Dharma and Justice Dialogues: The Metaphysics of Liberation
After years of teaching in adult and juvenile detention, and being involved in the police and prison abolitionist movement, katie had the sneaking suspicion that any movement seeking to dismantle carcerality was about a lot more than defunding the police and closing all the prisons. Getting at the “roots of violence”, making prisons “obsolete” as instructed by abolitionist visionary Mariame Kaba, perhaps isn’t only a legislative or socio-cultural venture – but rather a psychological, ontological, spiritual, and metaphysical one.
Picking up what M. Jacqui Alexander put down in her landmark Pedagogies of Crossing, katie’s dissertation research seeks a “new metaphysics of political struggle” (2005) informed by conversations with police and prison abolitionist movement leaders in Minneapolis, MN, USA. What might we learn from how abolitionists experience themselves, their relations, and their realities? Through a close read of recent abolitionist literature and grounding in decolonial philosophy, katie describes a movement in an ontological borderlands – where fixed colonial realities and relational emergent realities exist alongside one another, and abolitionists have learned how to navigate between and beyond them.
In this Dharma & Justice dialogue, katie robinson & co-host Brooke Lavelle will speak about the psychological, ontological, spiritual, and metaphysical frames required for transformative and liberatory movement praxis. Together, they will consider what the dharma might offer our movements, as well as the kinds of “movement chaplaincy” needed right now.
Date & Time:
Thursday, April 16, 2026
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM EST
Online Webinar
Meet the Speakers:
katie robinson (any pronouns) is a writer, facilitator, educator, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist devoted to the exploration of what is present and possible outside of the white supremacist colonial imagination. Their essay, “Here’s How I Let Them Come Close,” a meditation on encounters, extraterrestrials, and the creative process, was featured in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars from Milkweed in 2023. They are currently a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where they just completed their dissertation on the intersections of depth psychology, decoloniality, and police and prison abolition.
Brooke D. Lavelle, Ph.D. (she/her) is the Program Manager for Buddhist Studies at Union Theological Center. She is also the Co-Founder of Courage of Care, a non-profit focused on nurturing a field of culture-change workers, or “relational facilitators”, in the art of transformative gathering and community building to support the heart of our movements for justice and liberation. She is also the Co-Editor of The Arrow Journal, a publication and podcast series that explores the relationship between politics, contemplative practice, and activism.