Abolition Symposium

Che Gossett

Che Gossett is a Black non binary femme writer and critical theorist specializing in queer/trans studies, aesthetic theory, abolitionist thought and black study. They are the Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at the Initiative for a Just Society, Columbia Law School, and a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, in the Animal Law and Policy Program. Che received their doctorate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, New Brunswick in May 2021. They received a BA in African American Studies from Morehouse College, an MAT in Social Studies from Brown University, an MA in History from the University of Pennsylvania and were a 2019-2020 Helena Rubenstein Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Che received a Ruth Stephan Fellowship from Beinecke Library at Yale University for the summer of 2022, to research the papers of queer feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Gossett has been a fellow at the Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford University, as well as the Centre for Visual Culture and Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge.

Currently, Gosset is finishing two manuscripts for Duke University Press–the first being a political biography of AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and the second emerging out of their dissertation, theorizing the ways in which abolition is activated in Black contemporary art. Gossett has co-edited a special issue of TSQ “Trans in a Time of HIV/AIDS” with Professor Eva Hayward, and their syllabus on trans and non-binary methods for art and art history co-authored with Professor David Getsy won the College Art Journal Award for Distinction. For the fall semester of 2023, they are in residence as assistant professor/visiting scholar at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Gossett will be presenting advance work from the manuscript in progress on the activation of abolition in Black contemporary art.

Jennifer Gonzalez

Jennifer Gonzalez writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation, digital and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space, public space, virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender. González has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published articles in numerous scholarly and art publications such as Journal of Visual Culture, Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Archives of American Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Open Space and Art Journal. She has lectured extensively at universities and art museums nationally and internationally and teaches regularly at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York.

Kimberly Juanita Brown

Kimberly Juanita Brown is Associate Professor at Dartmouth and one of the key organizers of the international IAVC conference on Kinship-Abolition-Freedom. Brown will present work that builds on the just published book, MorteVivum (MIT Press, 2024). Brown’s research and teaching gather at the intersection of African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies. In particular, Brown is interested in the relationship between visuality and black subjectivity. Brown’s first book, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction and the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space. Brown’s latest book, Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual is just out from MIT Press. This project explores the relationship between photography and histories of anti-blackness on the cusp of the twenty-first century.