UChicago Race Center to Host Annual Public Lecture on Imagining A World Without Prisons

UC Santa Cruz Professor Gina Dent to Speak on Visualizing Abolition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 2, 2024
Contact: Anaga Dalal, adalal@uchicago.edu, 201.600.4718 (c)

Chicago, IL. Next Wednesday, May 8 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture (CSRPC) at the University of Chicago will host its signature event, the Annual Public Lecture (at International House, 1414 E. 59th St.).

This year’s lecture will feature Gina Dent, professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies, and Associate Dean of DEI at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dent is also coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now. with Angela Y. Davis, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie.

Professor Dent’s talk, “Visualizing Abolition: How to Imagine A World Without Prisons,” will address the harms that prisons perpetuate and will invite the audience to consider how, through art, society can reconsider the very need for prisons. Dent will be joined in conversation by Professor Cathy J. Cohen, the inaugural director of the newly formed Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and CSRPC faculty affiliate at the University of Chicago.

“The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration with some 2.3 million people locked up,” says CSRPC Executive Director Tracye A. Matthews. “In addition, about 11 million persons in the country experience some form of punitive control from detention centers to electronic monitoring, all of which disproportionately impacts communities of color,” Matthews continues. “Our guest lecturer this year will help reframe conversations around justice by addressing the racialized injustice of mass incarceration.”

Professor Dent’s writing and curatorial practice help to amplify CSRPC’s latest initiative, Beyond Prisons, which is a teaching and learning initiative that interrogates, disrupts, and moves us beyond carceral logics and systems.

“Beyond Prisons, in concert with Professor Dent’s lecture, amplify our core mission at CSRPC: To advance scholarship, arts, and public dialogue about the centrality of race and racism in the systems we inhabit,” Matthews says.

Register to attend at bit.ly/ginadent. There will be a reception with local groups that work on abolition and social justice from 6:00 to 7:00 pm, followed by the program.