Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Abolition Geography"

Thursday, October 20, 2022, 7 - 9pm

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore and book title

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is one of the foremost scholar-activists of our time. Her research and organizing has reshaped the way we think about race, place, power, prisons, and the transformations of state structures. Join us in celebrating her work and the publication of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation as part of the Fall 2022 Fall 2022 IDS Lecture Series at The Cooper Union. On this occasion, Ruth Wilson Gilmore will be in conversation with three of her essential, long-time interlocutors: Lisa Lowe, Shellyne Rodriguez, and Nikhil Pal Singh. The panel conversation will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing session.

 Nikhil Pal SinghAny guests to campus are required to show proof of a vaccine to enter a Cooper Union Building and the Residence Hall.



Nikhil Pal Singh is professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University (NYU) and faculty director of NYU’s Prison Education Program. He is the author of Black is a Country (Harvard UP, 2005), Race and America’s Long War (UC Press, 2017), and the forthcoming Reconstructing Democracy (UC Press, 2023).Shellyne Rodriguez

Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.



Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar whoseLisa Lowe work is concerned with the study of race, migration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell UP, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke, 1997).





Ruth Wilson Gilmore is professor of earth & environmental science and director of the Center for Place, Culture at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press, 2007), Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso, 2022), as well as the forthcoming Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket, 2023). With Paul Gilroy, she co-edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke UP, 2021). She is also a co-founder of many grassroots organizations including California Prison Moratorium Project; Critical Resistance; and the Central California Environmental Justice Network.

Located in The Great Hall, in the Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.