Professor Angela Davis and University of California Santa Cruz is pleased to announce a call for papers for the 2009 Legacies in the Making. Abstract deadline: August 15, 2009.
Angela Davis: Legacies in the Making
October 31 - November 1, 2009
UC Santa Cruz
For almost four decades, Angela Y. Davis's scholarship and activism has defined the meaning and practice of being a public intellectual and has radically transformed many sites of knowledge production, including the positioning of the U.S. academy as a site of intervention and social transformation. Few professors have had such a broad impact in their fields of expertise or on the world in their lifetimes. This gathering of her former students, in conversation with scholars nationally, maps the impact of her vision on issues such as democratic theory, philosophy, Marxism, cultural studies/popular culture, social policy, race, class, and feminisms. Professor Davis has also trained students as activist scholars for almost four decades in both university systems in California. We thus convene this conference to examine the poetics and politics of Professor Davis's pedagogy in California over the past forty years (1969-2009) and to consider how her role as an activist scholar/teacher bridges the academy/community divide and dismantles the false dichotomy of theory/praxis.
Interested scholars and activists are invited to submit abstracts for fifteen to twenty-minute presentations addressing the work of Angela Y. Davis for the following four panels (please indicate which panel you wish to participate in). A fifth panel, Legacies in the Making, facilitated by Professor Bettina Aptheker, is by invitation. Questions and inquiries may be directed to: davissymposium2009@gmail.com
Abstracts must include your name, professional title and affiliation, e-mail address and telephone, a presentation title, and should be 500-700 words in length. Please mail your submission, subject heading "AYD abstract," to: ihr@ucsc.edu as a pdf file by August 15, 2009. For more information, please see http://ihr.ucsc.edu/Panel 1: Voices of Resistance
Facilitator: Rashad Shabazz, George Washington Henderson Post Doctoral Fellow, Geography, University of Vermont.
This panel addresses themes of institutional persecution and individual and collective resistances. Institutions can include, but are not limited to, the prison industrial complex, the state, schools, the workplace, and the home, and resistances might be anything from direct action to cultural production and pedagogy.
Panel 2: Race, Gender, and Politics
Facilitator: Kehaulani Kauanui, American Studies, Anthropology, Wesleyan University.
In this panel presenters will be discussing how Angela Davis's framing of race, gender, and politics have affected their work. Papers may also address the history and legacy of Davis's political affiliations by identifying a particular argument or theoretical approach from Davis's texts or lectures, and by discussing how their work builds upon that approach.
Panel 3: Cultural Legacies
Facilitator: Kevin Fellezs, School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, UC Merced.
Papers in this panel will connect the presenters' work with Angela Davis's analyses of such cultural productions as the Blues and visual representation, and the complex relationship of culture to race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Panel 4: Are Prisons Obsolete?
Facilitator: Sora Han, Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine.
Angela Davis's contribution to critiques of state violence and the prison industrial complex is considerable; the papers in this panel will explore how panelists have drawn on that work to inform their own related projects.
