Event

Abolition and/as Activism

Fri, May 3, 2024

6:30 PM–8:30 PM

Friday, May 3rd 5:00-8:30 PM & Saturday, May 4th 10AM-8:30PM at The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th St, NYC.

Join our friends and collaborators the Center for Place, Culture and Politics’ for their Annual Conference 2024: Abolition and/as Activism on Friday, May 3 5:00-8:30 PM & Saturday, May 4 10AM-8:30PM at The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th St, NYC. Free and open to all.

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 Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Global Studies program at The New School. It is free and open to the public.

Register here for the in-person conference.

More information and updates HERE.

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

Conference Program:

Friday, May 3

5:15 Welcome

5:30-6:50 24 years of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics

Kandice Chuh, Peter Hitchcock, David Harvey, Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine

7:00-8:20 Keynote Dialogue

Rabab Abdulhadi and Ruth Wilson Gilmore in conversation

Saturday, May 4

9:45 Welcome

10:00-11:50 Thinking the State

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma, Giacomo Bianchino, Christina M. Chica, Lexington Davis, Anthony Dest, Javiela Evangelista, Thauany Freire, Cynthia Yuan Gao, Nour Mohamad Jamil Hodeib, Zahra Khalid, Nerve V. Macaspac, Maria Luisa Mendonça, Laura Rivas, Benjamin Rubin, Shreya Subramani, Dominic Wetzel

12:00-1:30 Pedagogies of Third World Marxism

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma, Zoe Alexander, Michele Cannon, Vincent DeLaurentis, Patrick DeDauw, Khouloud Mallak, Gabriel Meier, Meraz Mostafa, Brendan O’Connor, Bryan Welton

1:30-2:30 Lunch

2:30-4:30 Militant Knowledges

Sonia Vaz Borges, Vijay Prashad, Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper

4:40-6:50 The Politics of Struggle /Abolition Futures

Ujju Aggarwal, Mizue Aizeki, Miriam Ticktin, Laura Y. Liu

6:50-8:30 Celebration