In 2020, Social Justice Week celebrated its 10th anniversary with a special opening night event called Beyond Pipelines and Prisons: Infrastructures of Abolition. In today’s episode we bring you highlights from this event. It features two extraordinary feminist, anti-colonial thinkers in dialogue about how to build the infrastructures that can take us beyond planetary social and ecological collapse:

Winona LaDuke is an international thought leader in the areas of climate justice, renewable energy, and environmental justice. She is a rural development economist working on issues of economic, food, and energy sovereignty, and is the author of six books. She leads several organizations including Honor the Earth.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York. She is Co-founder of many organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Winona LaDuke are both deeply invested and active in on-the-ground social transformation. They have built vital infrastructures for survival and flourishing in their respective communities. Both are also active in struggles against the expansion of toxic and colonial infrastructures like pipelines and prisons.

In this event moderated by Shiri Pasternak, an assistant professor in the department of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University, Leduke and Gilmore draw on their respective lived experience in urban communities and on remote Indigenous reservations. Together they discuss what a decolonized, ecologically and socially just future might look like.

Host: Kiké Roach
Editor: Eunice Addo