Against Innocence: Miriam Ticktin in Conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Join the CPCP and Ruth Wilson Gilmore for a discussion of Miriam Ticktin’s new book Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World.
In this timely and bold book, Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually ends up creating harm for so many. Claims to innocence protect migrant children, but often at the expense of their parents; claims to the innocence of the fetus work to punish women. Ticktin shows how innocence structures political relationships, focusing on individual victims and saviors, while foreclosing forms of collective responsibility. Ultimately, she wants to understand how the discourse around innocence functions, what gives it such power, and why we are so compelled by it, while showing that alternative political forms already exist. She examines this process across various domains, from migration, science, and environmentalism to racial and reproductive justice.
Miriam Ticktin is Director of CPCP and Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center. She has held positions at the New School for Social Research, University of Michigan, and at Columbia University, and she has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, and an invited visiting professor at the EHESS in Paris. She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities, and most recently, she has written about the idea of a decolonial feminist commons. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press, 2012), and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010). Her latest book is Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (University of Chicago Press, 2025). She is currently working on her next book, Containment and Commoning: From Bordered Worlds to Collective Life. Ticktin writes in public venues such as Truthout, LARB and Open Democracy, and organizes with migrant social justice groups in the US and in France.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She was Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics from 2014 to 2024. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press 2007). Other recent publications include an Introduction to V.I. Lenin Imperialism and the National Question (Verso 2024), as well as forewords to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg, (UGA Press 2019), and to Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (ed. HLT Quan, Pluto Press 2019). She and Paul Gilroy edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke 2021). The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore features her internationalist work. Honors include the Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020), the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (with Mike Davis and Angela Y. Davis), and a 2022 Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This event is cosponsored by the CUNY Graduate Center Departments of Anthropology, EES, French, and the Henri Peyre French Institute.
