Session: Abolitionist Research Praxis In the Service of Democracy: Critically Examining Money, Power, and Possibility (Society for Social Work and Research 31st Annual Conference)

The prison industrial complex (PIC) is “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems” (Critical Resistance, 2026, para. 1). This session brings together four papers that demonstrate how social work scholars use research to analyze the financial, institutional, and governance structures that produce and sustain inequities—or develop tools to undermine them—making explicit the relationship between prisons and political economy. Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s call (see Hayes & Kaba, 2023, p. 81) to move beyond naming systemic harm toward understanding how systems reproduce it in order to disrupt and remake them, these papers use diverse methodologies to examine how the PIC’s overlapping government–industry interests operate through racial capitalism to inform lasting non-carceral solutions.

Paper 1 draws on constructivist grounded theory and digital ethnographic observations to examine how queer social workers of color use TikTok as a form of “glitch politics” to create shadow care infrastructures that resist oppressive systems, while interrogating how regimes of money and power threaten these digital spaces of care. Paper 2 uses a narrative, document-informed approach drawing on government records, historically foundational documents, academic literature, and contemporary data sources to examine how exclusionary systemic practices and federal policy shifts over the past five years have deepened economic inequality and undermined the wellbeing of Latinx populations, concluding that macro-level analysis is necessary to inform intervention across all levels of social work practice. Paper 3 uses critical discourse analysis of Chicago Tribune articles (2010–2024) to examine how rhetoric linking urban growth and public safety legitimizes development-oriented responses to crime while obscuring structural inequality, displacement, and alternatives to carceral approaches. Paper 4 is a utilization-focused evaluation of Economics for Emancipation—an 8-module political education curriculum developed by progressive economists, grassroots organizers, and rank-and-file union workers —to inform curriculum adaptations for the abolitionist social work practice context.

A discussant will engage presenters and the audience in examining the role of abolitionist scholarship in addressing interlocking crises and analyzing regimes of money and power in the service of liberation. Drawing on her expertise in racial capitalism, technology, and the financial system, she will synthesize insights across papers, surface key tensions, and identify directions for advancing abolitionist research praxis and anti-carceral solutions.