How Does Change Happen?

Leader of the Communist Party USA, civil rights and prison rights activist, Angela Davis, who studied Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt from 1965-1967, poses the challenging question “How Does Change Happen?”.

She proposes that a “critical posture” towards the tools, concepts, vocabularies, and organizing practices that characterize landscapes of struggle involves transforming our habits of thinking and imagination. Such an indispensable scrutiny would contribute towards rethinking the interrelationship between activism, advocacy work, and knowledge production.

On occasion of Angela Davis’ stay at the Cornelia Goethe Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CGC) from 3rd to 11th December as Guest Professor, a lecture series will be held in Winter Semester 2013/2014 in co-operation with the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies (FRCPS).

Internationally reputed scholars are invited to address issues of power, domination, resistance, and radical change from a feminist-postcolonial perspective and critically engage with the question of how to produce and employ knowledge in a transformative way. Addressing issues like the formation of new political spaces and subjectivities during the Occupy Gezi protests in Turkey; the role of gender and violence in the Algerian anticolonial struggle; the situation of Latin American indigenous women within the modern colonial gender system; the visual history of black lesbians in South Africa; the reworking of democracy through interventionist politics in India; and the politics of representation of colonial prisons in Uganda as a strategy of colonial governmentality, this lecture series will explore different sites, scales, and temporalities of social change.