Toward a New Metaphysics of Political Struggle: Explorations into Abolitionist Subjectivities

Abstract

While the abolition of policing and prisons has been widely examined as a political and institutional project, far less attention has been paid to its ontological stakes: the ways abolitionist praxis questions reality itself. This dissertation argues that the contemporary movement for police and prison abolition—particularly in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis—articulates not only socio-political demands, but ontological demands, emerging from the fractures and materialities produced by colonization and enslavement. Drawing on abolitionist movement literature, and decolonial theoretical frameworks, the dissertation examines how abolitionist praxis inhabits an ontological borderlands. There, some actors and initiatives remain tethered to modernist/colonial paradigms that reproduce worlds of separation and carcerality, while others enact decolonial, relational worlds through creative anti-carceral practice. The project engaged five Minneapolis-based abolitionists and their four collaborators. Using narrative, arts-based, post-qualitative, and participatory methodologies, including research conversations and collaborative art-making, the study explores how participants experience themselves, their relations, and their realities amid escalating political violence and encroaching authoritarianism during the summer of 2025. Narrative and interpretive analysis corroborate the existence of an ontological borderlands, and reveal the emergence of a new metaphysics of political struggle responsive to the metaphysical catastrophe of coloniality of being, with implications for depth psychological understandings of collective transformation.