An exploration of how emergent strategies
can help us meet this moment, survive what is to come, and shape safer
and more just futures.
Practicing New Worlds explores
how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience,
transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization can
shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance,
police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively
have everything we need to survive and thrive.
Drawing
on decades of experience as an abolitionist organizer, policy advocate,
and litigator in movements for racial, gender, economic, and
environmental justice and the principles articulated by adrienne maree
brown in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds,
Ritchie invites us to think beyond traditional legislative and policy
change to create more possibilities for survival and resistance in the
midst of the ongoing catastrophes of racial capitalism—and the
cataclysms to come. Rooted in analysis of current abolitionist practices
and interviews with on-the-ground organizers resisting state violence,
building networks to support people in need of abortion care, and
nurturing organizations and convergences that can grow transformative
cities and movements, Practicing New Worlds takes
readers on a journey of learning, unlearning, experimentation, and
imagination to dream the worlds we long for into being.
“In Practicing New Worlds, Ritchie brings her wisdom—drawn from
decades of researching, theorizing, organizing, and convening movement
spaces—into an altogether new kind of dream work. In a feat of
originality, Ritchie stretches the conceptual paradigms of emergent
strategy into entirely new places, grounding it deeply in struggle:
specifically, Black feminist, abolitionist movement work. In doing so,
she accomplishes a rare feat, gifting us a text that is expansively
visionary and pragmatic.” —Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives
