News and Events
Graduate Center scholars innovate, advance social justice, and promote public debate through their work. Our hundreds of free, public events with prominent GC scholars and artists as well as guests are designed to spark conversation, inspiration, and action.
Featured News

April 19, 2022
With 'Migration Music,' Pianist Han Chen Explores Stories of Immigration
- Student News
- GC Stories

April 18, 2022
Using Hard Data to Tell Human Stories
- Alumni News
- GC Stories

May 2, 2022
Exploring the Layers of Language
- Alumni News
- GC Stories
Upcoming Events
Join us for an upcoming event.
Friday, May 20, 2022
For What? For Whom? An Evening of Collective Storytelling Featuring Kamau Ware of the Black Gotham Experience
5:00 pm — 7:00 pm
1218: Segal Theatre
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Tastes Like War: Grace M. Cho in Conversation with Patricia Clough
7:30 pm
Online
Thursday, May 26, 2022
ARC Seminar: Henrique Espada Lima
4:00 pm — 5:30 pm
Online
Recent Books

The Battle Nearer to Home
The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City
Despite its image as an epicenter of progressive social policy, New York City continues to have one of the nation's most segregated school systems. Tracing the quest for integration in education from the mid-1950s to the present, The Battle Nearer to Home follows the tireless efforts by educational activists to dismantle the deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities that segregation reinforces. The fight for integration has shifted significantly over time, not least in terms of the way "integration" is conceived, from transfers of students and redrawing school attendance zones, to more recent demands of community control of segregated schools. In all cases, the Board eventually pulled the plug in the face of resistance from more powerful stakeholders, and, starting in the 1970s, integration receded as a possible solution to educational inequality. In excavating the history of New York City school integration politics, in the halls of power and on the ground, Christopher Bonastia unearths the enduring white resistance to integration and the severe costs paid by Black and Latino students. This last decade has seen activists renew the fight for integration, but the war is still far from won.
Published July 2022
Stanford University Press

Abolition Geography Essays Towards Liberation
New collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration
Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geographypresents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.
Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.
Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.
Published May 2022
Verso

Les entretiens de Baton Rouge
In 1990-91, while teaching at the University of Baton-Rouge, Louisiana, Edouard Glissant participated in a series of conversations with his medievalist colleague Alexandre Leupin. These conversations reveal his long-standing opposition to systems of thought and to fixed ideologies, as well as his interest in what philosophers generally scorn-landscapes, the blues, minorities. He envisages the collision between the European Middle-Ages and the reign of Louis XIV as a drama between two concepts of the world: the language of rationality at its height-a system of thought transmitted by Catholicism-versus Creolization-epitomized by Rabelais, Montaigne, and the Pleiade poets-which introduced and developed critical thought, secularism, the legal system, democracy, the abolition of slavery, the rights of man and woman. Throughout his personal story, Edouard Glissant exalts literature and particularly poetry which escapes the doctrine of determinism, develops the idea of "eccentric" thought, and seeks what is new and amazing in the story of human and cultural relationships today. Edouard Glissant is a distinguished professor of French at the Graduate Center.
Published May 2022

The Thought Project
The Thought Project shares the knowledge, research, and innovation of Graduate Center scholars with the world. Through a podcast and a Medium blog, The Thought Project allows Graduate Center faculty and students to discuss how their scholarship goes beyond academia and affects the public good.
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