Environment in Context: Red, Green, and International with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

In this special episode, Huma Gupta and China Sajadian discuss abolition geographies and environmental movements with renowned geographer and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

She is the author of the award-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and several forthcoming books, including Change Everything, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation, and Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference, co-edited with Paul Gilroy. In this interview, Gilmore explains her research on carcerality through a global, comparative lens, from the long traditions of emancipation within Black Marxism, to popular struggles against TIAA-CREF land grabs in Brazil, to the contemporary challenges of giant monopsonies like Amazon.

If abolition must be green, Gilmore insists, it must also be anti-capitalist and internationalist. Such an approach to abolition not only underscores how different parts of the world are, in Gilmore's words, partitioned and re-partitioned by capitalism -- but also the ways that dispossessed, criminalized, and vulnerable people across seemingly disparate contexts come to recognize their fundamental connections to each other.