An Audience with Angela Davis

The Stuart Hall Foundation is delighted to welcome world-famous author and activist Angela Davis for ‘An Audience with Angela Davis’, an online event hosted in partnership with Southbank Centre from 17th - 24th September 2020.

From the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the present, Angela Davis has been an important figure in the historical struggles of our times. Through her scholarship and organising, Davis has been a living witness to the shifting frontiers of social justice and is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on women, race and class. 

In the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic, in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement and the upcoming US election, Angela Davis will deliver a keynote speech reflecting on what led us to this historic chapter in our history and what might come next. Davis will be in conversation with lecturer and author Dr Brett St Louis about the political scene in the US heading into the upcoming election and the ongoing struggle for economic, racial and gender justice. Davis and St Louis will then respond to questions submitted by the general public in advance of the event. 

The event will also be the inaugural event for Southbank Centre’s new Inside Out series as part of their Autumn season of events. 

Audiences can purchase a ticket up until 24th September 2020 that gives them access to the event recording for 8 days.

TICKETS: £5

About Angela Davis

Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela 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.

Professor 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 fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness – an interdisciplinary PhD program – and of Feminist Studies.

Angela Davis is the author of ten 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 seventies as a person who spent eighteen 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 entitled The Meaning of Freedom. Her most recent book of essays, called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, was published in February 2016.

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 women in prison.

Like many educators, Professor 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.

About Brett St Louis

Brett St Louis is senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, having previously been lecturer in sociology at Bristol University and assistant professor in ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of C.L.R. James’ Critique of Modernity: Race, Politics and Poetics (Routledge 2007) and is currently completing a book on racial eliminativism that develops a critical genealogy and analysis of postracial thought.