Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of How to Survive the End of the World

"Our podcast about learning from apocalypse with grace, rigor and curiosity."

So begins the refrain of the podcast, How to Survive the End of the World (HSEW) hosted by queer Black sisters, adrienne maree and Autumn Brown. The hosts, who share the identities of being writers, healing justice practitioners and organizers, decided to begin their podcast in November 2017, to center what must be known and practiced for living, existing, and resisting interlocking forms of social oppression. The hosts argue that they and the larger world are living through apocalyptic moments such as climate change, racial terror, queer and trans antagonism, and the violences of capitalism. HSEW would grow to have over 100,000 unique listeners. Their podcast is a significant site for my exploration of embodied abolition because of their sociopolitical commitments to abolition, social change, and healing.

Carceral abolition is a political project to end policing and imprisonment by cultivating a society that challenges carcerality, which include systems of imprisonment, surveillance, and criminalization that construct a punitive culture that affects one's embodiment in a carceral state. Embodied abolition links carceral abolition with healing justice, the work of centering individual and collective healing in movements for social change. I believe embodiment is deeply linked to healing one's body, mind, and soul, because the embodiment of liberation is healing justice. I introduce the term embodied abolition to analyze the affective conditions that shape the ways individuals know, understand, and practice liberation through their bodyminds within the carceral state.¹ Carceral abolition must be concerned with healing because carcerality crafts punitive ways of being in relationship to our own bodies and the bodies we exist with.

The experience of HSEW becomes healing for participants as liberatory strategies are shared, learned, and taught. Through an analysis of HSEW, I argue that podcast(ing) expands our understanding of abolition praxis.² I center the healing justice conditions of the podcast that construct noteworthy digital ecologies. By analyzing the digital ecological elements of this podcast, grace, rigor, and curiosity, one comes to understand how HSEW creates a digital healing space that creates transformative possibilities for embodied abolition.

Because I am interested in how collective healing can challenge how the carceral state attempts to break communal bonds to perpetuate carcerality, I am concerned with how we rebuild, preserve, and cultivate intimacy. In terms of podcast(ing) one can define intimacy as, "efforts to create and reveal emotional experiences and personal connection" among podcast participants.³ Sarah Florini argues podcasts create spaces that, "enable participants to reaffirm community and collectivity, engaging catharsis, and, at times, even find a brief reprieve."⁴ My own chosen family brought me to HSEW, and we often share how the podcast has positively influenced our healing journeys. In my experience as a participant of HSEW, I feel the intimacy. Beyond the intimacy of their own personal bond, the Brown sisters invite individuals they trust, respect, and often know onto the show. I have often remarked that when the world feels overwhelming, I can enter an episode of HSEW that becomes therapeutic in the ways that it holds grief, terror, and the difficulty of existing as a person harmed by carcerality, while also fiercely believing a different world is possible.

In my discussion of ecology, I borrow from Christina Sharpe's understanding of ecology. Sharpe utilizes climate and weather as metaphors to describe the current spatiotemporal conditions of Black people: "In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies."⁵ Ecology serves as a concept for the strategies, communities and networks of survival and resistance Black people created in response to the climate of anti-Blackness.⁶ I argue HSEW, in its digital ecosystem of primarily episodes but also live shows and social media, builds digital ecologies, anchored by grace, rigor, and curiosity, that encourage embodied abolition.

Through an autoethnographic analysis, I argue HSEW is a significant digital space that constructs the ecological conditions for healing...