Book Review: Dreaming in the Shadow of the State: Prefigurative Politics in Abolition and Social Work and the We Charge Genocide Campaigns

Abstract

This article reviews Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care, and places the anthology in conversation with the 1951 and 2014 “We Charge Genocide” (WCG) campaigns against the United States and the City of Chicago Police Department, respectively. Through these case studies of abolitionist praxis, I explore two key themes of the book. The first theme is the paradox of abolitionist social work, with its imperative to prefigure the world we want from within a professional field that has, since its inception, been complicit in state violence. The second theme concerns abolitionist epistemology that attends to counter-histories of social work, and to anticolonial, Black, and Indigenous theorizations of care. Both WCG and Abolition and Social Workdemonstrate that prefigurative politics, guided by marginalized histories and frameworks of care, are fundamental to the work of imagining and building an abolitionist future within the trappings of the carceral present.

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