Reimagining the PhD Scholars Archive

Creative Commons in the Crisis of the “Prison Fix”: Thinking New Publics Across Incarcerated and Unhoused Communities

Alec Fisher and Alexandra Meany’s project is a community-led, digital creative commons that responds to the linked crises of mass housing insecurity and mass incarceration in Washington. Our public, abolitionist archive aims to speak back to emerging discourses that connect the unhoused community to an “increase in crime” in order to ultimately argue for their removal through policing and prison expansion. Central to this project is honoring existing relationalities while also inviting opportunities for community-making between unhoused and incarcerated groups, which are often understood separately by non-profit service providers and community organizers. In collaborating with community partners which have largely addressed homelessness and imprisonment as separate issues, we hope to produce new knowledge about the inter-connections of state violence. It is our hope that our project expands and bolsters abolitionist imaginaries against containment and rhetorics of disposability.