepting a logic of separation weakens our ability to challenge social problems that affect people in very connected ways. Williams illuminates the short path from privatization to deprivation, before limning the difference between the state’s compulsion to watch & the human need to be seen.

This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by Lauren Williams; essays were co-produced by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Featured guests include Nick Buckingham, Curtis Renee, Tawana Petty, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic, Monica Lewis-Patrick, Nate Mullen. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actors Joy Vandervort-Cobb and Jastin Artis. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

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Something sinister ties the pristine to the policed: landscapes, bodies, and the neighborhoods born from their mingling. In this second meditation on safety & interdependence, thoroughly cited from both academy & community, Williams draws our focus to disappearance as an evolving method. Put another way, employing violence workers to delete the native, the trafficked, the poor is American as cherry pie, and the attendant systems of prison and policing may actually be working just as designed.

What would our world look like if we reconstituted safety as connectedness, freedom as togetherness? Will there even be a world if we don’t?

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In this episode, we meet neighbors and residents who have organized themselves to nurture lands they belong to, while Lauren Williams outlines seductive narratives of pioneerism, emptiness and care that beg the question of whether all property might be virtual.

In her eyes, land speculation, the financialization of housing markets, and urban “blight,” all feel more than a little esoteric, as if confusion is the point. Here, Williams clears the smoke and cracks the mirrors, braiding histories of property valuation, colonialism, and displacement from the Detroit River to the Mediterranean Sea.

This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by Lauren Williams; essays were co-produced by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Featured guests include Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, Nate Mullen and Kyle Whyte. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actors Joy Vandervort-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.