What is freedom?

Maybe a better question is where?

Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers an answer to this elusive question.

Freedom, she says, is a place.

It makes sense that one of the world's foremost abolitionist scholars would be a geographer.

Dr. Gilmore is deeply concerned with the places, not just prisons,

but also homes, schools, high streets and offices,

where carceralism is enacted, and where one day freedom might rain.

Thanks to Dr. Gilmore, most abolitionists tend to think this way these days.

Now Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

and Director of the Centre for Place, Culture and Politics

at the City University of New York's Graduate Centre,

Dr. Gilmore is much better known

as creator of the field of carceral geography,

and someone who has practically defined how we understand abolition today.

No surprise then that two other scholars have collected Dr. Gilmore's essays,

talks and interviews in abolition geography,

published by verso earlier this month.

One central idea in Dr. Gilmore's thinking,

an idea that clearly stems from her cartographic view of the world,

is that of abolition as presents,

the notion that the work of abolition is not just that of tearing down,

...