16th annual Israeli Apartheid Week 2020: United Against Racism
Dr. Angela Davis, Justice Is Indivisible
keynote address for International Women’s Day
Angela Davis tickets released online TODAY February 19 @ 12pm! Eventbrite link: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/93958964793
Childminding & accessibility requests welcome by Feb 25, 2020: saia.opirg.uoft@gmail.com!
Sunday, March 8, 2020 | 6:00pm (doors open @5pm)
UofT’s Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles St W, Toronto M5S 2C7)
The University of Toronto’s Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement is deeply honoured and overjoyed to host legendary freedom fighter and renowned intellectual, Dr. Angela Davis, for Justice Is Indivisible, the opening keynote of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) 2020 on International Women’s Day, Sunday, March 8 at 6pm (doors at 5pm).
****About the keynote, Justice Is Indivisible
The event brings student, labour, feminist, and anti-imperialist organizations and movements into conversation on the global Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement. It explores the internationalist ethos that connects Palestine to antiracist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean, across Africa and Asia, and on Turtle Island/North America. This event makes connections between these themes and movements for the abolition of the “prison-industrial complex,” a term coined by Dr. Davis to trouble the increasing corporatization of prisons and the rise of mass incarceration in the U.S. and the rest of the world to exploit oppressed people. As Dr. Davis explains:
“Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison: one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison” (Davis 2016, p.59).
****About Angela Davis
Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world through her activism and scholarship over many decades. 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. 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 most recent book of essays, called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, was published in February 2016. 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.
