Alisa Bierria

Decriminalize Survival is a community-engaged, digital archive project designed to illuminate a submerged legacy of feminist resistance to interpersonal and carceral state violence. Through a variety of traditional and digital humanities methods, the archive provides a searchable database of past and present activist formations, an oral history project, and a gallery space for rotating exhibits. Decriminalize Survival argues for a rich tradition of antiracist feminist and queer activism against the carceral state as it brings together past and present efforts to decarcerate survivors of gender violence; resist gendered prison expansion; confront the reproductive violence of incarceration; and create transformative responses to rape and abuse.

“Inconceivable Agency” engages a diverse collection of archival material that demonstrates how intention becomes a critical site of carceral meaning production. Systems of criminal punitivity reinvent actions taken to survive gender-based violence, such as self-defense by survivors of domestic violence, as action with “criminal intent.”  Yet, intention, defined here as “meaning that provokes, mobilizes, or is expressed by agentic action,” is under-theorized as a specific area of inquiry in examinations of antiblack carceral and structural gendered violence. Therefore, through centering insights from Black survivors’ lives, experiences, and visions of freedom, “Inconceivable Agency” proposes a pluralistic, qualitative philosophical framework for agency that can account for action taken within a matrix of violence. That is, theorists must not only ask “how much” agency are subjects allowed within conditions of subjugation, but also what kinds of agency are projected onto subjects, and what kinds of agency are formed through acting with the intent to survive.