During the summer 2020 rebellions in the United States following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, common sense seemed to shift. In Philadelphia, as elsewhere, the moment marked an opening for an abolitionist imagination to address the decades-long interconnected crises of policing, sentencing, urban violence, as well as issues of housing, health, education, and work vulnerability. New narratives emerged that framed both a deep refusal to the rule of policing (and their pervasive reach into so many other institutions in society) as well as a reclamation, and attempted reconstruction, of key cultural concepts such as public safety, accountability, and justice. 

 

Looking back five years, what does the unfinished rebellion of 2020 tell us about the role of narrative power in both stabilizing orders, disrupting them, and the “up for grabs” nature of common sense in moments of crisis and revanchism, such as our present? In this talk, Malav Kanuga will discuss the role of narrative as a key factor in the interplay of movement and imagination, articulation and coalition, and in the fraught balance of consensus in times of rupture and possibility.