Communities of exposure,community as exposure: Thinking collective life in the police abolitionist movement

Introduction

In her influential piece on racism and geography, police and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to the confluence of power and difference as ‘fatal couplings’ that shape state-building projects such as incarceration. Towards expressing a genealogy of radicalism in geographic terms, Gilmore asserts, following Michel Foucault, that neither power nor difference hold a fundamental moral meaning. Rather, it is the application of violence that articulates the two together in the service of particular political projects. In the name of a different articulation, Gilmore writes, “What, then, are nonfatal power-difference couplings? Mutuality for one. For another, my undergraduate students always say “the family”; and while we debate how and why different kinds of contemporary families are structured as they are, and to what extent patriarchy is still a family rather than state affair ... and how the concept of family defines normative sexuality, there’s something in the answer to work with” (2002: 16). In the years since Gilmore’s article, literature developed in the police abolitionist movement has commonly answered her question as to non-fatal couplings of power and difference with another, complicated figure of collective live that could point us to a world lived otherwise: the community.

Across a range of visions, from policy claims on fiscal restructuring to radical projects working towards extra-state projects, the figure of community has entered political discourse with unprecedented force on the side of police abolition. Informally circulated zines assert that collective power is built through cultivating community relationships and suggest that we get to know our neighbors through activities such as neighborhood picnics, group text threads, and game nights (Abolition Action, n.d) Autonomist approaches to abolition invoke community as the organizational unit for formations such as civilian block patrols that protect neighbors from police violence and resource pooling practices that redistribute money and materials among participants (True Leap Press, 2020). Political campaigns, such as the Yes to Question 2 in Minneapolis that sought to replace the Police Department with a Department of Public Safety of social workers trained in crisis response and violence prevention, advocate a broad framework of “divest-in-police-and-invest-in-community” (MPD150, 2020). As more and more people seek alternatives to the carceral model, toolkits circulated by the transformative justice movement invoke community not only as a more equitable response to harm, but as the primary arena for pursuing accountability, healing, and radical change in its aftermath (Imarisha et al., 2017).

Across these initiatives, community is posed variously as the unit of political organizing that will exert the amount of pressure on the state required to do away with the police (Davis et al., 2022), the locus of new social structures that will address danger and redress harm without and after the police (Chua et al., 2024; Ybarra et al., 2022), and the recipient of newly freed funds that will be made available once drastic fiscal restructuring means they are no longer funneled to cops (Kaba and Ritchie, 2022). A range of abolitionist projects create community forms that are at once necessary for surviving the carceral state in the immediate and work towards creating social collectives able to replace, rather than integrate into, existing systems of addressing harm. The question I pursue here asks: what theorization of community might tie these different functions together? The movement literatures I examine to answer this question are drawn from the US context I am familiar with from my own work in abolitionist organizing. These movements were and are conditioned by the legacies of chattel slavery and settler colonial dispossession that structure the American landscape and inform the deep-seated racial disparities of carceral expansion that defined US policy from the 1970’s onward (Kohler-Hausmann, 2017). The abolitionist conceptualization of community is at once conditioned by this context and seeks to trouble existing jurisdictional containers of political action through iterating community as a mobile and relational process.

The concept of community has long vexed political theorists and social movements alike, and section one will be devoted to parsing its various critiques and definitions within geography. This discipline has, broadly speaking, produced scholarship on the formation of community that either positions it as the “natural scale” through which agency and resistance are made possible or demonstrates that invoking community in fact recapitulates the exclusionary logics of other political forms (Carter-White and Minca, 2020: 1). Through a critical literature review in section one, I suggest that this scholarship has largely understood community in terms of enclosure, even when this concept is understood otherwise than a unified or ‘natural’ scale of human collectivity. I argue that this has pigeonholed our understanding of community into a recapitulation of the basic framework of liberalism, tying its theorizations to a politics in which the violation of norms is met with the threat of expulsion and the ‘fix’ for exclusion entails expanding diversity and inclusion.

My contribution here works instead towards thinking community as a spectrum of relations. I suggest that we can usefully understand the intersection of various functions of community within the abolitionist movement as a twinned conceptualization of communities of exposure and community as exposure. To communities of exposure, drawing on work from the liberatory harm reduction movement, I show in section two how these perspectives refuse the criminalizing ascription of risk to certain activities and identities. Against this, these projects theorize risk as variegated structural exposures to the harms of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and cis-heteropatriarchy. This allows us to understand communities as structurally situated, and to fold into this analytic an understanding that communities are not defined a priori and will change as resource access shifts. To the concept of community as exposure, I turn in section three to the work of the transformative justice movement, in which community is understood as itself a relation of exposure that disavows the idea that police could sanitize community of its risks. The practices of care and interpersonal responsibility cultivated in these movements suggest that our exposure to one another is a resource of community, rather than the impetus for its protectionist enclosure. In order to hone this meaning from movement, activist, and practitioner literatures, I draw in section three on the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. The contribution of his thought enables me to draw out from movement work premised on community an understanding of this concept that challenges its figuration in the prevailing liberal framework.

