On 27 May, UPF will pay tribute to its honorary doctor, Angela Davis
The activist was awarded the distinction online during the pandemic and is returning to UPF at an event on the Ciutadella campus.
Davis will be talking to the journalist Mònica Terribas about the topics she has addressed in her intellectual pursuits.
Angela Davis, an honorary doctor from Pompeu Fabra University, will be visiting the Catalan university on 27 May. Coinciding with Davis’ visit to the La Literal Fair in Barcelona, UPF is organizing a tribute event including a conversation between the activist and the journalist and UPF professor, Mònica Terribas.
It will take place at 11.30 am in the Mercè Rodoreda auditorium on the Ciutadella campus (all locations are already sold out, but you can follow online). Titled “Civil rights and social justice”, the event will address issues such as the relationship between university, knowledge and technology; the penitentiary system; civil rights, and collective struggles in an increasingly individualistic society.
Pompeu Fabra University thus shows its recognition of her extensive academic and intellectual career including valuable analyses of the relationship between gender, race and social class, and her active militancy in defence of civil rights, justice, equality and freedom of individuals, three years after being made an honorary doctor.
UPF honorary doctor
Angela Davis was awarded an honorary doctorate by UPF in March 2021, in a ceremony that was streamed due to the pandemic, from Oakland (California). Then, Davis expressed her gratitude for the recognition in her acceptance speech, while highlighting intersectionality as the key in the analysis of gender discrimination: “Gender cannot be separated from race and class, we need to address the systemic causes of exploitation”.
Tània Verge and Linda G. Jones, a full professor and a lecturer of the UPF departments of Political and Social Sciences and of Humanities, respectively, gave the laudatory speech for the doctorand, and Elena Larrauri, a full professor of Criminology of the Department of Law, was her patron.
Davis was the seventeenth personality to be invested honoris causa by the UPF, since the first recognition of Desmond Tutu, in the 1999-2000 academic year, and the fourth woman after Maria João Pires, invested in the 2018-2019 academic year. The event was followed by more than half a thousand people.
A fighter for human rights and against racial discrimination
Angela Y. Davis (Birmingham [Alabama], 1944) graduated in French Studies at Brandeis University (Massachusetts) and in Philosophy at the Goethe University (Frankfurt). She has devoted much of her life to defending human rights and feminism and to combating racial discrimination. She is an emeritus professor of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Her childhood was marked by the Jim Crow laws that deprived African Americans of civil rights and imposed racial segregation in public places such as schools and public transport, in the southern United States. From a young age, she witnessed discrimination in her local neighbourhood of Dynamite Hill, due to the large number of African-American families that were dynamited by the Ku Klux Klan.
The daughter of an activist family, she quickly became involved in movements against social segregation, class oppression and the patriarchy. At university, she immersed herself in the principles of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and especially the idea that the individual has the right to rebel against the system.
Angela Davis’s involvement in the civil rights struggle began during the 1960s, when she joined the Black Panthers and the Communist Party in the United States, which is why she was dismissed from her position as a professor of Philosophy at the University of California. During her early years of political and intellectual activism, she participated in the campaign to improve conditions in prisons, especially those that discriminated against the African-American community.
Davis was accused of participating in incidents at prisons by getting weapons into the prison, and was persecuted by the FBI and held for 16 months, in a case from which she was eventually acquitted.
Among her most relevant publications are books such as Women, Race and Class (Akal, 2006); Democracia de la abolición: prisiones, racismo y violencia (Trotta, 2016); her Autobiography (Captain Swing, 2016); Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Kindle, 2016), and Podem abolir les presons? (Tigre de Paper, 2020).