Keynote Speaker 5 (Day 2 16.30-17.30)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“Meanwhile”

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Geography in the Doctoral Programme in Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, at the City University of New York. Her wide-ranging research interests include revolution and reform, environments and movements, prisons, urban–rural continuities, and the African diaspora.

Ruth is the author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007). She writes extensively on racial capitalism, organized violence, organized abandonment, changing state structure, revolutionary and other oppositional formations, the African diaspora, infrastructure, and extraction.

From 2010 to 2011, she was president of the American Studies Association (ASA), the nation’s oldest and largest association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history. She has also cofounded many grassroots organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network.

Ruth has won a number of awards, such as the Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (American Studies Association), the Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Scholarship (Association of American Geographers), and the inaugural Eugene Grant Distinguished Scholar in Social Justice Prize from Purchase College of the State University of New York. She holds a Ph.D. in economic geography and social theory from Rutgers University.