Prevailing conceptualizations of community

Much of the literature in geography that is critical of the concept of ‘community’ takes aim at its usage in scholarship to denote an authentic and transparent scale of collective life. In the literature in which community primarily indexes beneficiary social relations, it emerges as a concept drawing on a combination of the following definitions: community is place-based (Kemmis, 1990), and community involves the sharing of qualities, values, and/or interests (Rudolph et al., 2018). I turn first to the small but growing body of scholarship that tends to stake its critique on demonstrating that these assumed qualities in fact mask or actively perpetuate injurious practices of exclusion. With notable exceptions, the prevailing logic of these critical perspectives is that, for good or ill, invoking community demarcates who is and is not included.

Martin Coward attests that theorists considering citizenship and community have commonly conceived this relation as one that “entails delineating both the collectivity to which the individual belongs…as well as those individuals taken to be excluded from such belonging” (Coward, 2012: 471). Lynn Staeheli’s work, spanning multiple practices of invoking community, has offered an analysis in which community is revealed to perpetuate the very logics it supposedly works against. This is exemplified in her contention that community “fosters particular ethics without appearing to, and certain imaginations of the public are actualized in ways that shroud the hard realities of inclusion and exclusion with soft, comforting notions of care and community” (Staeheli, 2008: 13). Stefano Bloch’s work examining usage of the app Nextdoor similarly finds that community operates as a “a logical ‘trap’ that begs acceptance and reverence without analysis of its consequences,” thereby “unwittingly contributing to forms of social exclusion” (Bloch, 2021: 263).

This scholarship suggests that community be analyzed primarily as a discursive and largely cultural site where diverse registers of socially constructed meaning make themselves known. This maneuver is also where one comes up against the difficulty of thinking community without recourse to liberalism. The prevailing story within political theory narrates the development of Enlightenment pluralist modernity and its progeny, the liberal state, as a means of mitigating the dangers of traditionalist invocations of community (Mouffe, 1991). In the progress narrative that subtends this form of government, the dangers of community are, if not eradicated, at least diffused into a palatable and peaceful form of coexistence. This model of liberalism imagines a public sphere in which all are (theoretically) treated equally, and that is (theoretically) neutral about the ‘private’ differences that tend to draw people together into what we call communities. In the aegis of a multicultural democracy, the state supposedly makes room for many different communities that cohere through their shared properties and coexist in relative harmony through the purportedly equal rights afforded their individual members.

Critical geographic accounts tend to mirror this framework of liberal democracy, demonstrating that communities are multiple, differentiable by their unique properties and yet able to expand the scope of members’ identities. Often through exposing the practices of exclusion that subtend assertions of community unity, these analyses turn to political interventions premised on inclusion and pluralism. Miranda Joseph’s work examining contestation around community in lesbian and gay grassroots theater in San Francisco draws on scholars who observe that “using the term community to refer to social practices that presume or attempt to enact and produce identity, unity, communion, and purity” leads to “a diverse range of oppressions, including but by no means limited to genocidal violence” (2002: xviii – xix, original emphasis). The critiques of ‘identity, unity, communion’ that follow tend to foreground plurality, multiplicity, and the acceptance of difference – arguably the discursive hallmarks of multicultural liberalism. In understanding community as arbitrating inclusion and exclusion, the political suggestions that follow revolve, essentially, around improving and opening that process of arbitration. To wit, Staeheli asserts that this form of collective life “must be supplemented by a public spiritedness that invites – rather than ‘uninvites’ – difference into the community” (2008: 14).

Although critiquing the terms of inclusion and exclusion, the aforementioned scholarship has maintained that these concepts are necessary to conceptualizing community. I want to turn now to the even smaller body of geographic thought that has drawn on conversations within poststructuralist continental philosophy in order to problematize the liberal framework of community through engagement with various ontological possibilities for this figure. This scholarship can be categorized into approaches following the work of either French theorist Jean-Luc Nancy or Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito. Their philosophies share the impetus to retain and probe the question of community in light of its implication in the 20^th century disasters of fascism and communism. Both are guided by the need to think community otherwise than as a coherent aggregation of self-defining individuals, and both turn to conceptualizing community in terms of a constitutive difference from itself. I will treat the divergences in the content of their respective thought in more detail in section three. What is important at this juncture are the fairly antipodal ways their work has been taken up to understand various phenomena within geography.

The core distinction between them lies in how the ontological thought of community intersects a particular space of politics. For those engaging Esposito, community appears as the arena of the loss of the proper in the experience of the common (Esposito, 2010). This has informed analyses that understand the loss of the proper as driving a biopolitical horizon, in which aspects of life itself (rather than the subject or citizen) become the object of governance, management, and modulation. The fundamental ambivalence of community tends to be resolved analytically through critiques that expose its implication in various regimes of dispossession. Carter-White and Minca draw on Esposito to argue that the formation of community in refugee camps tends to recapitulate the very violence of the camp itself. The expropriation of the proper aligns with the denial of rights the camp imposes on its inhabitants, introducing a dynamic in which communities, while they may provide protection and solidarity, “are often designed and implemented by the same structure of power that they may in certain instances appear to act against” (Carter-White and Minca, 2020: 10). Zinzani and Proto’s analysis of grassroots socio-environmental movements in Bologna make an intervention that similarly takes up Esposito to reveal the resurgence of exclusionary practices within efforts to build a community of the common (2023: 8). In Roelofsen and Minca’s work on the ‘superhost’ category of Airbnb hosting, they interpret the giving of the proper (home) as granting access to the Airbnb ‘global community’ via biopolitical mechanisms of demonstrating ‘fitness’ – a category shaped by dimensions of power and global inequity that are highly racialized and gendered (2018).

