Ruth Wilson Gilmore | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Gilmore in 2012 | |
| Born | (1950-04-02)April 2, 1950 (age 75) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Scholar,Professor |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Rutgers University, New Brunswick (PhD) |
| Thesis | From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism: Finance Capital, Land, Labor, and Opposition in the Rising California Prison State[1] (1998) |
| Doctoral advisor | Neil Smith[2][1] |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Geographer |
| Institutions | CUNY Graduate Center,University of Southern California |
| Main interests | Prison-industrial complex,Race |
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (born April 2, 1950) isa prison abolitionist and prison scholar.[3] She is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor ofgeography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at theGraduate Center of the City University of New York.[4] She has made important contributions tocarceral geography,[5] the "study of the interrelationships across space, institutions and political economy that shape and define modern incarceration".[6] She received the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from theAmerican Association of Geographers.[7]
Ruth Wilson was born on April 2, 1950[8] inNew Haven,Connecticut.[2] Wilson's grandfather organised the first blue collar workers' union atYale University. Her father, Courtland Seymour Wilson, was a tool-and-die maker forWinchester Repeating Arms Company.[5] He was active in the machinists' union. He later was assistant dean of student affairs atYale Medical School, then went toYale-New Haven Hospital in the Office of Government and Community Relations.[5]
In 1960, Wilson attended a private school in New Haven as one of its few working-class students and the first, and mostly only, African American student.[5]
In 1968, she enrolled atSwarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where she became involved in campus activism. In 1969, Gilmore,Fania Davis (the younger sister of radical activistAngela Davis), and other students occupied the school's admissions office hoping to persuade the administration to admit more black students. Following the sudden death of the university president, white students spread false rumors that the occupying students were to blame. The next morning, Gilmore learned that her cousin,John Huggins, along with anotherBlack Panther,Bunchy Carter, had been murdered atUniversity of California, Los Angeles.
In the wake of those events, Gilmore left Swarthmore and returned home to New Haven.[5] She then enrolled at Yale, where she obtained abachelor's degree indrama.[5]
Gilmore earned her Ph.D. fromRutgers University in 1998 in economic geography andsocial theory, inspired by the work ofNeil Smith.[9][5] After finishing her Ph.D. she was hired as an assistant professor atUniversity of California, Berkeley and began working on her concept of carceral geography. Carceral geography examines the relationships between landscape, natural resources, political economy, infrastructure and the policing, jailing, caging and controlling of populations.[5] The community of academic scholars in this area is associated with the Carceral Geography Working Group (CGWG) of theRoyal Geographical Society with theInstitute of British Geographers. Gilmore gave a keynote address at the 2nd International Conference for Carceral Geography at theUniversity of Birmingham, UK, on 12 December 2017.[10]
She is a cofounder of many social justice organizations, includingCalifornia Prison Moratorium Project.[11] In 1998, she was one of the cofounders ofCritical Resistance along withAngela Davis. In 2003, she cofounded Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) to fight jail and prison construction and currently serves on its board.[5]
Gilmore has been a leading scholar and speaker on topics including prisons,decarceration,racial capitalism, oppositional movements, state-making, and more. She is the author of the bookGolden Gulag which was awarded the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize for the best book in American Studies by the American Studies Association in 2008.[12] She has also published work in venues such asRace & Class,The Professional Geographer,Social Justice,Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex, and the critical anthologyThe Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which was edited by theIncite! collective.
In 2011, Gilmore was the keynote speaker at theNational Women's Studies Association annual conference inAtlanta, Georgia.[13]
In 2012, theAmerican Studies Association awarded her its first Angela Y. Davis prize for Public Scholarship that "recognizes scholars who have applied or used their scholarship for the "public good." This includes work that explicitly aims to educate the public, influence policies, or in other ways seeks to address inequalities in imaginative, practical, and applicable forms."[14]
In 2014, Gilmore received the Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice from theAssociation of American Geographers.[15]
In 2017, Gilmore earned the American Studies Association Richard A. Yarborough Award. This honors scholars who demonstrate an excellence in teaching andmentoring.[16]
In 2020, Gilmore was listed byProspect as the seventh-greatest thinker for theCOVID-19 era, with the magazine writing, "Gilmore has spent the best part of 30 years developing the field of carceral geography [...] She's helped shift the conversation about responses to crime from one of punishment to rehabilitation. As the failings of the US justice system come once again to the fore, Gilmore's radical ideas have never felt more relevant."[6]
AnAntipode (journal) documentary film featured Gilmore and key ideas of her work:geography,racial capitalism, theprison industrial complex, and abolition geographies.[17]
In 2021, Gilmore was elected as a Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[18][19]
In 2023, Gilmore was honored with a mural painted by artist and filmmaker,Jess X. Snow and local community members on the outside of the Possible Futures bookstore in New Haven, Connecticut.[20]
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