The Work and Us: A Survey of Incarcerated People on Prison Labor

Over the course of the past year, The Work and Us has been conducting surveys of incarcerated people to find out what they're thinking about prison labor, extraction, and freedom. In this conversation scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore and currently incarcerated organizer Stevie Wilson discuss some of the results, and what they mean for the struggle.
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Speakers

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press) and the forthcoming book Change Everything (Haymarket) . Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).

Stephen Wilson is a currently incarcerated, Black, queer writer, activist and student. He is a founding member of Dreaming Freedom Practicing Abolition, a network of self-organized prisoner study groups building abolitionist community behind and across prison walls. Follow him on Twitter @AlwaysStevie.

Minali Aggarwal is a graduate student worker, organizer, and artist. Her research focuses on race and politics, specifically the ways race is constructed and reified through cultural and political processes and institutions. She is a co-organizer of The Work and Us, an abolitionist participatory research project aimed at understanding and documenting the perspectives of imprisoned people on labor, prison, and the struggle for freedom.

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Special thanks to the Marguerite Casey Foundation for helping sponsor this talk.

This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Study & Struggle. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.