Activist Angela Davis to Speak at CSUSB April 17
Angela Davis, American political activist, philosopher, academic and author, will visit Cal State San Bernardino on April 17.
The talk, to be held noon to 1 p.m. in the Santos Manuel Student Union (SMSU) North Conference Center, will be moderated by Angie Otiniano Verissimo, CSUSB associate professor of health science and human ecology, and Alexandra Thambi, biology major and chair of the SMSU board of directors. A virtual option is also available.
A book signing with Davis will follow from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. in the SMSU South Fourplex.
To attend the event and for a chance to receive a book, register at the A Conversation with Dr. Angela Davis registration webpage.
This will be Davis’ second visit to CSUSB. She last spoke on campus in February 2010 at an event hosted by the Women’s Resource Center, which was attended by more than 700 students and guests.
Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial and gender justice.
Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College and UC Berkeley. She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, Syracuse University, the Claremont Colleges and Stanford University. Most recently she spent 15 years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness – an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program – and of Feminist Studies.
Davis is the author of 10 books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and South America. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination.
She draws upon her own experiences in the early ’70s as a person who spent 18 months in jail and on trial (she was acquitted by a jury), after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” She also has conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment.
Her books include “Abolition Democracy” and “Are Prisons Obsolete?,” and two books of essays entitled “The Meaning of Freedom” and “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.” Her most recent books include a re-issue of “Angela Davis: An Autobiography and Abolition. Feminism. Now.,” with co-authors Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie.
Twice a vice presidential candidate on the Communist Party USA ticket, Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia, that works in solidarity with women in prison.
Like many educators, Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.
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