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Racial, gender, and environmental justice. Class war. Militarism. Interpersonal violence. Old age security. This is not the vocabulary many use to critique the prison-industrial complex.
But in this series of powerful lectures, Ruth Wilson Gilmore shows that the only way to dismantle systems and logics of control and punishment is to change questions, categories, and campaigns from the ground up.
Abolitionism doesn’t just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that’s already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want.
As Gilmore makes plain, “Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.”
Change Everything is the inaugural book in the new Abolitionist Papers book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & 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. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers' Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); and the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017).
More by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
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