Please join us virtually May 12 for the bi-annual Sonnabend Lecture.
This year’s lecture will be delivered by Dr. Angela Davis. Through her activism and scholarship over the last decades, Davis has been deeply involved in our nation’s quest for social justice. 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, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. She spent the last 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 seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” Davis has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender, and imprisonment. Her most recent book is 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 other 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.
The Sonnabend Lecture honors the memory of Elsa Sonnabend, former Chair of the Lesley University Board of Trustees. The Sonnabend Lecture brings to Lesley’s campus distinguished practitioners in the field of human services to work with Lesley’s students and faculty and enrich the academic community.
This event will be held virtually as a Zoom Webinar and is free and open to the public. Participants must register through Zoom to receive the secure link.
The 45-minute lecture will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A.