'Against Innocence' — Miriam Ticktin in Conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Scholars Miriam Ticktin and Ruth Wilson Gilmore challenge innocence as a political and moral framework in humanitarian politics and abolitionist thought.
Why we picked this
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is one of the most important thinkers on incarceration and racial capitalism working today — her engagement with Ticktin's challenge to humanitarian innocence promises the kind of intellectual friction that generates real insight.
Miriam Ticktin’s “Against Innocence” makes a pointed argument: that humanitarian politics — the framework through which we extend compassion to refugees, migrants, and the vulnerable — depends on constructing its subjects as innocent victims, which simultaneously excludes those who don’t fit that profile and depoliticizes the structural causes of their suffering. Innocence, in this reading, is not a neutral moral category but a gatekeeping mechanism. It decides who deserves care and who doesn’t, and it does so in ways that tend to track race, gender, and class.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work arrives at related conclusions from a different direction. Her book “Golden Gulag” is the definitive study of California’s prison expansion, and her abolitionist framework argues that prisons are not solutions to violence but organized abandonment — the state’s way of warehousing surplus populations. For Gilmore, the question of who gets counted as innocent is inseparable from the question of who gets punished, and both are inseparable from political economy.
Putting these two scholars in conversation at CUNY’s Graduate Center is a chance to watch two sophisticated frameworks interrogate each other. They are not simply agreeing — Gilmore’s abolitionism and Ticktin’s humanitarianism come from different traditions with different political commitments. The friction between them is where the most interesting thinking is likely to happen.