Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Y. 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.
Dr. Davis’s teaching career has taken her to numerous college campuses across the United States, and she has also given lectures in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. She spent 15 years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and of Feminist Studies.
A persistent theme of Dr. Davis’s 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 seventies as a person who spent 18 months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender, and imprisonment. Her works 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 entitled The Meaning of Freedom. As of 2019, her most recent book of essays is titled Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.
Angela 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 incarcerated women.
Like many educators, Dr. 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 prompts her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st-century abolitionist movement.
