Podcasts about Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Alberto Toscano is Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Term Research Associate Professor at the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), Una visión compleja. Hacía una estética de la economía (Meier Ramirez, 2021), La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021), and the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation (with Brenna Bhandar, Verso, 2022). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is also the translator of numerous books and essays by Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, Furio Jesi and others. Subscribe to our newsletter

For our finale, we are doing something different. In this episode, Asha, Carrie, Deondre and Theo have a book group-style discussion of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. It contextualizes our season and this sensitive and fought moment in organizing and in history. Gilmore's activist scholarship over three decades has been deeply influential for abolitionist organizing in the United States and Canada, where we live, and across the world. Over the course of this conversation, we explore the lessons that this body of work has to offer for our current conjuncture. Not least of all, the messy and unending work of building shared questions and narratives across perceived boundaries.

Signal (the phone app) has become an obligatory download for every organizer on the Left in the US. But it was funded through one of the American government's propaganda agencies, and the atmosphere it creates is one of a neverending meeting permeated by paranoia. Epic conversation, care of Jemma DeCristo and Ralowe Ampu.  LAGAI—Queer Insurrection! [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/OTIxNTJmOWUtMDAxZi00YjgxLWExZGMtZDJlMzBjN2M0OWMx?view=apps&sort=popularity] Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT!) [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/NDI2Y2VjYTItMjcwNi00MjQ5LWFkZTMtZmQyMjE2YjdjMjQ2?view=apps&sort=popularity] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, scholar recently on Sad Francisco [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/NjQwMzVkZGUtMzU4MC00YjdkLWI5N2MtNzk2MjdmZWM2YjJk] SFPD racist texting scandal, 2015 edition [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/26/san-francisco-police-officers-racist-text-messages-jason-lai] Mentioned in the introduction: "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" by Yasha Levine [https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S93C3541049]  "Cloudflare Issue Can Leak Chat App Users' Broad Location" (Joseph Cox, 404 Media) [https://www.404media.co/cloudflare-issue-can-leak-chat-app-users-broad-location] Past episodes with Jemma: "The Twitter Tax Break: How AOC West Sold Out SoMa" [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/MTUxODQwOGEtNDZhYy00YWQ2LWJlZjMtODdiZmNjYmE3OGM2?view=apps&sort=popularity] "Is the Transgender District a Force for Liberation or Gentrification?" [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/YmEyM2FiYzktYTA5OC00ODJkLWE4NjktZTY5YzA3MzlkYTAz?view=apps&sort=popularity] "Trans Black-Palestinian Solidarities" [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/NmYwYTkxYmEtYmYxNS00ZTQxLTk1OWItMzZjNDY3YWMwZDRm?view=apps&sort=popularity] And Ralowe: [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/MmIyMmJiYTgtYjMxZS00MGJjLWFjYTctMTYwOTU1YmQ0YmNl?view=apps&sort=popularity] Referenced:  "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" by Yasha Levine [https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S93C3541049]  "Cloudflare Issue Can Leak Chat App Users' Broad Location" (Joseph Cox, 404 Media) [https://www.404media.co/cloudflare-issue-can-leak-chat-app-users-broad-location] Past episodes with Jemma: "The Twitter Tax Break: How AOC West Sold Out SoMa" [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/MTUxODQwOGEtNDZhYy00YWQ2LWJlZjMtODdiZmNjYmE3OGM2?view=apps&sort=popularity] "Is the Transgender District a Force for Liberation or Gentrification?" [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/YmEyM2FiYzktYTA5OC00ODJkLWE4NjktZTY5YzA3MzlkYTAz?view=apps&sort=popularity] "Trans Black-Palestinian Solidarities" [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/NmYwYTkxYmEtYmYxNS00ZTQxLTk1OWItMzZjNDY3YWMwZDRm?view=apps&sort=popularity] And Ralowe: [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/MmIyMmJiYTgtYjMxZS00MGJjLWFjYTctMTYwOTU1YmQ0YmNl?view=apps&sort=popularity]   Support us and find links to our past episodes: patreon.com/sadfrancisco  

Two founders of the prison abolition movement—renowned thinkers and doers Craig and Ruth Wilson Gilmore—speak on the prison industrial complex's California roots. Also discussed: Why focusing on closing private prisons is too narrow a vision, and Gavin Newsom's campaign to put a kinder, gentler face on mass incarceration via the medicalization of imprisonment (eg. increasing conservatorship, forced rehab, and slapping the words "Rehabilitation Center" on San Quentin).    Support us and find links to our past episodes: patreon.com/sadfrancisco  

In this episode we speak with Andrew Krinks about his recent book White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization.  The book is really interesting and I highly recommend it, this is part 1 of a 2 part discussion we recorded on it. You can pick it up from Massive Bookshop the bookstore that uses their revenue from book sales to bail people out of jail. In this discussion Krinks goes into the religious function that the mass criminalization of Black, Brown, and dispossessed peoples serves within the racial capitalist system. Engaging with Marxist and materialist explanations as well as Christian theologians and bourgeois philosophers, we get into how police and prisons are tethered deeply with religious ideology, which also finds quarter within the so-called secular theorists who provided the political philosophical underpinnings of the capitalist system. We also get into dynamics of race making and racialist thinking by way of folks like Cedric Robinson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore to examine the connection between race making and property relations.   I'll also note that last year we hosted a video conversation with Melayna Kay Lamb and Tia Trafford about the philosophical underpinnings of police power that has some important areas of overlap with this discussion as well, but focuses a bit more on European secular philosophy and policing. Starting on Monday the 6th we'll be hosting a new live series on our YouTube channel with Mtume Gant who is a filmmaker, media critic, and professor of film, where we will be talking about Cedric Robinson's Forgeries of Memory and Meaning. So if you like this conversation I think you'll find a lot of resonance with those discussions as well as they really go into how and when race-making processes are instrumentalized in the media, using historical examples. And lastly it is a new year, and we have a ton of new content coming this year. Last year we published 115 video episodes, and 38 audio episodes. We hope to be similarly productive again this year, but in order to do that we do need your support to be able to put in the amount of time necessary to get all that work done. You can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month. We should have another study group starting up in February and that is open to all of our patrons as well. So head over to Patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism and kick in a $1 a month or more to that effort.

This episode was originally released October 6th, 2022 and we're re-releasing it today in the lead up to Covid Year Five. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Beatrice speaks with Ruth Wilson Gilmore about how to understand the concept of "the state," the capitalist state's capacity of organized abandonment, and the extraction of time. Transcript: https://www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/organized-abandonment-with-ruth-wilson-gilmore Order her book Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation here: www.versobooks.com/books/3785-abolition-geography Ruth Wilson 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. Find our book Health Communism here: www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-communism Find Jules' new book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3054-a-short-history-of-trans-misogyny As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod

What does literary realism look like in the 21st century—and what can it do? In episode 80 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at Liz's Book Bar in Brooklyn, BISR faculty Paige Sweet sat down with fellow faculty and debut novelist Joseph Earl Thomas plus special guests, writers Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Vinson Cunningham, to talk about what it means, what it takes, and what it feels like to represent social reality in contemporary fiction. In novels that test the boundaries of realism, traditionally conceived—borrowing techniques from autofiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, satire, and academic non-fiction—Thomas (God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer), Adjei-Brenyah (Chain-Gang All-Stars), and Cunningham (Great Expectations) get beneath the detailed depiction of everyday life to discuss, among other things, the world-building that happens in every act of writing; how fiction can serve as a testing ground for theoretical commitments; the carceral nature of our social institutions and their ripple effects through our intimate lives; the violence that goes on under the guise of pleasure; and how to feel and depict life as precious in even the most devastating and dehumanizing conditions. Persons and things touched upon include: the US Constitution, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Henry James, Solmaz Sharif, Saidiya Hartman, Goodreads, love, looking, “boundaries,” and beauty.  This episode was produced by Ryan Lentini.

