Making Abolition Geographies
Humanities Forum with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Location
Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn : Gallery
Date & Time
April 30, 2020, 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm – Canceled
Description
Making Abolition Geographies: Social Justice Organizing for Vulnerable Households, Workers, and Communities
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, the Graduate Center, City University of New York
The talk explores how visions of abolition guide and connect organizing across a range of social justice struggles. The examples highlight environmental justice, public sector labor unions, farm workers, undocumented households, criminalized youth, and community-based approaches to prevent and resolve gender and interpersonal violence. The vivid stories presented show that abolition is a practical program for urgent change based in the needs, talents, and dreams of vulnerable people.
A reception and book signing will follow the program.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Gilmore is a co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She works on racial capitalism, organized violence, organized abandonment, changing state structure, criminalization, labor and social movements, and abolition as a green, red, and internationalist project of liberation. Gilmore’s recent publications include chapters in Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter; Futures of Black Radicalism; forewords to a new collection of work by Cedric Robinson and to Bobby M. Wilson’s classic America’s Johannesburg. Forthcoming are a co-edited (with Paul Gilroy) collection of Stuart Hall’s writing on race and difference and a second edition of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.
Sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities; the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery; the Geography and Environmental Systems Department; the Sociology, Anthropology, and Health Administration and Policy Department; and the Political Science Department.
Photo by Don Usner.
[image: A woman wearing a black top and glasses standing behind a podium and microphone]
