Keynote Speakers

Dylan Rodríguez is Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies.  He was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars in 2020 and was President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021).  

Dylan’s thinking, writing, teaching, and scholarly activist labors address the complexity and normalized proliferation of historical regimes and logics of anti-Black and racial-colonial violence in everyday state, cultural, and social formations.  He conceptualizes abolitionist and other forms of movement as part of the historical, collective genius of rebellion, survival, abolition, and radical futurity.  

Dylan is the author of three books, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).  He was co-editor of the field-shaping anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016) and has written in a wide cross-section of scholarly and popular venues, including Social Text, Black Agenda Report, Harvard Law Review, American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Colorlines, The Abolitionist, and Scholar & Feminist Online.  

Dylan is a founding member of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association and Critical Resistance, a national carceral abolitionist organization.  He is part of the Abolition Collective and Scholars for Social Justice, and continuously works in and alongside various radical social movements and activist collectives. 

Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dorothy Roberts is an award-winning author and expert on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. Her latest book, TORN APART, lucidly explains how the child welfare system destroys Black families—and how abolition can build a safer world.

Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and bioethics. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.