This is the first of our two-part finale to our Season of Pleasure, a season throughout which we have sought to understand our relationship with pleasure while simultaneously witnessing and confronting genocide across our world. With poet and activist June Jordan's words, “What shall we do, we who did not die?” in our minds and spirits, we hear from Zeina and Fatma, two mothers living in London who organize with Parents for Palestine, a group of parents who organize marches, actions, and teach-ins that include young children calling for the end of the genocide and occupation in Palestine. How do we talk about genocide with our youngest children? How do our personal rest and pleasure principles sustain collective liberation and education as the practice of freedom?   Share your thoughts with us at us@dancingondesks.org, leave an audio message, or slide into our DMs on IG @dancingondesks. Transcript Available Aug. 2 INTELLECTUAL INHERITANCE -Follow Parents for Palestine on Instagram @parentsforpalestine - Ghassan Kanafani, The Land of Sad Oranges (1962) -adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism (2019) -Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (2022) -June Jordan, “Some of Us Did Not Die” (2001) -The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) -”50 Years of Combahee”, Black Women Radicals (2024) — A special thank you to Jaimee Smith, founder and executive director of Black Women Radicals, for allowing us to use an excerpt from her May 22, conversation with Combahee River Collective co-founders Barbara Smith and Demita Frazier.  -bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) -“Lineages of Deviant Caretaking”, Dancing on Desks (2024) MUSIC -Our Dancing on Desks Theme Song is composed and arranged by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes -“Arabic Oud” prod. @aldisjaminii_  -“Jamila” prod. @montymusic311 -"I'll Be Free" prod. @Rhamzandays -“Joyful & Upbeat Background Nasheed” vocal only prod. Quran Lofi -"Calming Background Nasheed" vocal only prod. Quran Lofi -“Soulful Nasheed” without music promoted by @ncnasheeds -“Small Talk” prod. yogic beats -“Relaxing & Calming Nasheed” vocals only provided by NoCopyrightNasheeds -“Haven” prod. rémdolla -“Stunt” prod. rémdolla -“Burst” prod. rémdolla-“Don't Save Me” prod. sadcg --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dancingondesks/message

A letter written for Bisan, circulated to my constituency: Peace. I write to you from the floor of my bedroom in Sierra Leone. Two days ago, Iran launched successful counter-attacks against the apartheid regime occupying the land of Palestine, currently known as Israel (which bombed their embassy in an open act of war on April 1). I can hear construction workers breaking rocks outside my window and the children of the house playing and running and the noise of Freetown traffic in an endless rise and fall. I always find it pertinent to name the moment clearly, as I am always certain tomorrow will not look like today; the things I consider commonplace will be precious and long gone. Some of my mind firmly plants itself in yesterday already: gone are the days where I can see children running and playing in the street— in any street, anywhere in the world— and I do not think of Palestinian children massacred in front of each other. I am in a permanent after. I kneel to pray and recall accounts of young Sudanese women messaging their local religious leaders, asking if they will still be permitted into paradise if they commit suicide to avoid rape from occupying soldiers. I am in a permanent after.Today is April 15, 2024. Tomorrow will not look like today.Bisan Owda, a filmmaker, journalist and storyteller, has called the world to strike on several occasions for the liberation of her homeland, Palestine. I feel about Bisan (and Hind, and Motaz, and many others) like I feel about my cousins: I pray for them before bed, asking for their continued protection, wondering for them— the same way I prayed for my family as a child, during Sierra Leone's own neocolonial war of attrition, or when Ebola came like the angel of death. This is the way I pray for Bisan, and for Palestine: with this heart beating in me that is both theirs and mine. She is my age. Bisan! You are my age! I wish we could have met at university, or at an artists workshop; I feel we would have long conversation. I understand more now about what my auntie dequi means when she says sister in the struggle— that's how she speaks of indigenous womyn, about Palestinian womyn, about womyn across the colonized world that use every tool they have to resist. Sisters in the struggle. It's never felt like an understatement— I just feel it in my body now. Sisters (n.): someone who you most ardently for. Someone who you care for such that it compels you to action. I'm certain many of you feel this for me—this long distance, cross-cultural, transcontinental kinship. Rhita, a stranger turned friend via instagram DMs, had me over for tea on a long layover in Morocco, and we spent at least two hours talking about blooming revolution and healing through art (she's a musician and she helps pave the way for musicians in Morocco, who fight for their royalties as well as their right to exist. Brilliant). Sisters in struggle: your lens on the world changes mine, and I am grateful for it. Today we are among war; I mobilize and I organize and I pray for a day where we might sit down for tea.I write to Bisan with the attention of my own constituency to shine light on her calls for a general strike, one of which occurs today, April 15 2024. These urgent asks have been met with lots of skepticism across the Western world: how do we organize something this fast? Does it really matter if I participate? How will one strike solve anything? I write to throw my pen and my circumstance behind you, Bisan. I lend you all (my constituency) my lenses as a teacher, in hopes that I make plain to you why these questions of feasibility assume there is another way out of our current standing oppressions. We have no other option for worldwide liberation that does not include a mass refusal to produce capital. We occupy a crucial moment of pivot as a species. Victory for the masses feels impossible from the complete waste they lay on anyone who dissents to their power. This feeling is manufactured. The hopelessness is manufactured. We see the insecurity of the nation-state everywhere. Never before has surveillance from the state been so totalitarian— even (especially) through the device likely read this on. I also submit: a conglomeration of ruling bodies who monitor their citizens with paranoia do so because they are very aware of their own precarity. ^this is a very good video if you want to learn more about that claim.The nation-state, as it currently exists, knows it will fall. Never before have we had this much access to one another in organizing across the world for our good. They know, and we are beginning to find out, this iteration of the human sovereign world (capitalism ruled by white, Western supremacy) is dying. Something else is on the way. The question is what? Will the world that comes after this one be for us or against us?I hope this set of arguments helps us understand our place in the human narrative, as those that still have the power to stop the machine.Theses:(1) The genocide in Palestine is not unique nor novel except in the fact that we can see it in real time. This is what colonial war has always looked like. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore described the machine perfectly. “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death." ― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing CaliforniaRuthie Wilson Gilmore is an abolitionist that has radicalized me immensely. To put the above in my terms: racism occurs or made when a group of people (Black, Indigenous, and colonized peoples) are constantly exposed to premature death (in overt ways, such as carpet bombing or slavery, or in more covert ways, like pollution, policy that denies healthcare, poverty wages, restricting access to food). This mass killing comes either with a green light from the state, or comes from the civilian populace of that oppressive nation-state.Capitalism in and of itself created the need for racial oppression. The establishment of capitalism required the open and expedited slaughter of indigenous peoples to secure their own land, and the slow-bred, constant slaughter of African peoples as a vehicle to over-harvest lands across North and South America, as well as across Europe. And they continue to expand.So then: racial capitalism is a death-machine. There is no way we can transition this world to a new order, where the masses are sovereign over our own lives, without withholding the labor that keeps the death machine going. Striking is not just in a decline of consumption, which is when we refuse to consume the products made by the machine. Radical action occurs when we decline production. That's the only way to stop the machine in their tracks. If we do not, the machine will continue slaughter for output. Simply put: you can't just stop buying. We do actually have to stop working.Nothing about the actions taking place in the Palestinian genocide are new! This is racial capitalism doing what it has always done: slaughtered the indigenous population and embedded heinous acts of violence to crush dissent, exacted a nation-state on the shallow graves, and found or imported a labor force to exploit such that they can strip the land of her resources. It has always been this horrifying. The only difference now is that we can see the horror live televised, in real time. (2) we are tasked with mobilization from our new understandings. We have a sister war now occurring in Sudan, where the superpower benefitting from violent civilian death is the United Arab Emirates (who extract the gold from Sudan in deals with the warring military groups while the people are slaughtered). This is a war of attrition, designed to break the will of the people bit by bit, massacre by massacre until they force consent to military rule. We had wars of similar depravity in the killings of Iraqis in this made up War on Terror by the United States, in the killings of Black radical counter-insurgents in the United States' second civil war in the 1960s, in the attempted decimation of Viet Nam (again, by the US, there might be a pattern). This is what I mean about wars of colonialism— this is what the annexing of Hawaii looked like. The fall of Burkina-Faso's revolutionary government. This is just to name a few. It's happened again and again, and it will keep happening until we pivot away from allowing the technology of the nation-state be sovereign over the earth. This is what the nation-state does under racial capitalism.(2a) EXTRAPOLATE. The 15th of April 2024 also marks one year of war in Sudan, which has largely been ignored by Western spectacle. I say all the time your attention is lucrative.This particular bit is addressed to my constituency: never is this more clear than watching world trials, UN emergency meetings, world mobilization on behalf of Palestine and no such thing for Sudan. I know that Palestinians do not feel good about this. We should not have to be in a state where we have to compete for attention in order to get justice. We should not require spectacle to mobilize for our countrymen! There are no journalist influencers living in Sudan to have risen out as superstars with moment to moment updates— the technological infrastructure and the political landscape simply didn't align for that. Is this why we don't care? I am also hyper aware, as a Black American and as a Sierra Leonean, of how no one blinks when Black people die. We were the original capital under racial capitalism. There still is this sentiment, especially among the Western world, that suffering and dying is just… what we do.We humans are very good at caring for what we can manage to see. I am both heartened and excited by seeing increased conversations, direct actions, fundraisers, for Palestine. The responsibility to the human family is to constantly be in the work of expanding your eyesight— which means that you too care for the people that you might not see every day in your algorithm. The human tapestry, woven together in different colors and patterns, is ultimately one long, interconnected thread. The first step of mobilization that must come from from realizing our situation under racial capitalism is fighting for everyone that suffers from it— not just the people we can see. If we fight situationally, we are set up to lose, because we save one part of the human tapestry while another part burns. Coordinated action can only come from coordinated understanding. No one is free until everyone is free. (3) Fast. Train. Study. Fight. Only in a slaveocracy would the idea of freedom fighting and resistance seem mad. —Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2003 | Black August Commentary on Prison RadioFast; train; study; fight is the slogan of Black August, a month of discipline where those active in the fight for liberation remember our political prisoners and dedicate ourserlves to the sharpening of our minds, bodies, and communities in service of liberation. Black August was first commemorated with collective action in 1971 when George Jackson was assassinated by San Quentin prison guards in an attempt to quell the revolutionary spirit he stewarded within the concentration camp of prison enslavement. The article linked above is by Mama Ayaana Mashama, an educator, healer, poet, and founding member of the Oakland Chapter of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement from the Bay. Black August also acknowledges the amount of life and world-changing victories of resistance that have occurred for Black oppressed peoples in August— everything from the Haitian Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion to the birth of Fred Hampton.I find these four actions to be the key to mobilization in the practical rather than just the rhetorical or theoretical, especially if you are newly radicalized (like me. I've only been radicalized for six years).What are the practical ways to strike?Fasting from consumption: Do not engage in mindless consumption. Do not buy anything from companies who use your dollars to oppress yourself and your neighbor— this includes groceries, gas, flights, fast food, more than that. Do not grease the machine with your dollars. I understand these things are embedded into our day to day society. Resist anyways.Additionally, fasting during the inaugural Black August included abstinence from radio and television. Last year, my first time fasting for Black August, I fasted from screens. Conscious divestment from the machine includes mind and body, not just dollars. Training (in mind and body): Train your attention. Train yourself to notice when you impulse spend. Money is a token you can trade for power. To be in the role of consumer is to constantly trade your chance for power for a momentary comfort— a good feeling, a rush, a high, a status symbol, all of which depreciate for you and all of which give tokens of power to the world-makers currently in charge. Now is the time to build up the muscles of dissent (both the literal and the metaphysical strength and will to act in favor of the people when it is time to).Study: You are only as useful to the movement as you are able to use yourself well. Study yourself and your own wants needs and habits. Know intimately your own boundaries, motivations and desires. What is your version of freedom? What are you specifically fighting for? Write it down!Study your own observable world. Ensure that you are caught up well on the events that surround you. This means local. When you walk around outside, what do you see? First: do you take walks? I would recommend them. Who are your neighbors? What do they do? What do they want? Who are your comrades and who are not? What is going in your local policy?Study the world that you cannot personally observe (and not just the news that comes through your algorithm). Learn where the stitches of the human tapestry are frayed. Note where they are being or have been burned intentionally. How do you connect to those charred places? What does regeneration and recreation look like?The backdrop of Sudan's war saw about eight months of sporadic striking that finally led to the general strike, which then led to the successful popular uprising. Sudan had a successful popular uprising in 2019 because they engaged in strikes, strikes, strikes until they created enough mass action to win. It will never feel like the right time. We create the time we need to mobilize on our best behalf. Fight:Fight the impulse to do nothing. You are in a natural state of doing nothing—by design. So better, I should say: you are kept in a default state of believing that you should do nothing. Do not do nothing. The more you do something, the easier it is to do the next thing. Fight the will to accept the world as something that happens above you. You have more power than you think you do. Fight the urge to act alone.Fight the urge to shrink from consequence. Fight the restrictions that inevitably follow dissent.Also literally engaging in combat training is helpful (for legal purposes I don't condone violence :P).(4) Revolution more about beginnings than endings. Critical mass happens with repeat action. The tide will not change because of some mass quantum leap everyone has in logic and circumstance. It will not come because your neighbor saw you pick up your pitchfork and thought, “oh yes, we need schedule Revolution today, let me grab my chainsaw.” The masses will shift because person after person after person continued to practice small, increasing modes of dissent. Dissent!— such that when powder kegs go off, when moments occur like this, or like Black Lives Matter worldwide uprisings of 2020, moments which break through the numb dissonance we all wade through every day, we have enough discipline to engage in organized action.General striking needs to be not just for Palestine, but for all the pressing problems that have a time mark on them. If Palestine is what gets you to mobilize, I commend you. Because Palestine is what got me to mobilize for general strikes. It was because of my sister Bisan, who called for them. And I thank her. Thank you! We as a human species need to recognize that what's happening in Palestine will happen again if we do not have a coalesced list of needs and demands. We need to understand the need to shape policy. We strike for sovereignty under the hands of the masses. Sovereignty under the hands of the masses!I learn so much from studying the successes and failures of the Burkina Faso revolution, lasting for four glorious years. Here's what's previously happened across colonized countries that managed to have revolutions, like clockwork. Step three (mobilization) was executed by a critical mass of people (not everyone, not even the majority, but enough people fasted, trained, studied, fought, enough people taught their neighbor/girlfriend/cousin/librarian/grocery store clerk the same thing, of the ways we can engage with struggle rather than the ways we run from it, or assume it's the job of someone else. There was enough mobilization sustained by extrapolation (the understanding that this was bigger than them) such that a popular uprising occurred, when which is a hard thing not to lose (as in, to let dissipate). A popular uprising is a difficult thing to lose! The strength in numbers is very, very real. Look at the farmer's strike in India! How could they fail?Then, this new and fragile union with a new world, this baby that needs attention, protecting, a family of support around it— gets hijacked. Colonial or neocolonial regimes take root and begin killing as many people as they can in attempts to spread epigenetic fear into the populace such that they never, ever try and imagine a world without their power ever again. This is what's currently happening in Sudan right now. This is what is happening in Palestine. This is what's happening everywhere where there are colonized people fighting against oppressive regimes.If we can manage to act together, if we can manage world-wide mobilization and world-wide solidarity, we can stand for one another at this crucial stage— we must dream past the start of something and be thinking towards the day when we are inevitably successful— how will we keep those gains? Past the fall of the empire— what are we fighting for? How do we intend to keep it?Peace to you and yours, Bisan. The sun has set in Sierra Leone. There is not a day that goes by where I do not think about you. And I thank for being plugged in, being supportive of, being for the revolutions across the world— especially your own. Thank you for being someone who belongs to your country in ways that are bold and ways that endanger you. I am so proud of you. I can't thank you enough.And peace to everyone reading, here meaning: I hope the work you engage with today emboldens you to act tomorrow. ismatu g. PS. THIS IS STILL A STRIKE THAT LIVES LARGELY ON SOCIAL MEDIA! WE NEED THAT TO CHANGE. TALK! TO! YOUR! NEIGHBORS! YOUR PARENTS! PEOPLE YOU KNOW IN PHYSICAL, DAILY LIFE! I DID NOT LEARN ABOUT THIS UNTIL PEOPLE IN MY PHYSICAL LIFE TOLD ME! USE THIS TEXT AND TALK ABOUT IT thank you have a good day. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe

