Tucker Edmonds, Joseph L.2025-01-292025-01-292022Tucker Edmonds, J.L. (2022). “I Want to Break Free”: Abolition and Full Participation in the Religious Studies Classroom. In J. Gray-Hildenbrand , B. McGuire & H. Rashid (Ed.). Teaching Critical Religious Studies: Pedagogy and Critique in the Classroom (pp. 162–173). London,: Bloomsbury Academic. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350228443.ch-12https://hdl.handle.net/1805/45560“I Want to Break Free: Abolition and Full Participation in the Religious Studies Classroom” explores how the framework of abolition provides a model for organizing the religious studies classroom, challenging hegemonic disciplinary practices, and rethinking the contemporary implications of the carceral state. This chapter engages my course, “Religion Behind Bars,” as a space where religious communities and university classrooms are studied as sites and cyphers for abolition. Students and I use Vincent Lloyd and Joshua Dubler’s Break Every Yoke and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons as texts to think through the processes of abolition, full participation, and breaking free. Ultimately, I illustrate that this technique enables students to more thoughtfully engage the relationship between the carceral state, studying religion, and the idea of full participation. “Breaking Free,” therefore, becomes a way to do close readings of religions and the carceral state, as well as prepare students for a new relationship to engaged citizenship.en-USAbolitionFull ParticipationDemocratically Engaged PedagogyCarceralityFugitivityBook chapter