Communities of exposure, community as exposure: Thinking collective life in the police abolitionist movement

Abstract

The growing police abolitionist movement in the United States invokes the figure of community to bind various political claims, from shifting the arena of justice to fiscal restructuring. Geographic scholarship on community has yet to conceptualize its usage in this movement, and existing literature tends to critique conceptualizations of community-as-political-resistance by demonstrating a given community’s exclusionary practices and reasserting a liberal politics of inclusion. This article combines analysis of activist literatures from the liberatory harm reduction and transformative justice movements with elements of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy to offer an understanding of community as a shifting and provisional spectrum of relations at once structural and intimate, thus challenging its prevailing figuration as a form of enclosure mediated by the terms of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on archival work into informally circulated, praxis-based ephemera from movements under the umbrella of police abolition, I conceptualize an abolitionist understanding of community at the juncture of ‘communities of exposure,’ formed along a structurally-produced spectrum of exposure to the harms of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, and ‘community as exposure,’ the condition of relationality that resists enclosure and, in understanding our essential vulnerability to one another as a resource for care, refuses the notion that police could sanitize community of its risks.