[artinfo] Angela Davis speaks on "Art, Philosophy, and Politics" at the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm

[Art&Education]

Angela Davis speaks on "Art, Philosophy, and Politics"

Lecture: Tuesday, 8 September 2015, 18h

Royal Institute of Art
Flaggmansvägen 1, Skeppsholmen
111 49 Stockholm 
Sweden

<http://www.kkh.se>www.kkh.se
As part of The Domain the Great Bear series, the 
Royal Institute of Art Stockholm is honored to 
have Angela Davis speak publicly on "Art, 
Philosophy, and Politics." Through her activism 
and scholarship over the last decades, Angela 
Davis has been deeply involved in the quest for 
social justice both in the United States and 
worldwide. Her work as an educator, activist, 
scholar and writer-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 
equality.

Angela Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita 
of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies 
at University of California/Santa Cruz, and the 
author of nine books, including Women, Race, and 
Class (1980), Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), and a 
book of essays entitled The Meaning of Freedom: 
And Other Difficult Dialogues (2012). This more 
recent publication confronts the interconnected 
issues of power, race, gender, class, 
incarceration and conservatism to explore a 
radical notion of freedom as a participatory 
social process rooted in difficult dialogues that 
demand a new way of thinking and being.

In recent years a persistent theme of Davis' 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. Davis draws upon her own 
experiences in the early 1970s as a person who 
spent 18 months in jail and on trial after being 
placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

Dr. Davis holds a doctorate in Philosophy from 
Humboldt University in Berlin. She studied 
Philosophy at Brandeis University under Frankfurt 
School's Herbert Marcuse, who became her mentor. 
After graduating from the University of 
California, San Diego, in the late 1960s, she 
joined the Black Panthers and also participated 
in Che Lumumba Club, an all-black branch of the 
Communist Party. Her teaching position at the 
University of California, Los Angeles was 
retracted when Davis was fired by the school 
because of her association with communism. Davis 
fought the case in the courts and subsequently 
won.

She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, 
a national organization dedicated to the 
dismantling of the prison industrial complex. 
Internationally, Angela Davis is affiliated with 
Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization 
based in Queensland, Australia that works in 
solidarity with women in prison.
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. 


A special screening and presentation by documentary filmmaker Göran Olsson  
3 September, 17:30h at the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm

Preceeding Angela Davis' September 8th lecture at 
the Royal Institute of Art, documentary filmmaker 
Göran Olsson will screen and speak about 
acclaimed films The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 
(2011) and Concerning Violence (2014) at the 
Royal Institute of Art.