In part 2, we explore the factors that drive mass incarceration. Per usual the truth is more complicated than the myth. We begin with the early history of prisons in the United States. Then we delve into the work (Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography) of geographer and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore to analyze how prisons became a fix all for social problems. We offer California as a case study to understanding prison expansion on state level. In part 3, we will explore the role counterinsurgency played in prison expansion. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation https://www.versobooks.com/products/2615-abolition-geography https://www.patreon.com/blackmyths

Speaker: Oliver Wilson-Nunn Bio: Oliver Wilson-Nunn is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD on prison and film in Argentina at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published on prison education in contemporary documentary film and on prison writing from Cuba. He is broadly interested in the relationship between law, criminal justice, and culture in Latin America, with his new project focussing on the relationship between contemporary documentary cinema and the processes of judicialisation and juridification. Prison, the cliché goes, serves as a mirror of society. Films about prison, according to a similarly clichéd logic, serve as a window onto that mirror of society. In this presentation, I move beyond this focus on reflection and refraction to propose a more materially sensitive approach to what prison-based films can tell us about state and society. I reflect on the institutional relationships between the film industry and prisons to show how the very production and exhibition of film—not just the symbolic force of the image itself—reconfigure the relationships between imprisoned people, non-imprisoned people, and the state. Focussing on Argentina, I consider examples of location shooting inside operational prisons, the use of imprisoned people as actors, and the exhibition of film inside prison from the 1930s through to the present day to trouble a tendency among academic lawyers, criminologists, and film scholars to evaluate prison films in terms of their ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ representation of real-life prisons. By shifting our focus from the truth value of the strictly defined ‘prison film’ towards the broader social relationships produced at the institutional interstice of prison and film, we can better understand prison, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, not as a ‘building “over there” but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere’ (2007, 242). The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. For more about the CSLG, see: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group The CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group

Speaker: Oliver Wilson-Nunn Bio: Oliver Wilson-Nunn is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD on prison and film in Argentina at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published on prison education in contemporary documentary film and on prison writing from Cuba. He is broadly interested in the relationship between law, criminal justice, and culture in Latin America, with his new project focussing on the relationship between contemporary documentary cinema and the processes of judicialisation and juridification. Prison, the cliché goes, serves as a mirror of society. Films about prison, according to a similarly clichéd logic, serve as a window onto that mirror of society. In this presentation, I move beyond this focus on reflection and refraction to propose a more materially sensitive approach to what prison-based films can tell us about state and society. I reflect on the institutional relationships between the film industry and prisons to show how the very production and exhibition of film—not just the symbolic force of the image itself—reconfigure the relationships between imprisoned people, non-imprisoned people, and the state. Focussing on Argentina, I consider examples of location shooting inside operational prisons, the use of imprisoned people as actors, and the exhibition of film inside prison from the 1930s through to the present day to trouble a tendency among academic lawyers, criminologists, and film scholars to evaluate prison films in terms of their ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ representation of real-life prisons. By shifting our focus from the truth value of the strictly defined ‘prison film’ towards the broader social relationships produced at the institutional interstice of prison and film, we can better understand prison, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, not as a ‘building “over there” but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere’ (2007, 242). The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. For more about the CSLG, see: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group The CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.

