When: 8:00 am, Saturday, April 19, 2014
Where: TBA @ TESC
FEE: $10.00/$20.00 (Student:Poor/Working Stiff)
What: A discussion & workshop exploring the relationship between racism and the prison-industrial complex as a profitable means of oppression
Peace Works 2014 Speaker Bios
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, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. Mostly 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 Ph.D program – and of Feminist Studies.
Angela 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.” 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, and a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In 2012 she published a new collection of essays entitled The Meaning of Freedom.
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.
Noura Erakat
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and activist. She is currently an Abraham L. Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple University, Beasley School of Law and a member of the Legal Support Network for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights. She has taught international human rights law in the Middle East at Georgetown University since Spring 2009. She is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.
She has helped to initiate and organize several national formations including AMWAJ-Arab Women Arising for Justice and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN). She currently serves on the board of the Trans-Arab Research Institute, is a Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka, and is a founding member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival. Noura spent the Spring 2010 academic semester in Beirut, Lebanon where she worked with human rights attorney, Nizar Saghieh, on several issues including administrative detention of Iraqi refugees. She helped Saghieh establish the Legal Agenda, a Lebanon-based NGO dedicated to studying law and society that advocates for legal reform in the Arab world through civic and judicial empowerment.