For those engaging Nancy’s line of thought, community appears as fundamentally oriented by the ‘with-ness’ of relation rather than loss. The subject’s fundamental insufficiency propels relations that cannot be resolved into a coherent entity made up of discrete beings (Nancy, 1991). This relation consists in a pure exteriority unable to be dialectically integrated into the definition of the self. Exteriority, here, is not the exposure of an inside through the loss of boundaries that cordon discrete entities; rather, it is the condition of being exposed as a form of relation that cannot be sublimated into the demarcation of an inside versus outside. Those following Nancy have understood community through phenomena that express resistance, whether ontologically or politically, to the normative organizational terms of political belonging. Coward’s work on globalized urbanism draws on Nancy to critique the treatment of alterity as a spatially distant phenomenon and, instead, posit the urban environment as a terrain in which moments of exposure to alterity enable the constitution of “shared divisions” (2012: 476). Dan Bulley’s work on community formation in refugee camps is similarly adamant that the uptake of community by liberal governmentality is only one possible, and severely limited, iteration of its meaning. He argues that strategies of governance attempt but ultimately fail to instrumentalize the ontological force of community as what he calls, pace Nancy, the “inevitable result of the unavoidable sociality of being” (2014: 67). In their analysis of squatting and housing activism in Dublin and Rome, Di Feliciantonio and O’Callaghan draw on Nancy to understand community as the iterative ‘tying and untying’ of relations (2020: 196). These iterations produce moments of political possibility for disrupting the ‘police order’ that has come to enmesh market logics with the legality of various forms of protest.

It is in line with these efforts to think community as relation that my contribution is positioned, but I contend that current scholarship taking up Nancy’s work on relationality falls short of accounting for the fact that communities form in geographically and historically specific patterns. Historical contingency has created the conditions that enable community to enact politics as disruption, but this understanding alone cannot speak to the fact that, to return to Di Feliciantonio and O’Callaghan, the dynamics of the housing crisis also created particular provisional communities along a spectrum of their structural relationships to resources and various forms of violence. As becomes clear in the political visions of various activist groups they cite, these approaches to protesting evictions understood community in structural terms as well, evidenced in the expansion from a focus on homelessness to broader housing precarity, inclusion of the rights of migrants, and analysis of gender-based housing loss (2020: 208-209). The political consciousness of these groups understands that people are ‘tied together’ through certain structural dynamics, and that this fact is not reducible to community as an inevitable sociality of resistance. What is missing in the existing literature is a means of thinking community as a relation, rather than enclosed entity, that can still speak to the material and historic patterning of particular community formations. In the following section, I develop an approach to this through the framing concept of communities of exposure.

Liberatory harm reduction and communities of exposure

Harm reduction has typically appeared in academic work through the lens of public health and without substantive engagement with the abolitionist principles integral to its liberatory form. Scholarship may refer to the radical past of harm reduction organizing to demonstrate the distance between those ideals and its manifestation in public health contexts (Proudfoot, 2017; Roe, 2005), but few have engaged with those radical tenets as theoretical conceptualizations of community in their own right. To develop this, I draw on the formally and informally published work, such as zines and resource guides, of thinkers, organizers, therapists, and users who offer theories that are inextricable from the praxis through which they were developed. My aim is to show that these approaches share an understanding of community premised on structurally determined exposure. ¹

Liberatory harm reduction is a particular tenet of the harm reduction approach developed out of the experiences of those engaging in criminalized activities such as drug use and sex work. Harm reduction more broadly has come to refer to a range of activities meant to intervene in risk. Campaigns to establish accessible safe use materials for criminalized drugs usefully invoke comparisons between these measures and risk mitigation activities that the public accepts (if not follows) vis a vis licit activities: using condoms during sex with someone new, putting on a seatbelt, not driving while drunk. In what follows, I emphasize the liberatory aspect of the literatures I engage because this movement explicitly grew out of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic and has long defined, as an ethos expressed in various terms, Indigenous peoples’ practices of survival under settler colonialism (Brown, 1995). The mainstreaming of harm reduction to refer to any risk mitigation practice can work to recenter the responsible neoliberal subject, a figure implicitly understood as resourced enough to simply make the right choices to keep herself safe. The liberatory harm reduction movement asks, instead, whose lifeways are made viable by existing systems.

The mainstream public health uptake of harm reduction engages behavior modification strategies induced by coercive swapping strategies, such as trading drug use for basic needs like housing. Against this, the liberatory movement stages a powerful critique of the idea that abstinence and sobriety must be the ultimate goal for all participants. Harm reduction practitioner and police abolitionist Shira Hassan points out that much of what the medical system distorts about harm reduction is due to the fact that a core tenet of its ethos is made impossible by the health industry’s (mis)understanding of risk. Liberatory harm reduction is rooted in a peer-to-peer model in which strategies of support and survival are crafted in collaboration among people with stigmatized life experiences. This is rarely actualized in public health settings because medical and non-profit employers view people with stigmatized experiences, such as active drug use or criminal records, as themselves ‘risks’ to the employment structure. All too often these projects do not hire people with the very experiences of those they seek to support due to liability and insurance issues (Minhee and Calandrillo, 2019).