Bio: Oliver Wilson-Nunn is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD on prison and film in Argentina at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published on prison education in contemporary documentary film and on prison writing from Cuba. He is broadly interested in the relationship between law, criminal justice, and culture in Latin America, with his new project focussing on the relationship between contemporary documentary cinema and the processes of judicialisation and juridification.Prison, the cliché goes, serves as a mirror of society. Films about prison, according to a similarly clichéd logic, serve as a window onto that mirror of society. In this presentation, I move beyond this focus on reflection and refraction to propose a more materially sensitive approach to what prison-based films can tell us about state and society. I reflect on the institutional relationships between the film industry and prisons to show how the very production and exhibition of film—not just the symbolic force of the image itself—reconfigure the relationships between imprisoned people, non-imprisoned people, and the state. Focussing on Argentina, I consider examples of location shooting inside operational prisons, the use of imprisoned people as actors, and the exhibition of film inside prison from the 1930s through to the present day to trouble a tendency among academic lawyers, criminologists, and film scholars to evaluate prison films in terms of their ‘accurate' or ‘inaccurate' representation of real-life prisons. By shifting our focus from the truth value of the strictly defined ‘prison film' towards the broader social relationships produced at the institutional interstice of prison and film, we can better understand prison, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, not as a ‘building “over there” but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere' (2007, 242).The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. For more about the CSLG, see:https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-groupThe CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work:https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group

This roundtable will celebrate the much-anticipated publication of Orisanmi Burton's first book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Order a copy of "Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt" from Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9780520396326 Speakers Jared A. Ball is a Professor of Communication and Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. and author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (Palgrave, 2020). Ball is also host of the podcast “iMiXWHATiLiKE!”, co-founder of Black Power Media which can be found at BlackPowerMedia.org, and his decades of journalism, media, writing, and political work can be found at imixwhatilike.org. Ball has also been named as one of 2022's Marguerite Casey Foundation's Freedom Scholars. Dhoruba Bin Wahad was a leading member of the New York Black Panther Party, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21. Arrested June 1971, he was framed as part of the illegal FBI Counter Intelligence program (COINTELPRO) and subjected to unfair treatment and torture during his nineteen years in prison. During Dhoruba's incarceration, litigation on his behalf produced over three hundred thousand pages of COINTELPRO documentation, and upon release in 1990 he was able to bring a successful lawsuit against the New York Department of Corrections for all their wrongdoings and criminal activities. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press). Change Everything is forthcoming from Haymarket. She and Paul Gilroy co-edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke University Press). Sarah Haley works in the areas of U.S. gender history, carceral history, Black feminist and queer theory, prison abolition, and feminist historical methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity and is working on a book titled Carceral Interior: A Black Feminist Study of American Punishment, 1966-2016. She is an associate professor of gender studies and history at Columbia University and organizes with Scholars for Social Justice. Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. His books include, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class; Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Orisanmi Burton is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University. His research employs innovative ethnographic and archival methods to examine historical collisions between Black radical organizations and state repression in the United States. Dr. Burton's work has been published in North American Dialogue, The Black Scholar, American Anthropologist, among other outlets and has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and The Margarite Casey Foundation, which selected him as a 2021 Freedom Scholar. Dr. Burton's first book, entitled Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt was published by the University of California Press on October 31 2023. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/yhsQ3LHsAYU Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for a conversation between Luke Messac and Kenyon Farrow on medical debt and racial justice. This event took place on November 16, 2023. Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “Debt robs. But debt also disciplines…Today, while the imperial imperatives might be different, the role of debt is the same—to compel consent through the coercion of debt.” One of the major sources of debt is medical costs. In the United States, an estimated 100 million people owe medical debt in some form. Medical debt appears on the credit reports of 43 million Americans, and medical debt collection brought in $1.5 billion in revenue for America's 7,000 debt collection agencies. Medical debt can be debilitating, resulting in denial of care, lawsuits, seizures of bank accounts, foreclosures, property liens, wage garnishments, and arrests. While medical debt impacts people across race, gender, and class, African Americans and people with low incomes have far more medical debt than other social groups. As emergency physician and historian Luke Messac notes in his new book Your Moneyor Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine, “A number of broader social forces have contributed to this transformation of medical debt. These include structural racism, economic inequality, the late-twentieth-century rise of neoliberal ideology, early twenty-first century efforts to organize health care workers, social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and shifts in health financing and ownership…third-party financing, health insurance reimbursement, social insurance, financialization, and privatization.” This event brings together Messac with Kenyon Farrow, a public health policy and communications expert, to examine how racism and resistance to a strong social welfare state have shaped changes in healthcare and medical debt, and in the process, harm society overall. They will also explore current policy and political efforts around healthcare access and debt erasure, and how confronting medical debt is a racial justice issue. Speakers Kenyon Farrow is a writer, editor, and strategist, whose work has long focused on public health and infectious disease with a focus on racial, gender and economic justice. He is the Vice President of Policy with Point Source Youth, a national organization working to end youth homelessness. He is the former Managing Director of Advocacy and Organizing with PrEP4All, and also served as senior editor of TheBody.com & TheBodyPro.com and U.S. & Global Health Policy Director with Treatment Action Group (TAG). Luke Messac is an emergency physician and a historian. He is an attending physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an Instructor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He received his BA from Harvard University, his MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed residency training in emergency medicine at Brown/Rhode Island Hospital. His research focuses on the history and political economy of health care, as well as on diagnostics for emergency care in resource-limited settings. His work has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine and online outlets including Jacobin and Current Affairs. His first book, No More to Spend, is a history of medical neglect and exploitation in Malawi. His latest book, Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine, will be published by Oxford University Press, in November 2023. It tells the story of how the collection of medical debt has become so aggressive, and the impact this is having on Americans' lives. Twitter: @LukeMessac Get a copy of Dr. Messac's new book Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/978019767... Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/StTxB7D-UEQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Over the course of the past year, The Work and Us has been conducting surveys of incarcerated people to find out what they're thinking about prison labor, extraction, and freedom. In this conversation scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore and currently incarcerated organizer Stevie Wilson discuss some of the results, and what they mean for the struggle. This event took place on October 12, 2023. Speakers Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press) and the forthcoming book Change Everything (Haymarket) . Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021). Stephen Wilson is a currently incarcerated, Black, queer writer, activist and student. He is a founding member of Dreaming Freedom Practicing Abolition, a network of self-organized prisoner study groups building abolitionist community behind and across prison walls. Follow him on Twitter @AlwaysStevie. Minali Aggarwal is a graduate student worker, organizer, and artist. Her research focuses on race and politics, specifically the ways race is constructed and reified through cultural and political processes and institutions. She is a co-organizer of The Work and Us, an abolitionist participatory research project aimed at understanding and documenting the perspectives of imprisoned people on labor, prison, and the struggle for freedom. Special thanks to the Marguerite Casey Foundation for helping sponsor this talk. This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Study & Struggle. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/_W2nyvQQ52U Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for a virtual launch event celebrating the release of Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. This event took place on May 16, 2023. What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster. Get a copy of Let This Radicalize You for 30% off here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/... Speakers include Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba, Tony Alvarado Rivera , Ejeris Dixon, Aly Wane and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. Kelly Hayes is the host of Truthout's podcast “Movement Memos” and a contributing writer at Truthout. Kelly's written work can also be found in Teen Vogue, Bustle, Yes! Magazine, Pacific Standard, NBC Think, her blog Transformative Spaces, The Appeal, the anthology The Solidarity Struggle: How People of Color Succeed and Fail At Showing Up For Each Other In the Fight For Freedom and Truthout's anthology on movements against state violence, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Kelly is also a direct action trainer and a co-founder of the direct action collective Lifted Voices. Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSTMC0QhZbg Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A quick note: I'm taking a brief break and returning the first week of November. ---------------------------In this episode, you and I are going to unpack the concept of “organized abandonment” together. A term that's enlivened by professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a prison abolitionist and scholar. Then, we'll explore one antidote to abandonment and codependence which is interdependence. We'll close out the episode with four invitations for you to play with when you practice interdependence in your daily parenting. So that you can strengthen your social justice muscles of interdependence- not codependence- when you go out to your community and advocate for change.---------------------------Get full show notes and more information at: comebacktocare.com/podcastFor more BTS of this podcast, follow @comebacktocare on Instagram!Sign up for our weekly Care Collective Newsletter for information and inspiration on topics like decolonized parenting, embodied, body-based centering practices for you and your children, intergenerational family healing, and more.I invite you to join me in a virtual gathering once a month for you to digest the information in the podcast with other Social Justice Curious listeners. We'll put awareness into action together with group accountability at www.patreon.com/comebacktocareIf you enjoy the Come Back to Care podcast, we could use your support! Please consider leaving a 5-star rating and review, and share with someone who needs to hear this!The Come Back to Care podcast explores how social justice, child development science, parenting, and family systems intersect—hosted by Nat Vikitsreth, a decolonized, licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatics, and social justice practitioner, and founder of Come Back to Care.

