In her justly-revered book, Abolition Geography, Ruth Wilson Gilmore articulates the prescience of the praxis, politics, and poetics of “abolition” as a central principle of liberation movements and social change. The book is a culmination of decades of Gilmore’s ardent and inexhaustible commitment not just to undo the injustices of the carceral state with its infrastructure of racial capitalism, but to formulate abolition as a condition of revolutionary possibility since, as she puts it, “mass incarceration is class war.” Far from being a handy metaphor for the combined and uneven development of the world system, the prison is the material instantiation of global inequality where location at scale is a provocation to think activism as also, in its difference and intensities, confronting carcerality in all its manifestations.

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics’ 2024 conference intends to honor Gilmore’s contribution–in activism, politics, pedagogy, and theory—to an abolitionist agenda and is also crucially an invitation to think with her work on future imbrications of abolitionism with anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-colonialism among a provocative array of allegiance to radical social transformation. In this way the conference not only celebrates a career, but extends it.

This conference is organized and sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, the Graduate Center, CUNY and cosponsored by the Global Studies program, The New School and The Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
It is free and open to the public.

More information and updates HERE. 

This event will be livestreamed. HERE is the link for May 3. HERE is the link for May 4.