Event

Meet the Speakers

Dr. Timothy Malone is a formerly incarcerated scholar who spent eight years inside of various California prisons. Upon release, he earned his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. His monograph in development, The Carceral Thresher: Abandonment, Contagion and Sacrifice in the Contemporary Prison argues that the primary punishments that any inmate is subjected to within the contemporary prison exceed what they were sentenced to endure by the court. The primary function of the contemporary prison, then, is to actively abandon a largely racialized, rendered-superfluous population within a state-totalized space to a steered machinery of delegated, proto-genocidal death production – social, subjective and/or biological.

Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad is the Founding Director of the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies and a Visiting Affiliate Fellow at Princeton University. She is the author of Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (NYU Press, 2022) and Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (Fortress Press, 2017). Dr. Vesely-Flad is the recipient of grants from the Fetzer Institute, the Lenz Foundation, and the Hemera Foundation. She is a 2024-2025 Fellow of the Crossroads Program. She is currently at work on The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (North Atlantic Books, 2025).

Dr. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an Assistant Professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research and teaching are focused on the carceral state, racial capitalism, feminist and queer politics, grassroots social movements, abolition geographies, disaster and climate justice, and the US South. She is the author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (UNC Press) and co-editor of The Jail Is Everywhere: Organizing Against the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso Books). Her words can also be found in a range of academic and activist venues such as Southern Cultures; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; Gender, Place, and Culture; Critical Criminology; Boston Review; and Truthout. She has been involved in various community organizing projects against criminalization, policing, and prisons for over 15 years.

Dr. Laura McTighe is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University and the Co-Founder of Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans. As a leading scholar-activist in the fields of race, religion, abolition, and mutual aid, her research, teaching, and service all center collaborative knowledge production as both theory and method for analyzing the violences of gendered racial capitalism in our everyday lives, and for dreaming beyond what is to build together the world that must be. She is the author with Women With A Vision (WWAV) of Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South, published by Duke University Press in 2024. She also serves as Principal Investigator on two major public humanities projects funded through generous grants from the Henry Luce Foundation: “Creating the World Anew: Religion, Economy, and Mutual Aid” and “The Callie House Project: Religion and Public Health in the Black Experience in the American South” Both of these projects align closely with her next book project, Abolition is Sacred Work.