What are the different tools for combating racism today, after Obama’s presidency and the backlash of the Trump regime?  What do the tools of struggle and emancipation look like, and do aesthetics play a role? Please join us as activist, scholar and writer Angela Davis discusses politics & aesthetics in the era of Black Lives Matter.

Held weekly every Monday at 6:30pm during the academic terms, SKIRBALL TALKS hosts visionaries from the worlds of politics, the arts, sciences, academia, and more. This event is free and open to the public.

**This event will be live streamed! Find it at the Institute for African American Affairs’ Facebook, at 6:30PM, Nov 5**

PLEASE READ IN FULL REGARDING SEAT RESERVATIONS: RSVP does not guarantee a ticket. You can begin picking up tickets at the NYU Box Office (566 LaGuardia Pl) 2 hours prior to event. Patrons are discouraged from arriving  to form a line earlier than 4:30pm . Patrons are able to acquire one (1) ticket per person. Tickets cannot be picked up on the behalf of others. Multiple reservations under the same name will not be honored. Tickets must be claimed by 6:10 pm. Unclaimed tickets will be released to those on the standby line. All tickets are subject to availability.
Standby Line 
We are no longer accepting RSVPs. If you do not have a reservation, a standby line will form 30 minutes prior to the event. Patrons are discouraged from arriving to form a line earlier than 6pm. Entry is not guaranteed. All tickets are subject to availability.

 

No Late Seating

Even if you have a ticket, you must be seated in the theater by 6:20pm. At 6:20pm, we may open up any empty seats in the theater to people in standby line.

Co-sponsored by the Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture.

Angela Davis photo

Show More

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 Ph.D 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.

 

New York University Logo in Purple

Humanities New York Logo in Black

The Skirball Talks series is made possible in part by a Humanities New York Action Grant and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. 

Show Less