Environment in Context - Red, Green, and International: Abolition Geographies and Environmental Movements with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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Aug 25, 2021

Environment in Context - Red, Green, and International: Abolition Geographies and Environmental Movements with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

By : Status/الوضع Audio-Visual Podcast Hosts

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.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore


Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches in Earth and Environmental Sciences, and directs the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Author of the award-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press), her forthcoming books include Change Everything (Haymarket); Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso); and (co-edited with Paul Gilroy) Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). The documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore features her internationalist political work. She has co-founded many grassroots organizations including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Honors include co-recipient (with Angela Y. Davis and Mike Davis) of the 2020 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.

Huma Gupta


Huma Gupta is a full-time Lecturer in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. Gupta holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and a Master's in City Planning from MIT. Currently, she is writing her first book The Architecture of Dispossession, which is based on her doctoral thesis on state-building and the architectural and environmental transformation of migrant reed-mat and mudbrick settlements in mid-century Iraq. Previously, Gupta was the Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at Brandeis University, Humanities Research Fellow at New York University-Abu Dhabi, and International Dissertation Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, and Thresholds. As a practitioner, she has worked on infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, municipal planning in Syria, eviction prevention and homelessness in the greater Boston area, and humanitarian response to housing needs for persons displaced due to climate, conflict, and development projects around the world. Gupta is the host of the Environment in Context podcast.

China Sajadian


China Sajadian is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation is an ethnography of agricultural labor, circuits of debt, and gendered relations of hierarchy and interdependency among Syrian refugee-farmworkers in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. She situates her contemporary analysis within histories of migration from Northeastern Syria and the historical political economy of agrarian transformation in the region. Sajadian holds a BA in Government from Smith College and an MA in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research has been awarded grants by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Orient-Institut Beirut, the Committee on Globalization and Social Change, and the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She has taught courses on the anthropology of religion, Middle East studies, and introductory anthropology at Brooklyn College.

References:
1. Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind, New York Times
2. Bobby M. Wilson, America’s Johannesburg
3. Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Walmart
4. James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State
5. Petter Nore and Terisa Turner, Oil and Class Struggle
6. Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
7. Anne Carson, Plainwater
8. Sónia Vaz Borges, Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963-1978
9. “Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore” 
10. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, And Opposition in Globalizing California.
11. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Apr 22, 2021 Lebanon
Environment Page Editors By :
Environment Page Editors

Environment in Context Podcast Archive

What is Environment in Context?


Environment in Context is a podcast series for critical and incisive analysis of environmental questions in the Middle East and beyond. It invites guests and listeners to rethink these questions by taking a broad stance on what counts as an environmental issue. Whereas environmental questions in the Middle East are usually framed in terms of security, water, or oil, this series purposefully seeks out a wide array of sources and perspectives in examining important environmental issues across the region. Too often, Euro-American international institutions dominate and depoliticize the conversation on the environment. This series, however, foregrounds environmental justice as a central analytical framework.

Episode Archive


August 2021: Red, Green, and International: Abolition Geographies and Environmental Movements 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.

January 2021: Fast Fashion and Sustainability in Bahrain (Rawan Maki)

Huma Gupta speaks with scholar and fashion designer Rawan Maki about fast fashion and the question of sustainability in Bahrain and beyond. Maki traces the life-cycle of the clothing we wear every day, mapping its geographies from the crops and petroleum necessary to produce organic and synthetic fibers, the individuals who farm, weave, and sew the garments to shipping, distribution, tailoring and purchasing networks.

December 2020: The Transformation of Dubai Creek into Infrastructure (Todd Reisz)

Huma Gupta speaks with architectural historian Todd Reisz about the transformation of the marshy estuary known as Dubai Creek (خور دبي‎) into infrastructure – a process which was central to the city’s architectural and urban development projects in the twentieth century.

December 2020: Environmental Reclamations (Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Alishine Osman, Anisa Salat)

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi speaks with Alishine Osman, Anisa Salat, and Huma Gupta about their experiences of environmental scarcity and diaspora, as well as the refugee camps and urban environments that became the landscapes of that trajectory. 

November 2020: Wetlands and the Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure in Turkey (Caterina Scaramelli)

Huma Gupta and Camille Cole speak with the anthropologist Caterina Scaramelli about Turkey’s wetland ecosystems. Scaramelli unpacks how many different shallow water ecosystems are materially and discursively produced into a flattened category called 'wetlands'.

September 2020: Ecologies of Capital in Egypt (Aaron Jakes)

Huma Gupta and Camille Cole speak with Aaron Jakes about Egypt’s occupation and the history of capitalism as both a social and an ecological process.

August 2020: Ecological Imaginaries of Water and Climate Change in Dubai (Nadia Christidi)

Huma Gupta and Danya Al-Saleh speak with Nadia Christidi, who explains how an anthropological approach can help us understand the political practices and economic rationalities of water governance based on her fieldwork in Dubai. 

July 2020: Phosphates & the Political Economy of Environmental Transformation in Tunisia (Layli Faroudi)

Huma Gupta speaks with journalist Layli Foroudi to explore how the story of phosphates can help us understand the political economy of environmental transformation in Tunisia from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. 

July 2020: Green Energy Colonialism in the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights (Wael Tarabieh, Muna Dajani, Malihe Razazan) 

Malihe Razazan, Wael Tarabieh, and Muna Dajani discuss how the conversation about a decarbonized economy cannot be separated from prevailing power structures and systems of oppression including colonialism through the example of Israel’s project to build the largest onshore wind farm in the occupied Golan Heights.

June 2020: Cement, War and Toxicity: The Materialities of Displacement in Iraq (Kali Rubaii)

Huma Gupta and Gabi Kirk speak with the anthropologist Kali Rubaii and learn about how ecologies of war have not only produced multiple waves of displacement, but also have intimately shaped the lives of displaced Iraqis through the materiality of cement.

April 2020: Green Sukuk: The Future of Islamic Financing for Climate Change Adaptation (Aneil Tripathy, Bassam Haddad)

Huma Gupta and Bassam Haddad speak with Aneil Tripathy about the role of Islamic Financing in the development of the global Green Bond industry, with a focus on Sukuk, which are asset-backed financial certificates that were developed over a millenia ago and are compliant with the Islamic principle of Shari'ah.