Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Abolition Geography

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is one of the foremost scholar-activists of our time. Her research and organizing has reshaped the way we think about race, place, power, prisons, and the transformations of state structures. Join us in celebrating her work and the publication of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation as part of the Fall 2022 Fall 2022 IDS Lecture Series at The Cooper Union. On this occasion, Ruth Wilson Gilmore will be in conversation with three of her essential, long-time interlocutors: Lisa Lowe, Shellyne Rodriguez, and Nikhil Pal Singh. The panel conversation will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing session.

Nikhil Pal Singh is professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University (NYU) and faculty director of NYU’s Prison Education Program. He is the author of Black is a Country (Harvard UP, 2005), Race and America’s Long War (UC Press, 2017), and the forthcoming Reconstructing Democracy (UC Press, 2023).

Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the study of race, migration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell UP, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke, 1997).

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is professor of earth & environmental science and director of the Center for Place, Culture at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press, 2007), Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso, 2022), as well as the forthcoming Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket, 2023). With Paul Gilroy, she co-edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke UP, 2021). She is also a co-founder of many grassroots organizations including California Prison Moratorium Project; Critical Resistance; and the Central California Environmental Justice Network.

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