The crucial intervention that liberatory harm reduction makes against this logic is a rearticulation of risk as something that is structurally distributed and not inherently tied to any particular drug or activity. In reference to sex work, Hassan writes, “Liberatory Harm Reduction deepens the idea of risk reduction because it recognizes that, for example, capitalism, racism, police, and misogyny are the biggest dangers for those involved in the sex trade. In this way, the sex trade and its dangers do not exist because of what one worker does or does not do while participating in it” (Hassan, 2022: 74). Risk, rather than referring to types of individualized behavior, encompasses how the settler state and racial capitalism position people differently in relation to resources, violence, and recuperation. This framework proposes a spectrum of drugs, activities, and harm that directly refutes the recovery readiness paradigm that dominates a public health approach, in which participants must at least be working towards quitting their drug of choice. For liberatory harm reduction, potential harms are not inherent to any activity or substance, and certainly not to any person, but vary depending on the factors of risk, set, and setting.

Popularized by Norman Zinberg’s 1984 book Drug, Set, Setting, this paradigm recognizes that there are multiple variables to consider in addition to the supposedly inherent properties of any substance. Set, referring to the mindset of the person using, as well as where and how the drug is being used (setting) are just as important to determining risk and crafting strategies for mitigation (Hassan 2022: 70-72). These variables provide avenues for reducing risk and increasing safety through, for example, allowing persons to enter single-use bathrooms in pairs and including Naloxone kits in them, as a setting where it has been documented that overdose rates are higher and which unhoused and otherwise marginalized people are forced to use due to lack of access (Hassan 2022: 71). Naloxone is an FDA-approved antidote that reverses overdoes from opioids and has been crucial for lowering the numbers of preventable deaths. Liberatory harm reduction recognizes that it is certainly possible for someone to choose abstinence as the right path but maintains that drugs can be tied to multiple effects and experiences, for example, enjoyment and/or the regulation of the effects of trauma (Page and Woodland, 2023).

Against the ascription of riskiness to particular activities, places and people, these perspectives rewrite risk as differential exposure to the harms of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, institutional abandonment, and state-sanctioned violence. The significance of setting in Zinberg’s formulation points towards a geographic sense in which community itself refracts and reforms the contingencies of place. The uneven geographies of policing and neoliberal capitalism link spatial affinities to political and everyday needs in ways that challenge us to understand place as simultaneously multi-dimensional and structurally conditioned. The ‘where’ of community fundamentally queries the divergent but coexisting layers of resource access that contribute to the creation of place and refuses to let this multiplicity overdetermine how place can be lived; an abandoned building signals the financial risk of development for some and a ‘crime risk’ for others, but from this vantage of community it can be a provisional shelter, congregation space, or place to source life-saving safer use materials from other users. Underground and grassroots syringe exchanges that emerged in the 1980’s responded to the forced isolation of safe use practices meant to protect against AIDS, emphasizing that the risks of injection are due just as much to criminalization and structural lack of needle access as they are to injection itself. It is by now commonly understood that the escalation of the AIDS crisis was manufactured by state neglect and widespread stigmatization of queer communities (Padamsee, 2017). Indeed, this perspective was one of the major contributions of the unequivocal claim animating ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) actions that “The Government has Blood On Its Hands” (Fury, 1988).

Materials from these early syringe exchanges emphasize the intersection of multiple forms of structural marginalization that themselves create the risks of drug use. These exchanges were established where they were through of a mix of differential policy opportunities, relative social welfare funding, and the collective consciousness of enough affected people, which in turn drew more people seeking community resources and established certain areas, such as New York and San Francisco, as hubs. Ephemera from these projects range from materials intended to rally the general public in support of government funding to underground materials circulated among drug users to share experiences, educate one another, and resist the forced isolation of stigma and criminalization. In an example of the former, pamphlets circulated by ACT UP Milwaukee in 1996 to generate participation in a rally demanded $100,000 of state level funding to extend the reach of the city’s needle exchange project LifePoint. Emerging explicitly out of queer activism, ACT UP’s political claims invoke the intravenous drug using community more broadly through emphasizing that the risks of use are differentiated by other structurally conditioned exposures to harm. They highlight that over half of AIDS cases in the Black and Latinx populations were due to shared needle use and that over half of AIDS cases in women were due to injection or sex with a partner who injects (ACTMilwaukee UP, 1996).

In grassroots literature passed informally between people, access to informative materials, HIV testing, and clean needles are understood as places where interlocking exposures to structural harm can be mitigated. The Youth Education Lifeline of ACT UP produced a Foster Kid’s Guide to HIV Testing zine that provided information about how to navigate the interrogation and possible forced testing by agents of the Child Welfare Agency, an institution known to prey on Black and racialized families and mete traumatic punishments for poverty (Roberts, 2022). The zine lets readers know that entering the foster system will entail an investigation to ascertain your risk for HIV that will also determine whether you can decide for yourself whether to take an HIV test. It outlines what youth can do to appeal if they are not judged fit to decide and what some of the benefits and drawbacks are of deciding to be tested. Cartoon depictions suggest that these decisions are racialized and classed: a white man in a suit with sharp teeth and angry eyebrows yells at a young person depicted with light brown skin and curly dark hair wearing a punk leather jacket. In another, the same evil white man judges a young Black woman with dreadlocks to be incapable of choosing whether she will take the test. The risk here is not primarily one’s own HIV status, but rather the possibility of disenfranchisement by the child welfare system, a possibility that is distributed along racial lines. The caricatured evil caseworker looks the same in each panel whereas the aesthetic, gender and racial markers of the young people change, suggesting that they are drawn together not through some intractable commonality but because they are exposed, along a spectrum of intensity, to the harms of this system (Youth Education Lifeline of ACT UP, n.d.).

