This foreword by adrienne maree brown explores how Andrea J. Ritchie bridges pragmatic abolitionist organizing with the imaginative, adaptive principles of emergent strategy, showing how transformative change grows through relationships, experimentation, and collective visioning.

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Andrea J. Ritchie is an unlikely Emergent Strategy Series contributor. She is a Capricorn movement lawyer, generally most comfortable with a linear plan of action to execute. I’ve known and admired Andrea’s legal and organizing work for almost two decades. I always felt we were in parallel efforts—her attending to the legal and policy struggles of the present while I do the imaginative space-holding work of collaborative dreaming of the future. I have often felt indulged by organizers like Andrea, “Ok, dream on, but in the meantime we gonna get people free right now.”

This is why I was astounded to find myself at a conference in Hawai’i, on a panel dedicated to a wide breadth of responses to emergent strategy, holding back tears as Andrea gave a talk on how emergent strategy had changed her worldview, life, and work toward abolition.

Andrea and I are both abolitionists, meaning we are working to abolish the system of US policing and prisons and, more broadly, shift our species from punitive approaches to justice to transformative ones. This means we both seek to transform the conditions of our society from the root up, such that the conditions that create what is then criminalized—poverty, inequality, and discrimination—are fundamentally eradicated. We both feel the pressure of urgency inside of intersecting crises for our peoples and our planet. It is challenging to be experimental in the face of such pressure, because it means acknowledging that the strategies we are more familiar with, even skilled in, are not enough to get us where we need to be: free, able to practice authentic accountability, in communities of care.

I think one of the ways we ended up at that talk, and with this book, is that we both developed a relationship to Detroit. I became a student of Detroit in 2006 and moved there in 2009 for what became a twelve year education in adaptation in the face of crises. Every summer, Andrea would come to town for the Allied Media Conference (AMC), a gathering of media-making change agents envisioning new worlds and sharing practical tools for the communication of survival technologies. For me, the AMC has been the cauldron in which I have experimented with my new recipes for justice and liberation.

I held an Octavia E. Butler summit there and early Emergent Strategy workshops, as well as Pleasure Activism sessions and Visionary Fiction writing workshops. Andrea also used this as a space to build her networks for policy-shifting legal work, and at times we overlapped. I got to facilitate gatherings of organizers and lawyers she was building with. We found each other on the dance floor in a shared community of activists, artists, journalists, and visionaries.

Beyond being the physical location of these gatherings, Detroit was a point of inspiration and education, showing us a people who had figured out paths of survival in the seemingly impossible conditions of racial capitalism. In these Detroit summers, I noticed that, alongside her pragmatism, Andrea was interested in magic. I learned that she was a secret sailor and thus had a relationship of respect and awe with the more-than-human natural world.

When Andrea began showing interest in emergent strategy, I felt excited and nervous—emergent strategy is both emerging modern theory and wisdom based in ancient understandings and visible patterns of the world around us. I could feel the depth of my faith in emergent strategy up against the anticipation of a cross examination. But then that made me more excited—I want people to keep unveiling more of emergent strategy, and to help keep it rooted in its radical soil, which can be very difficult in the reductionist landscape of social media and viral trends. This requires a critical look at where emergent strategy comes from, how it has landed and been received, how it works with and beyond existing political frameworks, and where there are gaps in applying it to organizing.

With Practicing New Worlds, Andrea offers us a deepening of emergent strategy. In addition to her own reflections and scholarship of how emergent strategy and abolitionist movements intertwine, Andrea lets us in on a conversation among all kinds of people doing this work, about how the small, relational, and visionary moves we make can accumulate, converge, and ultimately shift culture at the largest scale. This is how change has happened, both in abolition work and throughout human history.

Andrea uncovers histories of emergent strategy that even I was unfamiliar with, histories that make me even more excited to be in the river of these ideas. She pulls in comrades and collaborators like Walidah Imarisha, ill weaver, Sage Crump, Mia Herndon, Ejeris Dixon, Mariame Kaba, Paula Rojas, Shira Hassan, Woods Ervin, Amanda Alexander, kai lumumba barrow, Mia Mingus, Damon Williams, the Spirit House crew, and so many more to weave this story, explore these lessons.

By looking at abolition through the lens of emergent strategy, element by element, Andrea uplifts the organizing strategies that are already creating more possibilities for our collective liberation, and points to the experiments and practices we can be in to advance toward the world we are co-creating. She even includes a radical bit of original mermaid fiction, so we can see how her own imagination has been unleashed in this journey. I am so grateful to Andrea for taking the risk to ask these questions, to let the answers in, and to deeply consider the possibilities offered through emergent strategy. I am so excited for you all to read this equally pragmatic and visionary and vulnerable work.

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