Selling Safety: Anti-abolitionist visualities, abolitionist guerilla-visualities, and the fight over the University of Chicago's expansion project

This thesis aims to answer the following questions: how is history used as a means of legitimizing social hierarchies? How is history visualized by anti-abolitionists and abolitionists in and around the University of Chicago? How are these aesthetics used to justify or reject the existence and expansion of the UCPD? And how are these aesthetics co-constitutive of each other? Using an interdisciplinary framework that draws from linguistic anthropology, cinema and media studies, history, and the knowledge produced by Chicago organizers, I will analyze abolitionist and anti-abolitionist visual media as means of researching how an anti-abolitionist register is legitimized, and the importance of temporal grounding in creating a language paradigm for discussing issues of racial justice. More specifically, I argue that the University's anti-abolitionist visuality must necessarily become allochronistic (Fabian 1983) to justify the University's expansion project. However, the University's allochronism and anti-abolitionist as register (opposed to pro-police) creates a space within which organizers like those of CareNotCops can create an abolitionist guerilla-visuality that re-imagines safety.