In a similar vein of horizontal knowledge-sharing, participants of the Santa Cruz Needle Exchange in the mid-1990’s put together junkphood, a series of informational zines that include photos and drawings of proper tourniquet ties for needle injection, how to identity and respond to an overdose, and interviews with users about their experiences. Started by Heather Edney, the Needle Exchange was intended to serve primarily homeless youth and women engaged in the sex trade as a means of accessing drugs. Edney maintained a focus on people who were heavily impacted by AIDS but whose life choices were increasingly stigmatized as barriers to care in the broader arena of AIDS responses and public health. The Santa Cruz drop-in center included a women-only day that combined wound care and needle exchange services with free manicures, pedicures, and haircuts, signaling that care related to injection is an element in routine attention to the body and giving participants the choice to take up particular forms of gender expression.

Junkphood zine contributors, largely young people, express that they are tired of listening to ‘experts’ who give them useless information and require that they fulfill the role of an ignorant kid. They reformulate their risks as the product of forced isolation resulting from criminalization and stigmatization: “We, as drug users, are the experts. All of us know bits and pieces of what is safe and unsafe, but because we are shoved underground, there is no way for us to talk about it. So we use drugs in silence, and sometimes we get infected with HIV, and sometimes we lose people we love to overdose” (junkphood, n.d.-b). The covers of junkphood zines are reworked advertisements for popular sugary cereals such as frosted flakes and coco puffs, substances with little nutrition and packed with additives that circulate in and out of conversations about whether they cause cancer. The design implies that, as young people, the zine’s creators are encouraged to unthinkingly fill their bodies with harmful substances in the service of corporate capital, and yet they are marginalized and criminalized for their choices about how to engage with other potentially harmful substances (Junkphood, n.d.-a). The suggestion is, again, that the risks of ingestion are themselves created by structural marginalization and the inaccessibility of informed and respectful care.

These projects were important rejoinders to what Cathy J. Cohen has referred to as the “assimilationist tendencies of AIDS activism” (1997: 439). I want to briefly elaborate this through posing liberatory harm reduction work against another historic rejoinder that formed under the banner of Queer Nation. Self-avowedly in the invocation of nation, Queer Nation’s politics sought to “affirm sameness by defining a common identity on the fringes” and clearly establish one’s enemies as “gay assimilationists and straight oppressors” (Bérubé and Escoffier, 1991: 12-13). Invoking a form of nationalist pride in the service of anti-assimilationist goals was perhaps necessary in its historic context, but this particular understanding of community restricted political belonging to a binary question of whether to understand oneself as part of a dominant entity or a marginalized entity. This essentially false choice was reworked through racialized, gendered, and nationalist forms of structural marginalization such that, in the early 2000’s, it was appropriate to coin the term ‘homonationalism’ to describe how a narrowly defined community of sexuality is used to oppress racial and global ‘others’ (Puar, 2007). In other words, the political focus on who is or is not in a given community turned inwards the coalition-building strategies of earlier ACT UP organizing in ways that ultimately reasserted community as something defined through the fixed terms of sameness and difference.

What the liberatory harm reduction movement offers instead is an understanding of community that forms along a spectrum of valences of exposure to interlocking systems of oppression. This is not a community distinguished by any particular confluence of identities, although in the colloquial sense the terms of identity can remain useful. ² In this vision, communities form, recognize themselves, and re-form in contingent and provisional patterns that are always tied to the structural tectonics of resource access and dispossession. What is geographic, here, is the supersession of an emphasis on place-based ‘rootedness’ with an attention to the contingent and provisional nature of specific community forms – conditioned simultaneously by particular conditions and the impetus to survive and, ultimately, change them. In Gilmore’s work on organizing against the construction of new prisons across central California, she contends that the “forgotten places” of state devolution and economic abandonment are not fixed in space and time but, rather, constitute a “spatially discontinuous” mosaic across which the careful, and often arduous, work of illuminating overlapping exposures, needs, and interests results in something like community (2022: 410). In my formulation, communities of exposure capture a collective state that is necessary to express because it will be superseded, articulating the experience of exposure without hypostasizing it.

