Abolition Geography: A Workshop with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Our final event of the 2023-24 Sawyer Seminar “Afterlives of Liberation: Antiracist Praxis for the 21st Century” is a workshop with scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Gilmore will lead a two-hour workshop on her essays, “The Soviets and Abolition” (a new introduction to Lenin’s Imperialism and The National Question, Verso 2024), “Decorative Beasts,” and “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (both from the collection Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, Verso 2022).
Monday, May 6, 2024
4:30 – 6:30PM
CCA Seminar Room, 6051
Rutgers Academic Building, West
15 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, Collage Avenue Campus
Please RSVP here.
We will email the readings after registration.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A co-founder of many grassroots organizations including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore works on racial capitalism; organized violence; organized abandonment; and abolition as a green, red, and internationalist project of liberation. Author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press 2007), she recently published a new introduction to Lenin’s Imperialism and The National Question (Verso 2024). With Paul Gilroy she co-edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference. (Duke 2021). Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition is forthcoming from Haymarket. Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Her internationalist work is featured in the Antipode Foundation documentary Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Dir Kenton Card, 2020). Honors include the Ralph Santiago Abascal Prize in Economic and Environmental justice (2003); the Southern California Library Lifetime Achievement Award (2007); A New Way of Life Re-entry Project Lifetime Achievement Award (2010); the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the American Association of Geographers Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Award (2020); The American Association of Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2021); the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar (2022); and the American Association of Geographers Presidential Award (2024). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.