Friday May 3, 5PM-8:30 PM & Saturday May 4 10AM-8:30PM
The People’s Forum (320 West 37th Street)

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics’ Annual Conference 2024:
Abolition and/as Activism

Register here for the in-person conference. This event will also be livestreamed. HERE is the link for May 3. HERE is the link for May 4.

 

In her justly-revered book, Abolition Geography, Ruth Wilson Gilmore articulates the prescience of the praxis, politics, and poetics of “abolition” as a central principle of liberation movements and social change. The book is a culmination of decades of Gilmore’s ardent and inexhaustible commitment not just to undo the injustices of the carceral state with its infrastructure of racial capitalism, but to formulate abolition as a condition of revolutionary possibility since, as she puts it, “mass incarceration is class war.” Far from being a handy metaphor for the combined and uneven development of the world system, the prison is the material instantiation of global inequality where location at scale is a provocation to think activism as also, in its difference and intensities, confronting carcerality in all its manifestations.

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics’ 2024 conference intends to honor Gilmore’s contribution–in activism, politics, pedagogy, and theory—to an abolitionist agenda and is also crucially an invitation to think with her work on future imbrications of abolitionism with anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-colonialism among a provocative array of allegiance to radical social transformation. In this way the conference not only celebrates a career, but extends it.

Register here for the in-person conference. This event will also be livestreamed. HERE is the link for May 3. HERE is the link for May 4.

 

Conference Program:

Friday, May 3 

5:15 Welcome  

5:30-6:50 24 years of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics 

Kandice Chuh, Peter Hitchcock, David Harvey, Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine 

7:00-8:20 Keynote Dialogue 

Rabab Abdulhadi and Ruth Wilson Gilmore in conversation 

 

Saturday, May 4  

9:45 Welcome 

10:00-11:50 Thinking the State  

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma, Giacomo Bianchino, Christina M. Chica, Lexington Davis, Anthony Dest, Javiela Evangelista, Thauany Freire, Cynthia Yuan Gao, Nour Mohamad Jamil Hodeib, Zahra Khalid, Nerve V. Macaspac, Maria Luisa Mendonça, Laura Rivas, Benjamin Rubin, Shreya Subramani, Dominic Wetzel 

12:00-1:30 Pedagogies of Third World Marxism  

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma, Zoe Alexander, Michele Cannon, Vincent DeLaurentis, Patrick DeDauw, Khouloud Mallak, Gabriel Meier, Meraz Mostafa, Brendan O’Connor, Bryan Welton 

1:30-2:30 Lunch  

2:30-4:30 Militant Knowledges 

Sonia Vaz Borges, Vijay Prashad, Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper 

4:40-6:50 The Politics of Struggle /Abolition Futures 

Ujju Aggarwal, Mizue Aizeki, Miriam Ticktin, Laura Y. Liu 

6:50-8:30 Celebration 

 

Register here for the in-person conference. This event will also be livestreamed. HERE is the link for May 3. HERE is the link for May 4.

 

Speaker Bios:

24 years of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics 

Kandice Chuh is a professor of English, American Studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also affiliated to Africana Studies and Liberal Studies. She teaches and writes about the relationship of aesthetics, un/common sense, and insurgent pedagogy. Chuh has served in administrative roles in American studies, English, and the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center and is a member of the steering committee for the newly established PhD Program in Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies. She was president of the American Studies Association from 2017-18. With Thuy Tu (NYU), Chuh is principal investigator of the 2024-25 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Transpacific Thought and the Problem of Asia. Her publications include The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities ‘after Man,’ (2019) and Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (2003). She is currently working on a book of essays titled The Disinterested Teacher and a research project on contemporary Asian racialization, Studying Asia.  

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of various books, articles, and lectures. His most recent books are A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, 2023) and The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles (Pluto Press, 2020). He is the author of Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Profile Books, 2014), one of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2011, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2010). Other books include A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Limits to Capital, and Social Justice and the City. Professor Harvey has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for nearly 40 years. His lectures on Marx’s Volumes I and II are available for download (free) on his website. He was director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics from 2008-2014.. 

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is also on the faculties of Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the GC. He is the author of five books, including The Long Space, for Stanford University Press. His most recent publications include, “Accumulating Fictions” for Representations,“Immolation” for the Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, “How to Read a Discipline” for Comparative Literature, “Culture and Anarchy in Thatcher’s London” for an anthology on Hanif Kureishi, “( ) of Ghosts” in The Spectralities Reader, “The Space of Time: Chronotopes and Crisis” for Primerjalna Knjizevnost, “Defining the World” inLiterary Materialisms and “Everything’s Gone Green: The Environment of BP’s Narrative” for Imaginations. Forthcoming articles include an essay, “Viscosity and Velocity,” for an anthology on oil (Cornell), and an essay on communism titled “The Leninist Hypothesis” for Poetics Today. Forthcoming book projects include a monograph on the cultural representation of labor, a monograph on worlds of postcoloniality, and an edited collection on the New Public Intellectual. He is currently working on two research projects: one about seriality in politics and culture; the other on the aesthetics of commodities and financial instruments. 

Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine is a historian who researches and writes about  Black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. Her book The Revolution Has Come:  Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland was published in 2016. She is co-founder of the Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project and has written widely on gender and Black Power. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History and Souls as well as The Washington Post, Vibe Magazine, Colorlines, and Truthout.  She has received awards for her work  from the Mellon foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Association of Black Women Historians.  

She is completing her second book on the intersections between the movement for Black liberation and the movement against the US war in Vietnam as a fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for studies in American History in 2023-2024. In addition, she is working on two biographies. The first is focused on radical activist, scholar and thinker Angela Davis and the second focuses on Patricia Murphy Robinson, Black feminist psychotherapist. She created @PATarchives on Instagram to spotlight how Patricia Murphy Robinson’s unprocessed home archives reframe the Black Radical Tradition. www.robyncspencer.com 

 

Keynote Conversation:  

Rabab Abdulhadi (PhD) is founding Director and Senior scholar of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies Program at SFSU. An internationally-known professor committed to community development and student engagement, she has over 80 publications in Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian and Spanish, on third worldism, Indigenous, Black and Women of color feminisms, Resistance and Revolution, and Palestine Studies. She is also the recipient of distinguished honors and awards, including best non-fiction Arab American book, Yale University’s Sterling Fellowship and Teaching Excellence award; Dr. Clifford I. Uyeda 2024 Humanitarian of the Year award (by the Japanese Day of Remembrance consortium), Comfort Women Justice Coalition; Angela Davis Award for Public Scholarship (by American Studies Association), Life Achievement award by Middle East Studies Association, Georgina Smith Award for union organizing and gender and sexual justice by American Association of University Professors; Alex Odeh Award by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Lucius Walker Award by InterFaith Community Organizations/Pastors for Peace; Courage awards by Al-Awda: The Palestinian Right of Return Coalition and American Muslims for Palestine; recognition award by the Arab Feminist Union, founded over a 100 years ago in Palestine, and named Bay Area Visionary by the National Women’s Studies Association, where she co-chairs Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine. 

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She writes about racial capitalism; organized violence; organized abandonment; changing state structure; the aesthetics and  politics of seeing; labor and social movements; and the urgency of abolition as a green, red, and internationalist project of liberation. Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022); and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press 2007); and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference. (Duke 2021). Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition is forthcoming from Haymarket. Gilmore’s internationalist work features in the Antipode documentary Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2020). She co-founded many grassroots organizations. Awards include the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize (shared with Angela Y. Davis, and Mike Davis), and the 2022  Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize. 

 

Thinking the State: 

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research focuses on the politics of labor, migration, and urban transformation in contemporary India. It traces the different types of recruitment of migrant and local labor in Kerala that reflect political contests and settlements between trade unions, corporate construction companies, and recruitment agencies. Another strand of her research focuses on the politics of indigeneity in Arunachal Pradesh in the North-East of India in the context of urban land governance, dam building, and migration. She has published articles and essays in Antipode,Contemporary South Asia, Society and Space magazine,and Economic and Political Weekly. 

Giacomo Bianchino is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His work centers on the relationship between poetry and politics, particularly in the modernist attempts to construct a new “epic” poem. He is also a labor organizer, a freelance journalist and a writer. 

Christina M. Chica is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at UCLA as well as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and a Scholar-in-residence at the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a child of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador and an interdisciplinary sociologist with research and teaching interests that span transnational gender, sexuality, culture, race, ethnicity, political economy, and urban studies. Christina has used multiple methods to study placemaking among LGBTQ+, migrant, and racially marginalized populations across time and space. Their current project investigates the relationship between urban change and LGBT+ placemaking in Mexico City—especially how LGBT+ people and places have adapted to COVID-19. More broadly, she is interested in the process of forming beloved community—its trials, tribulations, failures, and successes—and its potential for grounding social relations rooted in wellness and social justice. 

Lexington Davis (she/her) is a writer, curator, and art historian currently completing a Ph.D. at University of St. Andrews, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. Her dissertation is a transnational study exploring how 1970s feminist artists complicated the politics of domestic labor through engagement with working-class struggles. She has taught at Leiden University and has written for publications including Feminist Media Histories, Flash Art, Espace art actuel, and Metropolis M. In addition to her academic work, she has held curatorial and research positions at the New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has previously curated exhibitions at apexart, NY; Neue Galerie, Innsbruck; the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest; and the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki. Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship; a Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grant, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; the Association for Art History, UK; Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds; and the Netherlands Institute in Athens. 

Anthony Dest is assistant professor of anthropology at Lehman College. His research focuses on social movements, violence, racism, and state formation in Latin America. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Dissident Peace: An Ethnography of Struggle in Colombia. Anthony is also a member of the executive council of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) and the Colombia Freedom Collective, which supports the struggles of people incarcerated for their participation in the 2021 National Strike. 

Javiela Evangelista is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department. As a public anthropologist she engages in participatory research that counters inequalities, particularly at the intersections of citizenship and racialization in the Caribbean and the African Diaspora. Evangelista is developing her book manuscript, an ethnographic analysis of the largest case of mass statelessness in the western hemisphere, the contemporary denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. This research has been supported by a Fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY Foundation . Her work has also been featured at the Venice Biennale and in the Publication of Afro-Latin/American Research Association (PALARA), National Political Science Review and Interdisciplinary Team Teaching (Palgrave). At New York City College of Technology, Evangelista is the Co-Director of the Living Lab, a general education and experiential learning initiative. She also serves on the Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Steering Committee.  She received her PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center, CUNY and her MA from the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.  

Thauany Freire is a geographer and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, conducting research funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). Her research delves into how racial capitalism has transformed the Haitian population into a migrant workforce, which nowadays navigates experiences oscillating between hyper-mobility and immobility. Her Ph.D. research in São Paulo (FAPESP- 20/06119-3) focuses on how Haitian immigrants, residing in the outskirts of the city, address their housing needs amidst the continuous dynamics of the real estate market in the neighborhood. She also investigates how the daily practices and struggles of Haitian immigrants in the city create spaces that embody local agency, aimed at confronting the racial constraints and urban violences. She holds a master’s degree in Human Geography (2018) from the University of São Paulo, in which she explored the socio-spatial consequences of housing policies implemented in São Paulo’s inner city throughout the 2000s. 

 Cynthia Yuan Gao is PhD Candidate in American Studies at New York University and incoming Assistant Professor in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. Her research examines the influence of Asian revolutionary thought and practice on the United States left, from the 1960s to the present. 

Nour Mohamad Jamil Hodeib is a writer, scholar, and cultural activist based in Brooklyn, New York. Hodeib’s research explores pop culture, musical dissent, and countercultures as they manifested outside the anglo-American canon during the (period commonly referred to as the) Global Sixties. He is currently a Doctoral Candidate in the history program, Graduate Center (CUNY), writing a dissertation on leftist sonic countercultures of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Specifically, Hodeib explores how a quasi industry emerged around songs by communist artists during the war, contextualizing songs within the period’s technological, political, economic and cultural dynamics. Hodeib asks how a study of songs can provide a nuanced understanding of the experience and memory of that period (away from the politics of amnesia that prevail post-war Lebanon). Beyond Lebanon, Hodeib examines Beirut as a site of the Global Sixties in which globalized pop cultural phenomena like Rock’n’Roll intersected with Third Worldist revolutionary rhetoric. Hodeib earned an M-Phil (History), MA (History), and MA (Middle East Studies) from the Graduate Center, CUNY (2017), and a BA degree in Political Science/International Affairs from the Lebanese American University (2012). As an adjunct professor, Hodeib has taught on Lebanon, Global history, and rock culture and the Global Sixties at Brooklyn College, NYU and Cooper Union.  

Aside from academic pursuits, Hodeib is active in arts communities in and between Brooklyn and Beirut. He has published poetry, plays, music, multimedia pieces and produced events in both cities since 2010.  

Zahra Khalid is a doctoral candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she studies cultural materialism and political economy, with particular interest in the interconnection between militarism and uneven development. Her dissertation project studies military-led speculative real-estate developments in Pakistan and associated “structures of feeling”—middle class desires, anxieties, and proclivities—to illuminate how housing becomes a site to materialize capital flows. It is based on 17 months of ethnographic and archival research. Zahra holds a Master’s in city planning, and a BSc. (honors) with a major in financial investments and accounting. She previously worked in the international development industry. 

Nerve V. Macaspac (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, and a Doctoral Faculty at the Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center. His current research examines community-led peace zones as spaces of unarmed civilian protection amid active violent conflicts. He is a Co-Investigator for “Creating Safer Spaces,” a 5-year international and interdisciplinary research project funded by the United Kingdom Research and Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, and for “Building the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium,” a 4-year project establishing Southeast Asian Studies network in the SUNY and CUNY systems funded by the Luce Foundation. He received his Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California in Los Angeles), and MA in Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. 

Maria Luisa Mendonça is a research scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of São Paulo (USP). Her research includes history and political economy of agriculture in Brazil and internationally. Her recent book Political Economy of Agribusiness (Fernwood Publishing, Halifax, 2023) demonstrates the central role of food systems in international relations as a result of a dialectical movement of economic crisis and expansion in connection with trade, financial markets, environmental justice, and transnational activism. Her research anticipated a trend in financial capital to “migrate” to farmland markets in the Global South, especially after the crisis in the United States’ real estate market in 2008. She has taught international political economy at University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and at the center for advanced research Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). Mendonça is a co-founder of the World Social Forum and co-director of Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Network for Social Justice and Human Rights – www.social.org.br). She is co-editor of the book Human Rights in Brazil, published annually since 2000. Her experience includes documentary filmmaking and investigative journalism, and she has served in expert meetings on the Right to Food at the United Nations. 

Laura Rivas is a doctoral candidate in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation examines the impact of an insular culture of antislavery on the political territorialization of the Dominican state. Analyzing the tension between fugitivity and official rule, she considers historical practices of black flight into rural areas and the rearticulation of colonial ideas of progress in the postcolonial state to explain the fractured cartography and political instability of the early Dominican nation. Peasants’ autonomous lifestyle favored local forms of governance over a framework of national culture for the materialization of freedom and political rights. With the advent of the nation-state, revolutionary turmoil becomes a process through which peasants inserted themselves into a national project devised to either exclude or discipline them. Her research engages alternative articulations of sovereignty—in this historical setting and at different scales—that challenge the hegemonic, ethnonationalist variant at play in the Dominican Republic today. 

Benjamin Rubin is a PhD candidate in geography in the Earth and Environmental Science department at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation project, “Revealing the U.S. Petrostate: Capitalist environmentalisms, reactionary politics, and the oil way of life in Texas” explores the long fracking boom in U.S. oil production, its Texas-based political center, and oil capital’s strategies to co-opt and re-direct green transition funding. His work is especially interested in how racial and colonial ideas that coalesce around oil provide a basis for common sense on energy and environmentalism under capitalism.  

Shreya Subramani is a sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor of Law & Society at CUNY John Jay College. Her ethnographic research explores how progressive criminal justice reform is productive of novel racializing processes that transform and expand carceral geographies in New Orleans. As a CPCP faculty fellow, Subramani will be workshopping her current book project. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2019) in New Orleans, her book is a historical materialist critique of contemporary criminal justice reform as passive revolution. She elaborates the fragmentations and contradictions emergent in what is parochially referred to as “the reentry space,” a private-public institutional infrastructure for policy and service provisioning designed to facilitate the reentry of formerly incarcerated individuals back into city life. Doing so, reveals a terrain of political struggle that opens onto our contemporary conjuncture of racial capitalism and its manifold crises as well as their ongoing regulation and transformation. 

Dominic Wetzel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, where he teaches Sociology of Gender, Sociology of Religion and Social Problems. His current research examines the rise of movements of religious nationalism, anti-Enlightenment thought and practices, and their implications for gender, sexuality and other forms of freedom. He recently published the article “The Rise of the Catholic Alt-right” in the Journal of Labor and Society. Other work has been published in Situations: Project for the Radical Imagination, of which he is also a member of its editorial collective; Socialism and Democracy; Research in the Sociology of Work; Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; the Routledge anthology Religious Queers, Queering Religion and Scholar and Feminist Online. He is currently working on a book manuscript examining the Catholic charismatic movement, titled Re-enchanting the World: Gender, Sexuality and Religion. He is the former interim Director of Kingsborough’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and is currently the co-facilitator of Kingsborough’s critical pedagogy project, the Faculty Initiative on Teaching Reading (FITR). 

 

Pedagogies of Third World Marxism:   

Michele Cannon studies Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. She researches international migration in the Americas, and currently focuses on (il)legality and (im)mobility in neoliberal Mexico. Michele collaborates with various migrant organizations in Mexico and New York City as an educator, translator and activist. She has been working with the Center for Place, Culture and Politics since 2022. 

Patrick DeDauw is a researcher and organizer doing his PhD in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. He will be a CPCP Dissertation Fellow in 2024–25. 

Khouloud Mallak is a doctoral student of Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. She researches the intersections of knowledge and geography in the Arab World. Her current research focuses on the role of the humanitarian-development sector in knowledge production in Lebanon. 

Gabriel Meier is an archivist, writer and doctoral student of Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on critical theoretical approaches to political economy, U.S.-Mexico Border logistics and the circulation of capital and labor. 

Brendan O’Connor is a writer and labor organizer pursuing a PhD in geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on social reproduction and imperialism in sport. He is also the author of Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right. 

Bryan Welton is a PhD candidate in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center, researching the contested and changing landscape of public health. 

 

Militant Knowledges: 

Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and social-political organizer. She received her PhD in History of Education from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). She is the author of the book, Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963–1978 (2019). As a result of her research Vaz Borges co-authored the short films, Navigating the Pilot School (2016) and Mangrove School (2022). She is currently an Assistant Professor in History and in the Africana Studies Program at Drexel University in Philadelphia (USA). Vaz Borges book Ragás Because the sea has no place to grab. A memoir of home, migration, and African liberation is expected to be released in June 2024, published by the Philadelphia based Common Notions eds.  Together with the visual artist Mónica de Miranda and the choreographer Vânia Gala, Vaz Borges is part of the team that will be  representing the Portuguese Pavilion at the La Biennale di Venezia, in 2024, with the project Greenhouse. 

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, and political commentator. He is the author of 40 books, including “Washington Bullets,” “The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South,” and The “Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power,” the latter written with Noam Chomsky. Prashad is the executive director of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of New Delhi-based publisher LeftWord Books. In his own words, “I’m a marxist. I’m a communist. I believe in women’s emancipation. I believe in gay rights. I believe in everything good, decent, and sensitive in the world.” 

Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper is an Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is also the director of the Center for Racial Justice at UCI. Dougé-Prosper’s work generally focuses on Black social movements. More specifically, her research centers around protest movements in 21st century Haiti. Dougé-Prosper has published in political magazines such as LeftEast and Black Agenda Report as well as academic journals such as Women’s Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and the Journal of Haitian Studies. She is completing her first manuscript titled “Development Arrested in Occupied Haiti: Social Movements and the Gangster State.” Dougé Prosper is also the international coordinator for Community Movement Builders, a board member of Grassroots International, and the co-host of the WBAI Pacifica in New York City radio show “Haiti: Our Revolution Continues.” 

 

The Politics of Struggle /Abolition Futures:  

Ujju Aggarwal is trained as a community organizer, popular educator, and cultural anthropologist. Her research engages public education, urban space, rights, and the state in relation to gendered political subjectivities, kinship, racial capitalism, social reproduction, and anti-carceral studies. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Experiential Learning in the Bachelors’ Program for Adult and Transfer Students (and affiliated faculty of Global Studies) at The New School. Her first book, Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education was recently published by University of Minnesota Press (March, 2024). Her current project, Education Against Enclosure, is supported by the Spencer Foundation. In addition to edited volumes and academic journals, Ujju’s writing has appeared in Truthout, Common Dreams, City Limits, and The Funambulist. She also brings along a history of working to build organizing for educational justice, immigrants’ rights, and abolition as well as projects at the intersection of arts and social justice, popular education, and adult literacy. She currently serves on the Board of Teachers Unite, on the Advisory Boards of the Parent Leadership Project (Bloomingdale Family Head Start Center, PLP), and PARCEO (Participatory Action-Research Center for Education, Organizing), The Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) housed at The Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center). Ujju received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center. 

Miriam Ticktin is 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, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press (2024). 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. 

Mizue Aizeki is Executive Director and founder of the Surveillance Resistance Lab. The Lab investigates and makes visible the often obfuscated ways in which tech is increasing state and corporate power over our lives and directing our future. By translating research into action, we nurture and accumulate the power of organizing and resistance—locally and transnationally— against technologies of violence and control and towards a future where all can thrive. For nearly twenty years, Mizue has focused on ending the injustices—including criminalization, imprisonment, and exile—at the intersections of the criminal and migration control systems. Prior to launching the Lab, Mizue was a Senior Advisor at the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) where she developed an advocacy program and led state and citywide campaigns to end the entanglement of local and immigration policing. Mizue is a co-editor of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (forthcoming from Haymarket Books, February 2024). Mizue’s photographic work appears in Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008) and Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016). 

Laura Y. Liu is Associate Professor of Global Studies and Geography at The New School where she is an interdisciplinary scholar of space, labor, politics, and power. Her research examines the relationship between politics and socio-spatial knowledge in the context of globalization and migration. Specifically, her work focuses on community and labor organizing; migration, urban development, and militarism; and the interplay of politics with art and design. She is part of the collaborative Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster which researches the dynamics of movement at the US-Mexico border and in other border spaces. Liu has written against the novelty of precarity (in Women’s Studies Quarterly); the influence of digital technologies on urban spaces (Situated Technologies: From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City); and the impact of September 11 on Chinatown Chinatown (Indefensible Space, Ed. Michael Sorkin). Her other articles have appeared in Anthropology Now; Urban Geography; Gender, Place, and Culture; and Social and Cultural Geography. With the poet Jennifer Firestone, she co-produced the art/chapbook LITtle by LITtle. She is on the Board of Directors of The Action Lab, a space and organization for grassroots movements to gather and strategize, and on the Advisory Board of the Urban Studies Program at Guttman Community College, CUNY. Liu received a PhD and MA in Geography from Rutgers University, and a BA in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. 

Register here for the in-person conference. This event will also be livestreamed. HERE is the link for May 3. HERE is the link for May 4.

 

This conference is organized and sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, the Graduate Center, CUNY and cosponsored by the Global Studies program, The New School and The Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
It is free and open to the public.