To be clear, this is not to say that when community is invoked it always looks anything like what I have described here, or that such projects are freed from practices of exclusion. ³ Precisely because of the violence and dispossession in which these projects arise, they grapple with protectionist tendencies and the complexities of belonging – but the point is that openly grappling with these issues is a core tenet of this kind of organizing. This ethos of collective self-reflexivity will become more apparent in the following section, but I want to establish here that this differs significantly from Staeheli’s conceptualization of the multiple-ness of community as a series of distinct, fixed communities that each reflect an aspect of the subject’s identity. In the notion of communities of exposure, the ‘risks’ the police state ascribes to racialized and nonnormative groups, often to delegitimize their political claims, are refracted back to define collective exposure to risk as a product of state and capitalist agendas. This foregrounds community as something that changes all the time as resources are redistributed and structural positions related to resource access transform. Shifting our conceptualization of community from an entity, either inclusive or exclusive, to a process opens onto the political work of prefiguration that is central to the abolitionist movement. What the ‘end’ of this movement looks like is built iteratively by the means, as groups experiment with different ways of addressing harm intended to create a world that does not need police. Immediate practices of care engender the forms of association available to us, but these forms will inevitably undo and remake themselves as that world becomes more possible.

Transformative justice and community as exposure

I want to turn in this section towards the articulation of community within abolitionist organizing that proposes this form of social life as the arena for pursuing justice and healing without and after police. My core point will be that the transformative justice movement expresses community not as uncomplicated conviviality or mutuality but as exposure to one another. Being in community indelibly involves exposure to risk and harm, and it is in recognizing this that the possibility for redressing, mitigating, and pursuing true safety lies. Against community as a space exclusively defined by mutuality, the transformative justice movement, deeply rooted in Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminist organizing, asserts that the very notion that the risks of community could be entirely excised itself undergirds the logic and practices of policing.

It is in this sense that recognizing exposure as constitutive of community is central to this work. Before turning to literature from this movement, I want to elaborate this point by differentiating it from a commonly referenced relation between community and exposure through returning briefly to Esposito. From his etymological search for the roots of communitas he extracts the Latin meaning of munus, identifying the relation of the common as rooted in a gift or debt that obliges one to the other. The burden of this obligation, which we ultimately cannot bear, leads humans to construct what he calls the paradigm of immunity. Sharing the root munus, immunity is what nullifies the obligation of community, and thus what is necessary to the creation and preservation of the borders that allow us to persist as such. Here, what we intend to invoke as community is in fact the impetus to immunization, a paradigm that characterizes modern politics insofar as the state form has developed in an attempt to neutralize the threat of munus.

The suggestion in his work is that the experience of exposure to one another necessarily initiates an immunitary response. Esposito’s project of community lies in recalibrating the type and degree of this response through a return to the common, articulated politically in the reversal of privatization, as a path to prioritizing immunization as protection of life over autoimmunization as destruction of life. This work begins, in his words, with the need to “to conceptualize the function of immune systems in a different way, making them into relational filters between inside and outside instead of exclusionary barriers” (2013: 88). Even in its turn to the porosity of an inside/outside distinction, this conceptualization reaffirms the need to think community from the starting point of entities rather than relations. The work of immunization and protection is essentially preemptive and in a certain sense conservative, in that it undertakes measures to preserve actual or perceived homeostasis. ⁴

As I will go on to show, transformative justice turns us instead towards recognizing that what is already here is always already exposure, and that political projects oriented by community are propelled by this very state rather than the impetus to preempt its risks. I will go on to suggest that an abolitionist reformulation of exposure articulates harm and danger in a way that refuses fixed inside/outside distinctions and resists premising community on the neutralization of risk within a given body or body politic. I want to be clear that transformative justice should not be understood as a project that finally gets community ‘right’ through total acceptance and inclusion. Rather, the practices of this movement are attuned to community as an always already being-in-relation that perpetually and purposefully cuts across transitory moments of closure. Empirically, exclusion can be found to recur in most forms of political organizing, but the horizon of these movements consists in recognizing that these concerns are not the definitional arc of community. They cultivate responses to harm that recognize relationality as unconditional, rather than a state of being that can be revoked.

In the transformative justice framework, the threat of state punishment and isolation are antithetical to the actual change that can take place in the aftermath of harm. Refuting the idea that people who have caused harm should be disposable, the movement’s formulation of accountability holds that all people should be treated with respect for their ability to transform. This understanding respects the fact that people navigate systems of oppression in ways that cause harm and maintains that these harms can be navigated without the intervention of carceral systems that expose people to potentially life-threatening conditions. This does not mean that transformation should take place at the expense of someone else’s safety, but rather that the possibility of staying in the relations to which one actually feels accountable is often a crucial condition for taking responsibility (Dixon, 2020).

This work holds that intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and relationships of abuse can be complex, person specific, and embedded in societal and material conditions such that survivors are often put in positions where they must choose between remaining in a relationship and basic needs such as secure housing and food. Cultivating non-carceral responses to sexual assault, rape, and domestic violence is central to this movement because these harms most commonly take place between people who are close to one another, living together, intimate partners, or family. According to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, 80% of survivors know their rapists (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, n.d). These harms are places where both the deep difficulties of community and the possibility of pursuing justice through existing ties of accountability come to the fore. The same data shows that 70% of survivors do not report their assault to the police, indicating at the very least that the carceral system does not present viable avenues of response (ibid).

