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Joined by a chorus of voices and visionaries, Detroit-based artist Lauren Williams invites us to consider roadmaps to futures we hope for, through a focus on the everyday & the contradictions of neoliberal philosophy. Should everything really be for sale, will the market protect the worthy?

First, a foundation: How do our ways of working separate us from our power and possibility? What exactly is neoliberalism, how did it become the dominant social and economic logic of U.S. civil society? What does any of this have to do with abolition?

To answer that last question first, it comes down to criminalization and control. Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy and civic fights about water access serve as examples of how accepting a logic of separation weakens our ability to challenge social problems that affect people in very connected ways. Williams illuminates the short path from privatization to deprivation, before limning the difference between the state’s compulsion to watch & the human need to be seen.

This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by Lauren Williams; essays were co-produced by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Featured guests include Nick Buckingham, Curtis Renee, Tawana Petty, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic, Monica Lewis-Patrick, Nate Mullen. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actors Joy Vandervort-Cobb and Jastin Artis. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

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Something sinister ties the pristine to the policed: landscapes, bodies, and the neighborhoods born from their mingling. In this second meditation on safety & interdependence, thoroughly cited from both academy & community, Williams draws our focus to disappearance as an evolving method. Put another way, employing violence workers to delete the native, the trafficked, the poor is American as cherry pie, and the attendant systems of prison and policing may actually be working just as designed.

What would our world look like if we reconstituted safety as connectedness, freedom as togetherness? Will there even be a world if we don’t?

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In this episode, we meet neighbors and residents who have organized themselves to nurture lands they belong to, while Lauren Williams outlines seductive narratives of pioneerism, emptiness and care that beg the question of whether all property might be virtual.

In her eyes, land speculation, the financialization of housing markets, and urban “blight,” all feel more than a little esoteric, as if confusion is the point. Here, Williams clears the smoke and cracks the mirrors, braiding histories of property valuation, colonialism, and displacement from the Detroit River to the Mediterranean Sea.

This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by Lauren Williams; essays were co-produced by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Featured guests include Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, Nate Mullen and Kyle Whyte. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actors Joy Vandervort-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

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Human made infrastructures always eventually crumble, lost to time and memory. The 21st century has brought these concerns uncomfortably close to ‘First World’ or technologically advanced societies, societies which tell themselves that they have mastered nature. Levees break, power grids overload, and suddenly a highway is a river. As we wade through the layers of deprivation, segregation and allocation that make it so, we uncover that some of these roads had always been rivers, and their memories may still be stronger than our methods. In this episode Lauren Williams points to human designs nearing failure tolerance, and calls us back to a different relation with Nature and each other.

This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by Lauren Williams; essays were co-produced by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Featured guests include Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, Nate Mullen and Kyle Whyte. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actors Joy Vandervordt-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

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What are memories of lands, waters or peoples, without time? What is the future? And, if we are unequipped to view time, like rivers, as currency to be manipulated, resource rather than relation, what have we already lost? In this episode, Lauren Williams shows us that these questions too, are political, introducing to the broader archive the concept of chronopolitics. She asks us to consider the question of Grace Lee and James Boggs: “What time is it on the clock of the world?” while her guests chime in with considerations of kinship, urgency, and magic. She also highlights the relationship between time and punishment in a world that may itself be more temporary than dominant narratives suggest.

This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by Lauren Williams; essays were co-produced by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Featured guests include PG Watkins, Curtis Renee, Nate Mullen, Angel McKissic, and Nick Buckingham. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actors Joy Vandervort-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

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In this final episode, Lauren Williams invites her colleagues, comrades and co-conspirators to bring us home, collectively considering all the questions raised so far and confronting the ones they make possible: If worlds have ended before, why can’t this one? Whose imaginaries do we currently inhabit? What enables and restricts our imaginations? How might we permit ourselves to imagine otherwise?

This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams; essays were co-edited by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actor Joy Vandervort-Cobb. In the excerpt from “Unraveling Harm, Cultivating Safety,” Denise and Sharon were voiced by Lorinda Hawkins Smith. Jonathan was voiced by Erron Allen. Thank you, also, to the interviewees—whose names were changed to protect their identities—and to the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network for allowing me to share this preview of the study.

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