Description

Recipient of AAG Lifetime Achievement Honors in 2020, Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has deeply enriched the study of critical human geography and reshaped the political landscape. Dr. Gilmore’s scholarship on racism, imprisonment, environmental justice, and freedom has transformed the discipline’s understandings of the state, capitalist restructuring, and social change. Moreover, her work has extended the reach of geographic thinking beyond the discipline and the academy to broader publics. Dr. Gilmore’s insistence that “a geographic imperative lies at the heart of social justice struggles” pulsates through her work; she demonstrates how the geographies of racism and incarceration are also the very sites where the imagination and praxis of freedom and abolition take place. For Dr. Gilmore, intellectual work is political work. In her words and hands, geography as a discipline can offer a theoretical approach to changing human relationships across landscapes. Her scholarship, transformative teaching, rigorous and life-altering mentoring, and visionary leadership have transformed multiple fields and extended well beyond academia. This session convenes several geographers, including former students and longtime comrades, who will speak to Dr. Gilmore’s formative work and its groundwork not only for the future of the discipline, but for nurturing collective life and struggle during ongoing crises.