Friday May 3, 5PM-8:30 PM & Saturday May 4 10AM-8:30PM

The People’s Forum (320 West 37th Street, New York City)

Register here for the in-person conference.

This event will also be livestreamed;

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.

Click Here for more information on the conference, program, and speakers.

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 

More information available on the CPCP website.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.