Stephanie Posey's Dissertation Defense

This dissertation examines how contemporary abolitionist organizing campaigns produce, circulate, and contest knowledge across digital and community-based information ecologies. Focusing on the #NoCopAcademy campaign in Chicago, the project analyzes how abolitionist organizers challenge dominant understandings of policing, safety, governance, and Black life through the creation of epistemic artifacts including toolkits, reports, chants, open letters, and oral herstories. Situating the campaign within broader traditions of Black radical Feminist organizing and abolitionist praxis, this study argues that abolitionist campaigns operate not solely through institutional confrontation, but through sustained epistemic struggle aimed at transforming the conditions that make policing and carcerality appear necessary, legitimate, and inevitable.

Grounded in Black queer feminist theory and the theoretical work of Patricia Hill Collins and Sylvia Wynter, the dissertation examines how abolitionist campaigns intervene in dominant ways of knowing while simultaneously navigating the stabilizing pressures of nonprofit governance, state power, and institutional recognition. Particular attention is given to the relationship between epistemic disruption and structural limitation, demonstrating how campaigns reshape political consciousness and public discourse even when broader institutional systems remain materially intact.

Methodologically, this project operates as a qualitative case study employing archival data and content analysis to examine the #NoCopAcademy campaign between 2017 and 2021. Using ATLAS.ti, artifacts were coded across four domains of power—interpersonal, structural, disciplinary, and epistemic—and analyzed through the orientations of disruption, stabilization, and maintenance. A central methodological contribution of this dissertation is the development of the Matrix of Resistance map, a visual-analytic framework generated through Python-based analytic heatmaps. This analysis illuminates relationships between domains of power and coded frequencies to reveal patterns of epistemic disruption, stabilization, and maintenance across abolitionist artifacts

Ultimately, this dissertation argues that abolitionist campaigns such as #NoCopAcademy perform essential epistemic labor. Even when immediate political objectives are not achieved, these campaigns reshape public discourse, redistribute authority over knowledge production, redefine failure, and expand the imaginative horizons of political possibility beyond policing and carceral power.

Questions? Contact Rachel M. Magee.