Announcement: Pratt to Host Activist, Writer, and Teacher Angela Davis as Scholar in Residence April 22-23

Pratt Institute will host activist, writer, philosopher, and
teacher Angela Davis as Scholar in Residence for Spring 2008 on Tuesday,
April 22 and Wednesday, April 23. As part of her residency, Davis will
participate in a series of events that are free and open to the public.

Davis will give a keynote address titled "Identifying Racism in the Era
of Neoliberalism" at 7 PM on Tuesday, April 22 following a 5 PM screening
of The Farm: Angola. On April 23 Davis will participate in roundtable
discussion "Urban Artists and the Politics of Visibility" with New
York-based artists Dread Scott, Hank Willis Thomas, Alain "KET" Mariduea,
and Amy Sananman. All events are to be held in Memorial Auditorium on
Pratt's Brooklyn Campus. Admission will be offered on a
first-come-first-served basis.

Davis was associated with the Blank Panther Party and the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Educated at the Frankfurt School, Davis first came to national attention
when she was placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most
Wanted List on false charges, driven underground, arrested, and
incarcerated for 16 months. While in prison, she wrote brilliant articles
and became the focus of the international solidarity movement -the "Free
Angela Davis" campaign-which brought about her acquittal.

Davis ran for U.S. Vice President under the Communist Party ticket in
1980, and in 1997 helped found Critical Resistance, a national
organization dedicated to dismantling the prison-industrial complex.

Today, she holds the University of California Presidential Chair in
African American and Feminist Studies in the History of Consciousness
Department at the Santa Cruz campus. She is the author of eight acclaimed
books, including The Autobiography of Angela Davis, Are Prisons
Obsolete?, and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture.

Her residency is sponsored by the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences;
the Department of English and Humanities; and the Initiative for Art,
Community, and Social Change with support from the Office of the Provost,
the Critical and Visual Studies Program, and the Pratt Film Society.

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