Content Notice: This episode contains discussions of sexual violence & rape This is the conclusion of our discussion on Orisanmi Burton's forthcoming book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. This discussion was recorded on the same day as the previously released episode, so you may catch references back to that conversation or to others we've had with Burton over the last couple of years. We'll link those in the show notes. Here we largely move into discussion of Attica itself, but this is not the blow by blow rendition that you have likely heard elsewhere. We talk about Attica through George Jackson's idea of the Black Commune, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography, we talk about how in the words of the Institute of the Black World “the men of Attica were different than their captors,” and we talk about the demand that prisoners be repatriated to a non-imperialist country. We also talk about Burton's findings on the repression faced by the prisoners after the slaughter of 39 men 52 years ago today. While we don't talk in graphic detail about all of that repression, a trigger warning is still necessary as we talk about sexual violence in that discussion.  We close by talking about Burton's work on the Black Liberation Army and how examining the prison as a site of struggle helped him develop a more capacious view of the BLA than what we find in most representations of who they were and what animated their activities. We're very grateful for the time that Orisanmi Burton has spent with us over the course of this interview and our other conversations over the past couple of years. We hope folks get as much out of these conversations as we do, and we strongly recommend that people pre-order Tip of the Spear if they haven't already. This is our 4th episode for the month of September. If you appreciate the work that we do, the best way to keep it coming is to join the amazing folks who make this show possible at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism by giving as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year.  Links: pre-order Tip of the Spear Part 1 of this discussion Prior episodes with Orisanmi Burton

In the sixth and final episode of Locating Legacies, series host Gracie Mae Bradley speaks to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Often dismissed or set aside as a US-based movement, Gracie and Ruth sit down together to explore how we can think about the histories, legacies and politics of abolition in the British context and beyond. They map how local instances of political organising express themselves globally, as well as interrogating how past struggles express themselves in the present. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences and American Studies at the City University of New York. She is the co-founder of many grassroots organisations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She is also the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, and Abolition Geography. About the Series: Locating Legacies is a fortnightly podcast created by the Stuart Hall Foundation, co-produced by Pluto Press and funded by Arts Council England. The series is dedicated to tracing the reverberations of history to contextualise present-day politics, deepen our understanding of some of the crucial issues of our time, and to draw connections between past struggles and our daily lives. Get 40% off books in our ‘Locating Legacies' reading list: plutobooks.com/locatinglegacies

We are excited to announce the Locating Legacies series - a fortnightly podcast created by the Stuart Hall Foundation and co-produced by Pluto Press. The series is dedicated to tracing the reverberations of history to contextualise present-day politics, deepen our understanding of some of the crucial issues of our time, and to draw connections between past struggles and our daily lives. Hosted by writer and organiser, Gracie Mae Bradley, the series explores some of the reoccurring themes in Stuart Hall's thinking. Gracie, along with some of the most critical voices of our time, examine: the current state of right-wing politics, contemporary decolonial politics, the co-option of ‘identity politics', how the Cold War has shaped politics today, the relationship between queer radicalism and class struggle, and the politics of abolition in the UK context.   In this trailer for the series, Chris Browne sits down with Gracie Mae Bradley and Orsod Malik, the Stuart Hall Foundation's Programme Curator, to discuss how this project came to be and what listeners can expect from the episodes to come. Over the next 12 weeks, we are proud to be hosting contributions from Kojo Koram, Françoise Vèrges, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Vijay Prashad, Sita Balani and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Find out more about the Stuart Hall Foundation at: stuarthallfoundation.org This project was made possible through funding from Arts Council England.

To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. She's a mentor and teacher to a new generation of social activism and creativity. She's a visionary of “abolition,” and that has become a fraught and polarizing word in our fraught and polarized public discourse. But when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of “abolition,” she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world, starting now, in which prisons and policing as we do them now become unnecessary, unthinkable. In this sense, abolition is not primarily a matter of what to get rid of, but what to build and to orient around — being present, for example, to human vulnerability and to the ingredients that make for deep human flourishing. Meeting Ruth Wilson Gilmore and drawing her out in this way is an exercise in muscular hope — and in understanding the passion of a new generation that is shaping what we will collectively become.Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a 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 grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her paternal grandfather was a janitor at Yale who helped organize the first blue-collar union at that university. And as a tool and die maker for the firearm manufacturer Winchester, her father played a central role in organizing the machinists at that company in the mid-1950s. She has co-founded several organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She has authored and co-edited several books, including Golden Gulag, Abolition Geography, and the forthcoming Change Everything. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Please share On Being with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues, and perfect strangers in the checkout line at the grocery store. And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.

In Part Two of their series on spectacular death, Ellie and Carrie speak with sisters Jessica and Leila Murphy, who lost their father Brian in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  He was 41 years old, Jessica 5 and Leila almost 4. Since that terrible day, Jessica and Leila have had to grow up not only without a father but also with the complexities that come with losing him in the attacks.   From their inability to grieve privately to the invocation of their father's name to justify two wars and countless acts of violence, Jessica and Leila have struggled with the meaning and responsibilities of victimhood. Now 26 and 25, they are part of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which advocates nonviolent options in pursuit of justice, including closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.We discuss Leila's 2021 piece in The Nation “I Lost My Father on 9/11, but I Never Wanted to Be a ‘Victim,'” Jessica's 2019 essay in The Indy, “Among the Iguanas: On life and the pursuit of death in Guantánamo Bay,” and a 2003 Brown Alumni Magazine profile on their mother Judy Bram Murphy's widowhood.  The sisters also offer thoughtful insight into successes and shortcomings of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum as a force of public instruction.Other works cited are “The Aesthetics of Absence” by Marita Sturken, Ambiguous Loss by Pauline Boss, The Land of Open Graves by Jason De León, Julia Rodriguez's 2017 op-ed for the New York Times “Guantanamo Is Delaying Justice for 9/11 Families,” Rachel Kushner's 2019 feature on Ruth Wilson Gilmore and prison abolition for the New York Times, The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Films mentioned are World Trade Center (2006), United 93 (2006), The Mauritanian (2021), and The Report (2019).

Alberto Toscano is Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Term Research Associate Professor at the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), Una visión compleja. Hacía una estética de la economía (Meier Ramirez, 2021), La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021), and the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation (with Brenna Bhandar, Verso, 2022). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is also the translator of numerous books and essays by Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, Furio Jesi and others. Subscribe to our newsletter

¡Mike Davis, presente! Three longtime allies of Mike Davis (1946–2022) will discuss the life and legacy of the author, geologist, historian, and organizer—and the inspiration we take from his life and work for the struggles ahead. Speakers: Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an activist and Marxist-Feminist in the Black Power and abolitionist movements since the late 1960s. In the 1980s, her book Women, Race and Class helped to establish the concept of intersectionality. She also helped to develop the concept of prison abolition, especially in her books Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire. Recently, Dr. Davis has written about the international movement in solidarity with Palestine in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her work helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for the #DefundthePolice movement. Davis's memoir was recently published in a new edition by Haymarket Books. Geri Silva, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, has spent the past 40 years in all forms of struggle for human, political, and economic rights. Her activity covers the span from immigration rights to welfare rights to the right to decent housing for all in need. For the past 20-plus years she has fought against the rampant and ongoing abuses in the courts and at the hands of the police. Silva is a founding member of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) in 1992, Families to Amend California's Three Strikes (FACTS) in 1996, Fair Chance Project (FCP) in 2009, California Families Against Solitary Confinement (CFASC) in 2011, and FUEL—Families United to End LWOP (Life Without Parole) in 2017. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent publications include “Beyond Bratton” (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds., Verso); “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds., Verso); a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson's Birmingham classic America's Johannesburg (U Georgia Press); a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (HLT Quan, ed., Pluto); Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso), and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). Forthcoming projects include Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket). Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. In April 2019 novelist Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in The New York Times Magazine. Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021). Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/u5xtmUWdWbc Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Creative Director and Co-Director of Magic Xiaowei Wang returns for our season finale!We talk union solidarity, life in a time of crisis, and our upcoming class on tarot and writing with The Shipman Agency. Dorothy breaks out the Modus Operandi Deck for a confessional tell-all with the three hosts that touches on what we can't let go of, the value of money, the role models and safety we wish we had when we were younger, and why we have a grudge on Timothée Chalamet.Five and Nine Season 2 is about transitions. As falls sets in in the northern hemisphere and spring in the south, Five and Nine looks at change in all its forms — leaving jobs, changing industries, starting new paths, and the wisdom that tarot and magic have to offer in a world that seems to be ever in flux.This is the Season 2 Finale. Paid subscribers will begin to receive our paid programming shortly. Our podcast returns in winter 2023!From Our Hosts* Robin DG Kelley* Tech Workers Coalition* Black Workers Alliance* Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Naomi Murakawa* Modus Operandi Deck* Ethical Rainmaker Podcast* Five Mindfulness TrainingsPrevious Five and Nine Episodes Mentioned* 2.02. Magic in the Everyday, with Helen Shewolfe Tseng* 1.07. Burnout, Biases and Body Mindfulness, with Kai StowersTarot Cards Discussed* Hanged One (Hanged Man)* Page of CupsMusic* Episode and Outro: Ain't we got fun, composed by Richard A. Whiting and performed by the Benson Orchestra of Chicago, 1921.Enjoying the show? You can support us in three ways:* Subscribe now for just $6 per month and get access to our paid programming. This podcast is always free, but paid subscribers will get access to special content, including how-to's, journaling exercises, tarot suggestions and more. Your generous support also helps cover our costs, which include honoraria for our guest speakers, software subscriptions and our time. With enough support, we'll also be able to bring back written transcripts for the show.* Recommend this show to others. Do you know anyone who you think might enjoy this podcast? Send them a link. Ask them to tune in. You can send them snippets of our shows on Instagram, at @fiveandnine_podcast.* Leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Reviews help bring visibility and credibility to indie podcasts like ours and help people know what to expect when tuning in.Five and Nine is a podcast and newsletter at the crossroads of magic, work and economic justice. We publish “moonthly” — every new moon

