Plenary Sessions

Keynote speakers:
 

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and professor of geography at the City University of New York. She is a specialist in abolitionism and the American prison system. Professor Gilmore is an influential scholar in the United States and also co-founder of many social justice organisations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, which she launched together with researcher and activist Angela Davis. These two organisations are both extremely important in the fight against institutional abuse of power by the American penal and prison system, and as anti-racist voices in the struggle to abolish discrimination in the USA.

Francisca Van Dunem was born in Luanda in 1955. She completed her degree in law at the University of Lisbon’s School of Law in July 1977 and served as a magistrate in the Prosecutor General’s Office from September 1979. Van Dunem was monitor of penal and processual law at the School of Law, University of Lisbon between 1977 and 1979; and syndication and inquiry assessor at the Alta Autoridade contra a Corrupção [Portuguese High Authority Against Corruption], between 1985 and 1987, on commission. She has also served as the Prosecutor General’s delegate in the Labour Court, the Lisbon District Deputy Prosecutor’s Office and The Central Department of Criminal Investigation and Prosecution. Van Dunem served in the Prosecutor General’s Office between 1999 and 2001, and was Director of The Central Department of Criminal Investigation and Prosecution, and Lisbon District Prosecutor, respectively from 2001 to 2007, and 2007 to 2015, the year she suspended duties to take office as Minister of Justice in XXI Constitutional Government of Portugal. Van Dunem was a member of the European Judicial Network as an expert in penal affairs between 2003 and 2007, and Portugal’s representative in several meetings and the technical committees of several international organisations, namely the Council of Europe European Committee on Crime Problems, and the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. She represented the High Council of the Public Prosecution Service in the Unidade de Missão para a Reforma Penal [Portugal’s, now defunct, mission for penal reform]; was a member of the Comissão de Revisão do Código de Processo Penal de 2009 [the 2009 commission set up to revise the penal code] and the High Council of the Public Prosecution Service; and she also represented the High Council of the Public Prosecution Service in the General Council of the Centre for Judicial Studies. Counsellor Judge of the Supreme Court of Justice.

Shahd Wadi Palestinian, among other possibilities, but freedom is, above all, Palestinian. She essayed her forms of resistance when she wrote “Feminismos dos corpos ocupados: as mulheres palestinianas entre duas resistências” [The Feminisms of captured bodies: Palestinian women between two forms of resistance], her master’s thesis in feminist studies at the University of Coimbra, the same institution she obtained her PhD from. Both her MA and PhD theses were new, at the time, in Portugal, in the area of feminist studies. She was later selected for the platform Best Young Researchers. Her PhD research, which serves as the basis for her book Corpos na Trouxa. Histórias-artísticas-de-vida de mulheres palestinianas no exílio (2017), explores the field of artistic narrative vis-à-vis the Israeli occupation of Palestine, proposing that art serves as a life testament, including her own.