Against abstraction: Reclaiming and reorienting to embodied collective knowledges of solidarity

Abstract

This article asks what kinds of places are we making within academic institutions concerned with racial and gender justice, decolonization and reconciliation when the terms of justice are fostered through the violence of abstraction? As queer scholar-activists, we share firsthand accounts of our movement from sites of community activism to the halls of academe, revealing the techniques and consequences of abstracting racist and gendered violence and dispossession. We insist on a reorientation, meaning a return to and towards, our embodied collective knowledges as sources of authority on and against the violences of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. We first recount the roots of our activism when we met in spaces of solidarity in unceded Coast Salish territories. We then describe the ways we have experienced this collective knowledge being represented back to us as we moved into academic spaces, emphasizing the epistemic violence of abstracting knowledge from its messy, hard-wrought foundations. Finally, we share strategies and experiences of reorienting ourselves toward collective and embodied knowledges in which solidarity is once again at the centre. In dialogue, we reject the violence of abstraction while asserting knowledge sovereignty in which communities maintain agency within the terms in which their lives are represented.