Diving into the modern abolitionist movement, we spend this hour with abolitionist activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, discussing her latest collection of writing called Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation. We get into some of the history of the modern abolitionist movement, and explore what it could mean to rely on community rather than the prison industrial complex to feel safe. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer and professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, and the director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York. She's also the co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Buy the book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3785-abolition-geography —- Subscribe to this podcast: https://plinkhq.com/i/1637968343?to=page Get in touch: lawanddisorder@kpfa.org Follow us on socials @LawAndDis: https://twitter.com/LawAndDis; https://www.instagram.com/lawanddis/ The post Abolition Geography w/ Ruth Wilson Gilmore appeared first on KPFA.

Beatrice speaks with Ruth Wilson Gilmore about how to understand the concept of "the state," the capitalist state's capacity of organized abandonment, and the extraction of time. Order her book Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3785-abolition-geography Ruth Wilson 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. Pre-order HEALTH COMMUNISM here: bit.ly/3Af2YaJ As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Death Panel merch here (patrons get a discount code): www.deathpanel.net/merch join our Discord here: discord.com/invite/3KjKbB2

In conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika Ruth Wilson Gilmore is largely credited with creating carceral geography, the study of how the interplay between space, institutions, and political economies shape modern incarceration. The author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and several often-anthologized essays, she is the co-founder of several social justice organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance. She is a 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. Gilmore's many honors include the Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship from the American Studies Association and the Association of American Geographers' Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research. A collection of Gilmore's work from the last three decades, Abolition Geography offers scholars, activists, and all interested people a new way of reacting to the incarceration crisis. (recorded 9/22/2022)

Grace speaks to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, prison abolitionist, scholar, and professor of geography at the City University of New York. She is the author of several books, including Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and, most recently, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation. They discuss who is profiting from the criminal justice system, how existing institutions within the system serve to support and reinforce capitalist social relations, and what a socialist conception of justice looks like.A World to Win is a podcast from Grace Blakeley and Tribune bringing you a weekly dose of socialist news, theory, and action with guests from around the world. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and to the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following talk was delivered by Dr. Kim Wilson at the DecARcerate Arkansas 2022 conference in Little Rock. The conference was an opportunity for abolitionist and other organizers to come together to listen as speakers from around the state and the country talked about their work. Kim interviewed organizers about their experience with boundary setting in movement spaces, and what they said illuminates a deeper problem that we seldom hear addressed, but that is nonetheless, important for liberation movements. As the mother of two sons currently sentenced to LWOP; as an organizer that provides education, direct support, and mobilizes resources for people in and out of prison; and as a Black disabled woman that is struggling with multiple health issues, she is emotionally, physically, and financially exhausted. The talk was a collaborative effort that included the voices of women and femmes in the movement who felt that these things need to be said, and Kim had the opportunity to use her platform to say them. We invite you to listen and to act upon what she shares, and to use this talk as an entry point to engage people in your community and movement spaces about what all of the women and femmes said. You can support Kim directly via Venmo (@Kim-Wilson-16) and CashApp ($BeyondPrisons) Transcript To borrow a phrase from the inimitable Fannie Lou Hamer, “I've been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I want a change.” Y'all I'm tired. I'm tired of arguing, of fighting, of feeling like we're constantly having to remind people of our humanity. I'm tired of the suffering, of the trauma, and of watching people die. I'm tired of oppressive systems, of prisons, of poverty, homelessness, and hyper-individualism. I'm tired of watching my friends suffer. I'm tired of people treating incarcerated people as if they don't matter. I'm tired of ableism. I'm tired of living in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchal society. I'm tired!!!! I'm tired of crisis management. I'm tired of sacrificing my physical and emotional well-being. I'm tired of people's discomfort being the standard by which we decide on really important things. I'm tired of cynicism. I'm tired of the thinking that says that women, and particularly Black Women, femmes and other folks should be willing to do this work without question or limits. I'm tired of fighting for people that expect me to have their backs, when I know that they don't have mine. Not really, really! I'm tired of toxic masculinity. I'm tired of men acting like they're doing women a favor when they are asked to do the absolute least necessary for us to survive. I'm tired of having to fear violence, anger, and passive aggression from men in general, but especially from men in movement spaces. I'm tired of the unspoken expectations that are placed on women in movement spaces that shift the burden onto women and femmes to do most of the work of organizing. While we're ALL suffering under these oppressive systems, women, femmes, trans, non-binary, gender non-confirming folks, and disabled people are disproportionately affected by these systems and we are still showing up and doing all of the things. This is not sustainable! To be clear, this is NOT a call out or a call in. This is our reality. I'm not the only one that's tired. Many of us are exhausted, physically, emotionally, mentally, and financially. I am bringing this forward so that we can set about the task of collectively changing things. There is no healing in isolation. Part of the liberatory project is to heal our collective trauma, and HOW we work together is part of that work. This work has to happen alongside the tearing down and building up. It's not work that can be deferred until some magical date in the future when we have the time, OR conditions are perfect. When folks make that argument recognize that they are gaslighting and attempting to derail the conversation to escape accountability. Audre Lorde wrote, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The conditions in which we organize are not separate issue buckets, but the literal material conditions through which we have to survive and help others. Women, femmes, trans, non-binary, gender non conforming and disabled people are treated as disposable. We live in a society that doesn't care about us, but how are we demonstrating that we care for each other? We are still in the middle of a global pandemic that has killed 6.52 MILLION people worldwide, and 11,961 people in Arkansas alone, yet there are still people arguing that wearing a piece of cloth on their face infringes on their freedom. Imani Barbarin, a Black disabled woman, and one of the baddest communications strategists and disability rights advocates around, has rightly called Covid “a mass disabling event.” This refers to the fact that many able bodied folks will find themselves disabled as a result of catching Covid. These newly disabled folks are now finding that they have to fight for things that we shouldn't have to fight for. Now that They're affected they're outraged and want change. Here's my thing, You don't have to learn the things the hard way. You could just trust what people are saying about their experience. Full stop. We've been saying for a long time that ableism is NOT the flex that people think it is. Let's consider how these things intersect, Black disabled women experience higher rates of houselessness and incarceration. There hasn't been a federal minimum wage increase since 2009, and raising the federal minimum wage would have a positive impact on Women's lives. We live in a country with no real social safety net, where people that work full time in minimum wage jobs cannot afford a two bedroom apartment in any state in the country. An honest accounting of the houseless problem in this country has to include policies that criminalize houselessness. For example, we know that Black people are disproportionately impacted by homelessness and incarceration. A 2021 study by the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness found that “Most people with a history of incarceration and homelessness were homeless before going to prison. Suggesting that the criminalization of homelessness is a driver of incarceration.” (Prison Policy.Org) But the problem doesn't end there, we also know that domestic violence is the leading cause of houselessness for women. We also know that trans people and gender non-conforming people experience houselessness at higher rates than their cis gender peers, and seventy percent of trans people using shelters report discrimination or violence by shelter staff. Prison abolition isn't just about working on prison issues. We need to consider what other institutions and systems are implicated. The many tentacles of the PIC means that our daily lives are lived being aware of its looming presence and power to destroy us. The PIC derives its power in part, from being simultaneously hyper-visible AND obscure because it is embedded into so many things. Many of us recognize the hyper-visible expressions of the carceral state in their physical form such as prison buildings, police, etc., and in their more abstracted forms such as policies and practices. But there's a cognitive dissonance that makes it difficult for some people to see that transphobia, ableism, sexism, toxic masculinity, and patriarchy are part and parcel of the same dehumanizing structure that includes prisons and policing. All of these things are rooted in white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, which is the logic that underpins the carceral state. To get rid of prisons, to get rid of ALL systems of oppression, the liberatory project has to address these problems. That is our work. But the work is NOT evenly distributed. The more women, femmes, trans, and other people that I talk with the more I hear that many of us are tired of doing this work. We do this work because if we don't we suffer. There are so many ways that we suffer that I won't even try to list them. Suffice it to say that we suffer when we take on too much, when we do or are expected to do more than any one person reasonably can or should. We suffer and shorten our lives because we're unable to rest without repercussions. Prentis Hemphill wrote, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” “Boundaries give us the space to do the work of loving ourselves. They might be, actually, the first and fundamental expression of self-love.” I interviewed a handful of women organizers from around the country and here's what they said in response to being asked to reflect on setting boundaries as women in movement spaces. JULIE Boundaries are really important especially in organizing-and especially in a kind of organizing that problematically glorifies when women ‘give their all' to the movement, despite how they are affected or how it affects their relationships with their loved ones. We have a tendency in social justice movements to romanticize the ‘woman' organizer. This mythic creature is fearless, boundless in energy, absolute in her devotion to the movement. She educates, she nurtures, she resources, she leads from the shadows. She never suffers, not from indecision or fatigue or loneliness or oppression. Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Safiya Bukhari, Kathy Boudin. Women we asked everything of, took all we could from, and what did we leave them with? What if instead of glorifying their sacrifices we shared the work? And not just the sexy parts of organizing, but the monotony too. MICHELLE I would just say two things: One is that I often find that women in organizing spaces are just quicker / more likely to take on the labor of figuring out logistics, even when doing so is burdensome or requires navigating complex systems, whereas men will give up or just not even try to figure something out if it isn't immediately clear. Often, I find that men need to be explicitly asked to do smaller logistical tasks, and are sometimes resistant to doing them, whereas women take on that work automatically. Often, when there are unsexy tasks like phone banking, it is women who show up much more so than men. ANGIE While men in the movement are often quick to make big statements and big decisions about how things SHOULD be done, it's women and trans people and nonbinary folks who are OVERWHELMINGLY doing the actual work of keeping people alive. And that's what the most fundamental work is in this movement: keeping people alive. It's the mutual aid work, the financial support (including commissary, phones, housing support for people getting out), the emotional support, the caregiving for kids who've been left behind... It's the person bringing over groceries when someone's confined to their home on electronic monitoring. It's the person coming to visit week after week so someone inside doesn't lose hope, doesn't lose their will to live. On a personal level — when my niece was incarcerated, I was so frustrated by the fact that her boyfriends, even her fiancé, would not do ANY of this work/support. Instead they complained that she wasn't out here to be there for THEM. What does this mean for boundary-setting? For me, it has often meant that setting boundaries is way harder than it should be because some people (i.e. most men) are not pulling any weight, when it comes to this low-profile, behind-the-scenes, hard every day work of supporting our loved ones' survival. So as we try (sometimes in vain) to help keep people alive, we end up letting our boundaries slip again and again... JOYA In every movement formation that I've been in, especially the abolitionist ones that have a spectrum of gender represented, it's 99 percent the femmes that start the google.doc, even that kind of infrastructural work is relegated to invisible care work. I don't want to call it soft violence, because I don't think it's soft. It's part of the quiet, but violent extraction that happens when people don't recognize people's labor and people's gendered labor. Regardless of what their gender is. In terms of boundaries, we tend to think about boundaries as I'm not going to work on a Saturday or I'm not going to meet after ten o'clock at night, but people don't think of a boundary as demanding that we all take turns doing the same amount of work. But I also feel like we are living in a time where there aren't a lot of other ways that people are allowed to take up space in movement work without violating those boundaries or without being affirmed for doing that work. By affirmed I don't mean respected–it's like thank you sis for doing this or like the snacks were provided by these people, how nice. That's not respected as much as the people who are chaining themselves to the prison. It's not lost on me either that the venn diagram of movement space is often run by a certain masculanized organizer model, and for as much as people pretend they're not for the Alinsky Model, they sure are. The venn diagram between certain organizing styles and the way that they devalue the google doc making, snacks bringing and setting up chairs work, and the type of abuser that emerges in movement spaces, and the kind of permission that's given to a lot of –especially masculine rock star organizers who are also systematically abusive. The venn diagram shows no respect for labor and boundaries and no respect for sharing work. Why is it that we think that so many of the letter writing spaces and the letter writing organizations and the relationship building organizations are run by femmes. Even when we're doing coalitional relational work in abolition, relationship building, the nurturing, the crisis intervention work, the people who are fielding calls from jail, the people who are making sure that the commissary goes through are often feminized people. And the people who get to hold the megaphone are not often those people. And the people who are there to be on the front line of receiving the frustration of incarcerated people are the same people who are there to write the letters, to receive the phone calls, and who are there to make sure the commissary goes through on time are often the same people who bear the brunt of somebody's frustration, who are there to pick up the pieces of the trauma that prison causes other people, the people who have to organize and mobilize and like themselves get traumatized by traumatized people because that emotional lash out is often reserved for the people on the front lines which are femmes and women, and those are the same people who show up with the snacks. ANNE Ok. So. Boundary setting. I think one of my biggest struggles in organizing spaces is the difference between people's expressed values of self-determination, consent, muddling through, and care for one another, ON THE ONE HAND, and the way that people's struggle practices do not align with these values, ON THE OTHER. The work of having to point this out and make space for the inevitable conflicts it brings is exhausting. And it is not seen as work—it is seen as complaining, being trouble, or not getting it. There is no boundary that can be set ahead of time that will prevent the need for people to work through conflict together. So we need many of us to skill up and grow our capacities for conflict. But the work is often put on those seen as the ones who are supposed to nurture and take care of the feelings. I'll leave you with a few suggestions for how to proceed. This is NOT an exhaustive list, but a place to start. AND please note that there is no one size fits all for how to address these problems, but we need to address them. One of the people that I interviewed suggested that, Men need to talk to their friends. That is, men have to get better at checking other men on their problematic behavior. Second, Political Education: engage in a political education process where you study and discuss materials that address these issues. Read the work of women, femmes, trans, disabled people, etc. Third, Do the work: actually begin doing the work. Abolition work is not constrained as a future project. It's how we move today. It's how we care for each other TODAY. It's how we act in the world, and the communities and power we build TODAY!!! It's a blueprint for today as much as it is a future society. Finally, focus on relationship building beyond performative and surface level solidarity. Ruth Wilson Gilmore said that abolition is presence. I agree!!! Engage in letter writing with incarcerated people. Visit people if you are able to gain access to prisons, go see folks inside on a regular basis. I'm in prison visiting rooms all the time and women are the majority of visitors. I don't have a pithy closing to offer you because I was too exhausted to write one. I'll just say this, We are all working with limited capacity and resources, and those of us that are showing up in all the ways and doing all the things even when our bodies are signaling that they need a break are giving more than there fair share. We don't want to be mythologized for our sacrifices; instead we not only want, but need change. How we work together matters just as much as the work itself. Thank you!

