CAMPUS LOCKDOWN Speakers
home   schedule   speakers   registration   forum   faq   about	Piya Chatterjee is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is a social and historical anthropologist by training and received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1995. She has published in journals such as Frontiers, The Journal of Historical Sociology, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Signs, and Pedagogy, and her essays have appeared in several edited volumes. Her first book, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Duke University Press, 2001; Zubaan/Kali for Women, 2003) won the John Hope Franklin Book Award from the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. She is currently working on two book-length projects: Witnessing Hunger: Violence, Capital and Women’s Organizing and The Global Plantation: Race, Gender and Imperialism. She is also co-founder of the Cha Bagan Mahila Manch, a community based organization run by tea plantation women and their allies. Angela Y. Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Over the years she has been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar, and activist/organizer. She is a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era. Professor Davis's political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, Alabama, and continued through her high school years in New York. But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA. In 1970 she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground and culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her sixteen-month incarceration, a massive international "Free Angela Davis" campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972. Professor Davis's long-standing commitment to prisoners' rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment. Today she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center, and currently is working on a comparative study of women's imprisonment in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Cuba. During the last twenty-five years, Professor Davis has lectured in all of the fifty United States, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday; and The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan once vowed that Angela Davis would never again teach in the University of California system. Today she is a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1994, she received the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies. Prior to joining the University of Southern California faculty in Critical Studies, professor Rosa Linda Fregoso, whose research interests are in theories of representation, human rights, transnational feminism, cultural studies and media was Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She has also held faculty appointments at UC Davis, where she was director of Women and Gender Studies, and at UC Santa Barbara in the departments of Communications and Chicano Studies. At USC, Fregoso holds appointments in the School of Cinematic Arts and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. She is the author of four books: meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (University of California Press, 2003); The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films by Lourdes Portillo (University of Texas Press, 2001); The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (1993); and Miradas de Mujer (with Norma Iglesias; COLEF and UC Berkeley, 1999). She is currently working on a book on Feminicides in the Americas (co-edited with Cynthia Bejerano and under contract with Duke University Press). Before coming to Academia, Fregoso worked as a radio and television journalist. Between 1979-1982, she produced and hosted The Mexican American Experience for the Longhorn Radio Network (an NPR affiliate). The weekly radio program aired nationally on public and commercial radio stations. From 1977-79, she produced and hosted Telecorpus, a daily talkshow that aired on KORO-TV. Fregoso holds a Ph.D. in the Language, Society & Culture Program (Communication & Literature) from UC San Diego; and a B.J. from the University of Texas, Austin. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a writer, professor of geography and Director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national anti-prison organizations in the United States. Gilmore is also active in the Prison Moratorium Project and California Prison Focus. Her new book, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), analyzes the economic and political changes which led to California's prison-building boom. She also examines the emergence of movements working to dismantle the prison industrial complex, highlighting the ways community-based activism has been successful in bridging urban-rural, racial and other divides to achieve victories against the growing prison system. Fred Moten teaches in the Department of English at Duke University. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and of three collections of poetry, Arkansas (Pressed Wafer Press, 2000), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Press, 2007) and Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008). He is currently working on a book, also to be published by University of Minnesota Press, called Stolen Life: Blackness and Form. Clarissa Rojas was raised in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, and Calexico, California. She is a poet, teacher, scholar and activist/organizer. When she was 12 years old, her family immigrated to Chula Vista, California. She began organizing in high school and has devoted much of the last 15 years working to resist violence, in its myriad manifestations, against and within raza, queer and communities of color. She holds a B.A. in Women’s Studies and Chicano Studies from UC Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and she’s recently freed and PhD’d from UC San Francisco’s Sociology Department. Clarissa teaches Ethnic Studies and Raza Studies at San Francisco State University, where she’s taught for 9 years. She served on the founding national planning committee of INCITE! and is co-editor of Color of Violence: the INCITE Anthology and appears in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: The Nonprofit Industrial Complex. Her poetry has been published in literary journals in Mexico and the “U.S.” She practices rebel dignity, believes in caracoles, and trusts the creative spirit. Audra Simpson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at Cornell University. She has articles in American Quarterly and Junctures and work forthcoming in Law and Contemporary Problems. She has work in the edited collections Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as well as the forthcoming volume, Native Feminisms Without Apology. Her book manuscript is under contract with Duke University Press. Her theoretical and ethnographic interests reside within nationhood, indigeneity, critical forms of history and contemporary colonialisms. She labors to connect these interests between the fields of anthropology, native studies and political theory. In July, 2008 she will commence her tenure track position in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Haunani-Kay Trask is one of Hawai'i's best-known Native leaders and scholars. Her four books include the critically-acclaimed From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i, as well as two books of poetry, Light in the Crevice Never Seen, and Night is a Sharkskin Drum. She was also co-producer and scriptwriter of the award-winning film, "Act of War: The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation" (1993). She was the first full-time Director of the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa in Honolulu. During her tenure, she oversaw construction of a multi-million dollar, five-acre, Hawaiian Studies complex. She has been a Fellow at the Pacific Basin Research Center at Harvard University (1998), a National Endowment for the Arts Writer-in-Residence at Santa Fe, New Mexico (1996), a Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder (1989), and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellow (1984). Professor Trask descends from a long line of Native orators. Her grandfather, a Hawai'i Territorial Senator, and her father, a lawyer and advocate for Hawaiians, were among the political figures known for their speechmaking and political contributions toward securing Native land rights in Hawai'i. Today, Professor Trask is widely considered an authority on Hawaiian political issues, as well as an internationally-known Indigenous human rights advocate. She has recently spoken in the Basque Country, Donostia, Spain; at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa; at the First International Conference on White Supremacy and Reparations at Benedict College, South Carolina; and as an indigenous Hawaiian representative at anti-racism gatherings in Brisbane, Australia; Barcelona, Spain; Geneva, Switzerland; Strasbourg, France; Vancouver, Victoria, and Hull, Canada; Auckland, Wellington, and Otago, New Zealand. Last updated 3.13.2008 Campus Lockdown Organizing Collective | www.woclockdown.org | info@woclockdown.org