Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (2003)

Hopefully you’ve all managed to have a lovely summer.

We’re looking forward to discussing some more intersectional feminist reads together and seeing those of you we haven’t seen for a while. We’d love to meet you if we haven’t yet met too.

In our next two meetings we’re going to delve into the topic of feminist abolition.

To start, on the 28th October we’ll pick up Angela Davis’ fantastic book ‘Are prisons obsolete?’ (2003). Here we see a theoretical framework set out for abolitionist work where we’re asked to think about how we and our societies take imprisonment for granted, and how that ultimately means we don’t develop other ways of dealing with social problems.

The background to this book lies in Davis’ own experience and also her previous work. The foundational ‘Women, Race and Class’ (1981) already points to the interconnectedness of all systems of oppression and requires that those who call themselves feminists acknowledge more than just some of them.

You can download the text in full here:
https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf

We’ll meet at 19:30 and will be hosting online through zoom.

Here's the registration form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/109mV-kufvehjcq09gl37oi8hjP4aUzE5q-H5M7h96io

Please fill this in as we use the email addresses you give us there to send you the zoom link. Also, if you have any questions / comments on the text that you’d like to discuss during the session there’s space for you to let us know that too.

We’ll close the form and send out the zoom link on the day of the event.