This week, Grace speaks to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, prison abolitionist, scholar, and professor of geography at the City University of New York. She is the author of several books, including Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and, most recently, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation. They discuss who is profiting from the criminal justice system, how existing institutions within the system serve to support and reinforce capitalist social relations, and what a socialist conception of justice looks like.You can support our work on the show by becoming a patron. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and to the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible.

Featuring Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on racial capitalism, intergenerational organizing, internationalism, and a whole lot more. Dan's live Dig interview from the Socialism 2022 conference in Chicago.Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDigCheck out our archives and weekly newsletter at thedigradio.comCheck out Breaking the Impasse by Kim Moody haymarketbooks.org/books/1873-breaking-the-impasse Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Featuring Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on racial capitalism, intergenerational organizing, internationalism, and a whole lot more. Dan's live Dig interview from the Socialism 2022 conference in Chicago. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our archives and weekly newsletter at thedigradio.com Check out Breaking the Impasse by Kim Moody haymarketbooks.org/books/1873-breaking-the-impasse

Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore pioneered the study of how mass incarceration has shaped the American landscape. In this wide-ranging interview with IDEAS, Gilmore talks about her latest book, Abolition Geography, in which she brings together more than three decades of essays and lectures about how America — and Americans — have come to be.

In this episode we are honored to welcome Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore to the podcast. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, she is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. In this episode, we ask questions primarily from Wilson Gilmore's latest book Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation. Along the way we talk about consciousness, conjunctural analysis, the horizon of abolition, and various modes of organizing against premature death. We also ask a couple of questions facing abolitionists today, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers some insights into the various forms of struggle in which she finds hope. We strongly encourage folks to pick up Abolition Geography which is packed full of insights from Ruth Wilson Gilmore's past 30 years of thinking and writing about abolitionist struggle, much of which she participated in directly.  Our music as always is provided by Televangel. We want to give a huge thank you to all of our patrons for supporting the show. Our work here is only possible because of your support. We don't sell ads, we don't put our episodes behind a paywall and we don't charge guests fees. We don't do any of those things because we don't want any corporate interests influencing our content, and we want all of our episodes to be freely available to anyone who wants to listen. So if you aren't already a patron, and you enjoy this conversation please become a patron of the show. You can do so for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism.

