Ruth Wilson Gilmore

abolitionist scholar and activist

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a writer, educator, and researcher. She is a professor of earth and environmental sciences, and American studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, where she is also director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.

Wilson writes about abolition, racial capitalism, organized violence, organized abandonment, changing state structure, the aesthetics and politics of seeing, labor and social movements, and internationalism. She is the author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007). Forthcoming books include Change Everything; Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation; and Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (co-edited with Paul Gilroy). The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2020) features her internationalist work. She has co-founded many grassroots organizations including California Prison Moratorium Project; Critical Resistance; and Central California Environmental Justice Network. Gilmore is co-recipient (with Angela Y. Davis and Mike Davis) of the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Gilmore lives in Lisbon.