The Department of Geography in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex is delighted and honoured to host an online research seminar and conversation with Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore on the topic of ‘Abolition Geography’ in collaboration with the Centre for Global Political Economy. This event initiates a series of weekly seminars throughout Autumn 2022 in which speakers have been invited to bring their own work into conversation with Professor Gilmore’s. The full programme of seminars is given below. Registration details/ Zoom links for the remaining seminars will be available via the School of Global Studies events page nearer the time.

The seminar series was inspired by Professor Gilmore’s new book Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation (Verso, 2022), which gathers together in one volume her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher and organizer. The book speaks directly to the turbulent present, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing.

Professor Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. In 2020 she was named by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 age. Her previous books include Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), which was awarded the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize for the best book in American Studies by the American Studies Association (ASA). The ASA also awarded Professor Gilmore its first Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship in 2012. In 2014 Professor Gilmore received the Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice from the Association of American Geographers.

GEOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT RESEARCH SEMINARS

AUTUMN 2022

Thursdays | Arts C333, University of Sussex , Falmer, Brighton OR Online|

29 Sep

4-6pm, Online

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, City University of NY (CUNY) - Abolition Geography

6 Oct

1-2pm, Arts C333

Roseanne Steffen and Billie Krish, Sussex alumni - ‘The rents keep on rising and so will we’: reflections on the 2021 Rent Strike at Sussex University

13 Oct

1-2pm, Online

David Featherstone, University of Glasgow - Seafarers struggles for equality, working class multiculture and the makings of place in Cardiff and Liverpool

20 Oct

1-2pm, Arts C333

Dalia Gebrial, LSE PhD Researcher & Novara Media contributing editor - Algorithmic Expulsions: Platform labour management and the carceral bleed

27 Oct

1-2pm, Arts C333

Moushumi Bhowmik, Jadavpur University/The Travelling Archive - ‘The caged bird sings of things unknown’: political prisoners and other stories of incarceration from the subcontinent.

10 Nov

1-2pm, Arts C333

Vron Ware, Visiting Professor, LSE - Return of a native: learning from the land

17 Nov

1-2pm, Arts C333

Fae Dussart, Sussex - Burdened by intimacy: duty, exploitation, and the Victorian ‘domestic sphere’

24 Nov

1-2pm, Zoom

Adam Elliott-Cooper, Queen Mary - Bobbies in Babylon: Black resistance to British policing

1 Dec

1-2pm, Arts C333

Felix Mantz, Queen Mary - Political ecologies of abolition: land-grabbing, natures, and the state in Tanzania

Series convened by Ben Rogaly. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’ seminar is organised in collaboration with the Centre for Global Political Economy.

Abolition Geography with Ruth Wilson Gilmore