Joseph Osmundson joins Eric Newman to discuss VIROLOGY, his new collection of essays published in June by Norton. Joe is a professor of microbiology at NYU, critic, essayist, and co-host of the Food4Thot podcast. Part memoir, part COVID diary, part essayistic journey into questions of risk, identity, and modern culture, Virology loosely explores what queer thought and experience can help us see and understand about viruses, and what a close look at viruses can help us understand about ourselves and our relation to others and the world. Two major pandemics saturate the book—the legacy of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and the COVID19 pandemic of the past several years. In looking at how queerness, risk, and social bonds intersect with moments of peak medical crisis, Joe searches out how we have been challenged and changed by pandemics and what new worlds we can build out of that experience. Also, Ruth Wilson Gilmore returns to recommend six books, which, taken together, renew her faith in "human internationalism from below." The titles and authors are: Sinews of War and Trade by Laleh Khalili, Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, Those Bones are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara, Return of a Native by Vron Ware, The Common Wind by Julius S. Scott, and the collection As If She Were Free edited by Erica L Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L Snyder.

Joseph Osmundson joins Eric Newman to discuss VIROLOGY, his new collection of essays published in June by Norton. Joe is a professor of microbiology at NYU, critic, essayist, and co-host of the Food4Thot podcast. Part memoir, part COVID diary, part essayistic journey into questions of risk, identity, and modern culture, Virology loosely explores what queer thought and experience can help us see and understand about viruses, and what a close look at viruses can help us understand about ourselves and our relation to others and the world. Two major pandemics saturate the book—the legacy of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and the COVID19 pandemic of the past several years. In looking at how queerness, risk, and social bonds intersect with moments of peak medical crisis, Joe searches out how we have been challenged and changed by pandemics and what new worlds we can build out of that experience. Also, Ruth Wilson Gilmore returns to recommend six books, which, taken together, renew her faith in "human internationalism from below." The titles and authors are: Sinews of War and Trade by Laleh Khalili, Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, Those Bones are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara, Return of a Native by Vron Ware, The Common Wind by Julius S. Scott, and the collection As If She Were Free edited by Erica L Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L Snyder.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to talk about her new collection, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation, which covers three decades of her thinking about abolition, activism, scholarship, the carceral system, the political economy of racism, and much more. For Gilmore, these are not siloed issues; rather, they are braided effects of an unjust political, economic, and cultural system that must be dismantled in order for liberation to take place. Gilmore reminds us that we must look for connections beyond the academy, where theory meets praxis, where the vulnerable are not an abstraction but a concrete human reality. Her thought and work are a much needed shot in the arm for a political and intellectual culture that has, in the view of many, atrophied or been co-opted by the extractive loops of late capitalism. Also, Natalia Molina, author of A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, returns to recommend two books on Latinx Los Angeles, George Sanchez's Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor's South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South LA.

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso, 2022) presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Edited and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place. In this interview, we spent time unpacking how the book came to be, its focus, and its central concept: abolition geography. Among other things, we discussed the meaning and merits of taking a specifically geographical approach to abolition, Ruthie's activist and intellectual influences, and the role of scholars in bringing about a more just world. Ruth Wilson 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. She is also the author of Golden Gulag and Opposition in Globalizing California. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso, 2022) presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Edited and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place. In this interview, we spent time unpacking how the book came to be, its focus, and its central concept: abolition geography. Among other things, we discussed the meaning and merits of taking a specifically geographical approach to abolition, Ruthie's activist and intellectual influences, and the role of scholars in bringing about a more just world. Ruth Wilson 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. She is also the author of Golden Gulag and Opposition in Globalizing California. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Even as police budgets and powers have expanded, ordinary workers are being called to carry out more and more policing functions themselves. Whether as an assistant manager in a McDonald's or as a teacher or doctor, workers are expected to take on extra ‘guard duty' in addition to their usual tasks, keeping watch for their […]

Join Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Robin D.G. Kelley for a conversation about the politics of solidarity in the fight against racial capitalism. “I was waiting for this book without realizing I was waiting for this book.”—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition “Olúfémi O. Táíwò is a thinker on fire. He not only calls out empire for shrouding its bloodied hands in the cloth of magical thinking but calls on all of us to do the same. Elite capture, after all, is about turning oppression and its cure into a (neo)liberal commodity exchange where identities become capitalism's latest currency rather than the grounds for revolutionary transformation. The lesson is clear: only when we think for ourselves and act with each other, together in deep, dynamic, and difficult solidarity, can we begin to remake the world.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. --------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) and Reconsidering Reparations. His work exploring the intersections of climate justice and colonialism has been featured in The New Yorker, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, The Appeal, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, Aeon, and Foreign Policy. Robin D.G. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and the author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Dissent Magazine. Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-elite-capture Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/BpLX8T6phOQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

What role does mass incarceration play in American political economy? What does that reveal about what sort of politics are required to overcome it? Ruth Wilson Gilmore with Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar, who edited the new collection Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation.Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDigBuy Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives by Donna Murch haymarketbooks.org/books/1650-assata-taught-me See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What role does mass incarceration play in American political economy? What does that reveal about what sort of politics are required to overcome it? Ruth Wilson Gilmore with Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar, who edited the new collection Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives by Donna Murch haymarketbooks.org/books/1650-assata-taught-me

Join Seven Stories Press and Haymarket Books for a launch of Alaa Abd el-Fattah's important new book, "You Have Not Yet Been Defeated". “The text you are holding is living history.” — Naomi Klein, from the foreword to You Have Not Yet Been Defeated Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa's written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade. To celebrate the launch of the first English language collection of his essays, social media posts, and interviews, Alaa's sister Sanaa Seif—herself an activist, filmmaker, and former political prisoner of the Sisi regime in Egypt—will be joined by Naomi Klein, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous for a conversation on the wide range of subjects covered in this important new book. To order a copy of You Have Not Yet Been Defeated visit: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781644212455 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Sanaa Seif is an Egyptian filmmaker, producer and political activist. Imprisoned three times under the Sisi regime, she is currently touring the US promoting her imprisoned brother, Alaa Abd el Fattah's, newly published book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. Sharif Abdel Kouddous is an independent journalist based in Cairo. He has reported from across the Arab world for a number of print and broadcast outlets including Democracy Now, and is currently an editor and reporter at Mada Masr, Egypt's leading independent media outlet. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and international bestselling author of eight books including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough and On Fire, which have been translated into over 35 languages. She is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept and an inaugural Marielle Franco fellow of the Social Justice Initiative Portal Project at the University of Chicago. In 2018, she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021, she joined the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice and is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag, as well as the forthcoming Change Everything, and Abolition Geography. Her recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice; the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award; The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award; and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Seven Stories Press. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/QdUpDKJ7tKg Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Leading up to Mayday, the nationwide Day of Refusal, and Abolition May, Saronik talks with Sean Gordon about abolition as an historical movement to end the transatlantic slave trade and a transformative justice movement to abolish prisons and defund the police. The episode focuses on the relationship between absence and presence, destruction and reconstruction, in abolitionist narratives and thought, and makes reference to Angela Davis's Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (2005), Mariame Kaba's We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (2021), Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019), and works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Frank Wilderson, and Jared Sexton. There is no doubt that abolition will save the world. Sean recently finished his PhD in English and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, abolition, and the environmental humanities. You can visit the We Do This ‘Til We Free Us publisher's website to donate copies of the book to people who are incarcerated. Image: “A is for Abolition”, one in the series titled Collidescopes by Julia Bernier Music used in promotional material: “Heartbeat” by ykymr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

“For anybody who is caught up in the systems that are shaped by extractive capitalism and organized violence, there is a cumulative and compounded effect on their persons and their lives,” says scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Gilmore talks with Kelly Hayes about prison abolition, the climate crisis, and what must be done. If you need a transcript, you can find that on our website: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

The industrial complex is an industrial complex! Today we'll be talking about the spread of industrial complexes, non-profits, so-called activist influencers, the controversy around BLM Global Network spending, and the whispers around Nikole Hannah-Jones and Kimberlé Crenshaw being problématique. What's the Word? Industrial Complex. Popularized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the industrial complex refers to the profit-driven enmeshment of the state and private industry in a way that makes it more profitable to perpetuate the problem they claim to solve. What We're Reading. “In The Shadow of the Shadow State” by Ruth Wilson Gilmore in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. In this essay, Gilmore discusses the rise of the non-profit industrial complex as an industry that takes up "kindness" work for those the state has abandoned and operates to suppress revolution. Her solution is to take the money and run, without fooling ourselves into believing the state or capitalism will give us the keys to our freedom. What in the World?! In this segment, we discuss our ongoing experience of forming a non-profit, the questionable financial decisions of Black Lives Matter, what Alyssa and Brendane would do if we came into $90 million, whether we really should be putting our faith or support in famous people or so-called "activist influencers," and why you should stay away from Teach For America. Join our Patreon community! Discussed In This Episode The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (INCITE!, 2017) Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Robert L. Allen, 1969) Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Aimee Meredith Cox, 2015) Re-Visions of Abolition: From Critical Resistance to A New Way of Life (Setsu Shigematsu, 2021) Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House (Sean Campbell, 2022) ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 202 is here! Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter! Transcript will be available on our website here.

For this latest installation of the Year Zero series we're joined by long time researchers, teachers, and prison abolitionists Craig and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to help us think through the carceral state: what it is, where it's heading, and how we can change it. Please read Ruthie's book, Golden Gulag: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag And Craig's Real Cost of Prisons graphic novel, from which today's episode art was taken: http://www.realcostofprisons.org/prison_town.pdf And finally, please consider supporting us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty