Civil rights activist, scholar Angela Davis to speak at St. Olaf
Activist, scholar, and writer Angela Davis will visit St. Olaf College March 2 to deliver the Political Awareness Committee’s spring lecture.
The event will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Boe Memorial Chapel. It is free and open to the public.
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 to struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice.
Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and the University of California, Berkeley. She also has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, Vassar College, Syracuse University, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University.
Mostly 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 nine 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 1970s as a person who spent 18 months in jail and on trial, 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 recent books include Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete? about the abolition of the prison industrial complex, a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and a collection of essays titled The Meaning of Freedom. Her most recent book of essays is called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.
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.
PAC is a branch of the St. Olaf Student Government Association responsible for facilitating, encouraging, and growing campus political dialogue.