The core principles of Black feminist organizing within the transformative justice movement have actively resisted the rise of what has been termed carceral feminism (Bernstein, 2007). The idea that police, prisons, and criminalization could redress the harms of patriarchal oppression arose from the reticence of white feminists organizing in the early years of the anti-violence movement to substantively include an analysis of race, class, and differential exposure to state violence. As Black feminist anti-violence organizers fought the whitening of the movement in the 1970’s, the Combahee River Collective broke away from the National Black Feminist Organization in order to, among other things, include sexuality and the needs of lesbians as a central issue. But, importantly, they positioned this move against the gender separatist strain that was then popular in white lesbian and feminist movements. Instead, the collective sought to create a platform that would allow them to “struggle together with Black men against racism” as well as “struggle with Black men about sexism” (1977).

These historic moments point towards an understanding of community that actively refutes an image of this social unit as a ‘collective good’ where harmful things do not happen. It has been crucial for anti-violence organizing that invoking a broader political collective not justify the obfuscation of harmful dynamics thought to be ‘internal’ to that collective. As Black feminists have shown, political work that relies on projecting a monolithic racial community can sublimate gender inequity into a vision of collective struggle premised on the community-as-unity paradigm refuted in section one (Crenshaw, 1991). Similarly, and also as Black feminists and feminists of color have shown, the collectivization of ‘women’ in the anti-violence movement ultimately reduced the complexity of domestic, sexual, and state violence to a collective figure representing a narrow section of women. As the campaign gained national attention and government-funded support, this collective figure became synonymous with white women and women in power, restricting the terms of the movement’s legitimacy through repressing racialized experiences of state violence (Richie, 2012).

So, why do we need Jean-Luc Nancy to further understand this figure of community? I suggest that Nancy’s thought can act as a selectively engaged resource for articulating what is already at work in these grounded theorizations. His work contributes a formulation of community in which this relation is explicitly premised on our exposure to one another, rather than on practices of inclusion and exclusion. ⁵ Here, we cannot retreat into community and close its borders against external violence because community itself is an act of exposure to one another. Similarly, in transformative justice literatures, community is not the enclosure of sameness against threat. The movement is adamant that this is impossible, and that just as it is true that police perpetuate rather than prevent harms, a world without police requires structures that address interpersonal harms and forms of violence that will not disappear entirely with the police.

Nancy’s work on community begins in a critique of what he calls ‘immanentism.’ For him, immanence understands the human as the sole producer of its own essence, a figure that is at once its own origin and product. This leads to a false image of community in which it is thought to be entirely coterminous with itself and have as its origin the production of itself through work (Nancy, 1991: 3). His theorization of community is premised, against this, on the idea that the structure of the absolute transgresses its own logic, which he explains through the idea of being alone. In order for me to be alone in the absolute sense, I must not only be alone but I must be alone in my aloneness. But in the requirement that I be the only one being alone, there is the recognition that others exist and that their togetherness or aloneness is implicated in my ability to be alone. This, ultimately, denies my ability to be absolutely alone.

A double enclosure is thus required, and impossible, for absolute immanence to deny the constitutive nature of relation. Closure must be enacted not only around the territory, which would leave it open to abutting other territories, but also around this very enclosure. It must be the only territory, but in that need to be the only lies the constitutive recognition of a possible relation to others that, itself, is a relation. Community can be understood to refer to the fundamental impossibility of this act of closure. In his words, “the relation (the community) is, if it is, nothing other than what undoes, in its very principle – and at its closure or on its limit – the autarchy of absolute immanence” (Nancy, 1991: 4). This relation is itself the necessary failure of the premise of immanence, understood as self-generated identity. Community, rather than always tending towards enclosure, is the constitutive cutting through of enclosure – not by something ‘other’ that comes from elsewhere, but by the very fact that the denial of relation cannot uphold itself.

This understanding of community as the denial of fixed enclosure appears in the social shapes suggested by the pragmatic materials of transformative justice. A personal safety planning workshop will ask participants to consider their relationships that could be called on in situations of violence, turning to the language of ‘pods’ to describe different types and proximities of relations. People will have multiple pods with different constellations in each, as who you would call on if you survive violence can differ from who you would call on if you cause harm. Workbooks often prompt participants to draw out their relationships in spatial terms, locating specific people in varying degrees of proximity to oneself and mapping the relationship characteristics that connect them, for example, reliability, geographic closeness, history of conflict resolution, or shared domestic responsibilities. Importantly, these proximities are mobile and not intended to fix indelibly a particular concentric circle of relationships (Mingus, 2016).

Transformative justice practitioner Mia Mingus writes that the language of ‘pods’ turned out to provide much more traction in practical terms than that of community. In their work with the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, it became clear that people tended to understand community in broad and romanticized terms but that this did not translate into actually identifying close and trusted relationships. The language of community became even more difficult when violence was coming from within what was defined as the community itself, often in closest relationships (Mingus, 2023). This points to the fact that community is not predicated, here, on finding and enclosing the closest inner circle of safety. Rather, it involves mapping and understanding the ways we are exposed to one another in various types of relations including those that can actually produce consequences for the perpetrator of harm. Although it is certainly encouraged to take this step if it becomes necessary for the survivor’s safety, effecting a perpetrator’s banishment from the broader group can lead to them relocating and continuing to cause harm in a new setting, losing the possibility to hold them accountable in existing relationships (Kaba and Hassan, 2019). The possibility of transformation consists both in asking someone to be accountable to the impact of what they have done, potentially facing certain sanctions and/or loss of responsibility/power, and a forward-looking accountability of the survivor to their broader relations, as many people who have been assaulted or abused claim that one of the main things they want is for this to not happen to anyone else (Perez-Putnam, 2020).

