What Would Harriet Do? Unfinished Liberation or the Dangers of Innocence
by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
2012 Yulee Endowed Lecture
Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 6:30 p.m.
Marvin Center, Room 309
800 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052
Free and Open to the Public
The world is in crisis and -- as everybody knows -- the effects of structural adjustment and organized abandonment fall most heavily on the shoulders of those most burdened by the cares of everyday life in the first place. In this talk I will discuss some of the crisis-driven opportunities in changing the scale and scope of the prison-industrial complex, and argue that the struggle against the all-purpose use of criminalization to solve social, political, economic, and cultural problems cannot be won with an appeal either to “innocence” or to naming “the real criminals.” That said, how we account for how we got to where we are determines in part what alternative futures we might make. Using the story of Harriet Tubman as a model and case, I will conclude with an argument about what I call the “infrastructure of feeling” and what it means to work in the Black Radical Tradition.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Geography in the Earth and Environmental Studies Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her prize-winning book is Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, published in 2007. She is a founding member of California Prison Moratorium Project; Critical Resistance; the Central California Environmental Justice Network; and many other organizations.
Sponsored by the George Washington University Women’s Studies Program
For more information: 202-994-6942, wstu@gwu.edu
No comments:
Post a Comment