Arts & Abolitionist Futures: Building Capacity for Futures Less Reliant on Criminal Punishment

The arts & abolitionist futures project, led by Professor Aylwyn Walsh, partnered with Abolitionist Futures, a collaboration of community activists in Britain and Ireland to explore how to build a future without prisons, police and punishment.

Together they worked with communities in Leeds to explore abolitionist praxis through participatory visual arts workshops. Two University of Leeds students with lived experience of incarceration - Dalton Harrison, who is also an artist-in-residence in prisons and a poet, and Phoenix Griffin – co-organised and led workshops alongside Professor Walsh and Eve Ryan from Abolitionist Futures. Using archived editions of The Abolitionist, a magazine that was published in Britain between 1979 and 1987, they developed conversations on continuities over time.

A smiling group of people. They are standing around a table with posters on it.

Participants at an arts & abolitionist futures workshop

Participants included people leaving prison, students, community members and activists. The workshops gave space for them to explore personal connections and everyday experiences of punishment and understandings of harm and accountability. From these conversations, participants created visual campaigns through collage and word art, as well as postcards and posters. A call for artists to pitch a poster design to represent abolitionist themes and to centre lived experience and generate capacity for imagining a world without prisons was subsequently generated.

The project was seed funded by Sapling – an initiative from the University of Leeds Cultural Institute and the Leeds Arts & Humanities Research Institute. Professor Walsh noted:

'Internal pots help establish relationships that need a little nurturing, and a small amount of resourcing helped value the lived experience of two ex- prisoners whose participation made a huge difference. It's slow work, but it feels more meaningful than 'just delivery'. To me, the trust and extent of the care we were able to generate through the project design helped me realise what I value in research partnerships!'

Close up of a woman’s hands holding a piece of paper featuring a detailed drawing. There are posters and drawings on the table beneath her hands.

Artworks created during one of the workshops

You can read more about the project through this conversation with Professor Sarah Lamble and Dalton Harrison.

The project received a Special Mention in the ‘Emergent Cultural Impact’ category of the University of Leeds 2024 Research Impact and Engagement Awards.