Angela Davis

Angela Y. Davis is professor emerita of history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, policing, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many influential books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. Her most recent publications include Abolition. Feminism. Now., co-authored with Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, as well as Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1, a collection of essays.

She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to dismantling the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia, that works in solidarity with incarcerated women and gender-diverse people.

Like many educators, Professor Davis is deeply concerned with the societal tendency to invest more in prisons than in education. Having helped to popularize the concept of the “prison industrial complex,” she now challenges audiences to think seriously about the possibility of a world without prisons—and to participate in building a 21st-century abolitionist movement.