Temitope Mayomi
All Disciplines Award - Gallatin's Master of Arts Program at NYU
Tope is an anti-violence worker and researcher with an abolitionist vision of justice. As a Black disabled person, their experiences with psychiatry pushed them towards abolition where they found community as a grassroots organizer and educator with the transformative justice collective, Cradle Community.
Tope is a co-author of Cradle’s first book, 'Brick by Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons (2021)'. Tope has worked with both perpetrators and survivors of violence in prisons and in the community and recognises the structural roots of normalized violence. After completing a BA in Social Sciences at King’s College London, Tope will be studying a Master of Arts in Human Rights Studies at Columbia University to analyse the role of psychiatry in legitimizing incarceration by naturalizing violence within individual psychology. Tope aims to use their scholarship to continue exploring alternative modes of accountability that do not reproduce harm or treat individuals as disposable through future work in criminal defence mitigation. Tope is looking forward to the opportunity to build and learn in solidarity with organizers in New York on working towards community safety.