To be clear, this work is incredibly difficult, does not always function as anyone has intended, and is not immune from causing more harm in the process; and yet materials collected across various experiments and projects again and again push back against a ‘romanticized notion of community,’ in which we refuse to recognize or to effectively address the harms that take place (INCITE!, 2003; Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2020). I return to Nancy briefly in order to further elaborate the usefulness of the idea of exposure to this vision and, again, to differentiate its usage from the terms of inclusion and exclusion. In his words,

If the dialectic is the process of that which must appropriate its own becoming in order to be, exposition, on the other hand, is the condition of that whose essence or destination consists in being presented: given over, offered to the outside, to other, and even to the self …The exposed being is perhaps also the subject of a dialectical process, but what is exposed, what makes it exposed, is that it is not completed by this process, and it “incompletes itself” to the outside; it is presented, offered to something that is not it nor its proper becoming.” (1991: 89)

This quote attests that the relation of exposure is itself un-subsumable. Whereas the sublimation of the other into the realization of the self might be necessary for the creation of an entity that can experience exposure, the condition of being truly exposed depends on the fact that this process of sublimation never reaches final closure. Community is not a collection of self-present beings producing their own collectivity. Rather, it is the propulsion of necessarily insufficient beings towards one another without the teleology of resolution into wholeness or coterminous presence.

This conceptualization gestures to a principle of un-fullness not dissimilar to Esposito’s notion of loss, as the unbearable condition subjects face when stripped of their immunitary borders. However, Nancy’s thought poses this principle through the notion of insufficiency. To have lost versus to not have enough are distinct conditions that lead to diverging relations. In the former, the political project of community consists in balancing our necessary response to lack, as immunization and protection of life, without resorting to an overzealous autoimmune response that calcifies exclusionary borders. In the latter, we seek each other because we are not enough, and there is no preempting or neutralizing this fact. In the face of it, all that we know to do is to appear again and again before one another. This is not to suggest that in togetherness we become whole or sufficient, but that our insufficiency at once demands relations and denies the sublimation of those relations into the production of an enclosure, however porous. Where Esposito’s figuration points us towards borders, in which social formations are set in motion by our need to preempt our exposure to others, Nancy’s model of insufficiency points us towards relations of what he calls ‘compearance,’ the condition of being called to appear before another. It is in continuing to show up, necessarily, in our exposure to one another that we find the constitution of community.

Understanding communities of exposure is central to pursuing the transformative justice principles of living community as exposure. A resource circulated by Interrupting Criminalization addresses in its title a question commonly put to the police abolitionist movement, “What About the Rapists?” (Kaba and Nagao, 2021). Its final page challenges the prevailing narrative of a ‘good survivor’ that implicitly defines many responses to sexual assault. Depicted under the question “Who is seen as worthy of support and advocacy?” is an inner circle containing the phrases ‘good victim,’ ‘non-criminal,’ ‘couldn’t have done anything differently,’ and ‘cooperates with the system.’ Outside this circle lie all of the valences of exposure that have been used to ascribe riskiness, or at worst deservingness, to certain people surviving sexual violence: person of color, queer, undocumented, incarcerated, sex worker, trans, drug user, disabled, Black, and labeled with mental health condition. This suggests that attending to community as exposure, a site where harm must be addressed without the further violence of police intervention, requires an understanding of how communities of exposure position us differently vis a vis resources even as we pursue intimate and trusted relationships. The zine asks readers to question who they are actually supporting as survivors by positioning sexual assault as evidence of a perceived need for police ‘protection’ from violence within a community. What we see in the abolitionist movement is, against this, an understanding of community that recognizes itself in the fact that it cannot be sanitized of its own risks by carceral interventions. It is this project, to simultaneously recognize the closeness of risk and in that recognition to work towards cultivating truly effective and equitable responses to systemic risks, that animates the intersection of communities of exposure and community as exposure.

Conclusion

I have developed here a conceptualization of community within police abolitionist organizing that challenges the tendency to think this social form as enclosure. In section one, I suggested that geographic work has tended to approach community through the framework of multicultural liberalism. Much of this work has understood community as, at its worst, a recapitulation of exclusionary practices and suggested political correctives intended to expand the inclusion of difference. Towards thinking community in more structural terms, the second section articulated exposure as a structurally determined condition through the work that liberatory harm reduction has done to understand risk in these terms. There, I put forth an understanding of communities of exposure, defined as the formation of social collectives through overlapping or abutting exposures to the risks created by state and capitalist institutions.

In the third section, I turned to literatures from the transformative justice movement and, drawing on Nancy’s philosophy, offered an understanding of community as exposure. Here, redressing the risks of interpersonal and intimate relations does not necessarily lead to processes of enclosure and preemptive exclusion. Instead, practices cultivated to respond to the closeness and immediacy of harm express community as premised on our constitutive exposure to one another, a form of relationality that cannot be excised by carceral interventions. These forms of community are mutually reinforcing, as structurally determined communities make redistributive claims on the state that work towards enabling community to itself become the domain of redressing violence and harm. My hope is that this understanding will contribute to abolitionist work articulating community as a force of political organizing, recipient of redistributed resources, and arena for pursuing anti-carceral forms of justice.