In light of the unwarranted firing of Garrett Felber from the University of Mississippi despite his scholarship and contributions to dismantling the carceral state, a panel of activist academics discuss the implications of the situation and the relationship between the university and social movements.

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Speakers:

Garrett Felber was recently fired by the University of Mississippi despite his incredible work in the study of the racist American carceral state and his activism with the Study and Struggle project that organizes against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, she has two books forthcoming in 2021: Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition and Abolition Geography.

Elizabeth Hinton is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States.

Robin D.G. Kelley is the Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and author of numerous books on the history of social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; Black intellectuals; music and visual culture.

Kiese Laymon is the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi and the author of the bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Her most recent book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership , was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.