Lecture by Phil Crockett Thomas, Newcastle University, September 2024, co-organised by the Abolition Feminism for Ending Sexual Violence Collective and the AHRC Network on Utopia and Failure.

Drawing on Tom Moylan’s conception of the ‘critical utopia’ (Moylan, 1986), this presentation focuses on how prison abolitionists use fiction to create spaces of hope, respite, and resistance in their ongoing struggle for abolition. To do so, this paper reflects on findings from Prison Break (2021-22), an interdisciplinary research project that used creative writing workshops to support UK-based activists and scholars involved in prison abolition and transformative justice to create ‘social science fiction’ (Theall, 1975) to help imagine and enact more just futures.

Watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrVQleH7Yy4&t=143s