Since the 2010s, global uprisings against authoritarianism, corruption, and coercive overreach (e.g., the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, End SARS) have brought discussions on prison and police abolition into mainstream social justice agendas. These debates are crucial to address militarisation, carceral violence, and totalitarianism worldwide, and include feminist perspectives on abolition and anti-carceral justice across the global North and South. However, limited resources to cross geographical and language barriers have hindered the formation of transnational networks. Making abolitionist approaches to justice understandable and imaginable to the public is also a key collective challenge. Additionally, collaboration among academics, activists and grassroots organisers is infrequent and largely confined to the global North. Therefore, establishing a South-North forum for knowledge exchange is vital.

This project addresses significant epistemic gaps, both between the South and the North, and between academia and social movements. We propose a knowledge-sharing workshop bringing together scholars, activists, organisers, and practitioners from Europe, Latin America, and Africa. We will explore two questions: (i) how is penal abolition conceptualised, practised, and debated by anti-carceral feminists across geographical, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries? and (ii) how can such practices inform an academic critique that is responsive to social demands?

Using a participatory methodology driven by anticolonial and abolitionist feminist ethics, this project will launch a Transnational Feminist Abolitionist network. This network will foster innovation on challenging penal institutions (military, police, criminal courts, prisons), expand academic frontiers, and constitute a platform for collective action. It will also promote horizontal dynamics that contrast with extractive academic practices, as it provides a safe space where activists, organisers, and practitioners are recognised as innovators, rather than merely data providers. Ultimately, by prioritising the perspectives and needs of social movements, scholarly work will align with grounded proposals for social change.