Angela Davis

Angela Davis’ background

Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Professor Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world.

The theme of her work has always been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalised criminalisation of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination.

Drawing upon her own infamous arrest, imprisonment and ultimate acquittal in the early seventies after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List”, Professor Davis shares a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. As both an observer and participant to consciousness-shifting global movements, she bridges the past and present with incisive insights on the interconnected fight for civil rights, feminism, and working class issues, offering thoughtful analysis of ongoing liberation efforts and insights on the intersectional struggle for racial, economic and gender equality in her keynote speeches.

She is the author of nine books and has lectured across the United States as well as around the world in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. As an educator, Professor Davis emphasises the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice.

Angela is a member of the executive board of the Women of Color Resource Center; a San Francisco Bay Area organisation that emphasises popular education of and about women who live in conditions of poverty. She also works with Critical Resistance, a US organisation dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex and is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organisation based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges and Stanford University. She has spent the last 15 years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary PhD program and of Feminist Studies.

Especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions, Davis has helped to popularise the notion of a “prison industrial complex”. In her keynotes, she urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st-century abolitionist movement.