Mike Davis | Lannan Podcasts

Recorded on YouTube on 05 October 2021.

The 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize was awarded to Angela Y. Davis for her lifetime achievements as a public intellectual advocating for racial, gender, and economic justice; to Mike Davis for his life’s work as a public intellectual who encourages critical analysis of society in the service of constructing an alternative, post-capitalist future in both theory and practice; and Ruth Wilson Gilmore for a lifetime of achievement as a public intellectual working toward the decarceration of California, the United States, and the world. Join all three, along with acclaimed author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, for an urgent conversation on abolition, cultural freedom, and liberation.

This was a Readings and Conversations event. This event was in partnership with Haymarket Books.

Listen to the audio version here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website.

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 16, 2008.

Mike Davis was born in Fontana, California, 60 miles east of Los Angeles in 1946, and is a veteran of 1960’s civil rights and anti-war movements. From his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream (1986), about unionism in the United States, to his most recent, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007), Davis’ fearless writing in 18 books shines a fresh light on economic, social, environmental, and political injustice. Some of his other books include City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Magical Urbanism, Planet of Slums, Dead Cities, In Praise of Barbarians, and No One is Illegal. He is currently working on a book about climate change, water, and power in the U.S. West and northern Mexico. A former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, Davis has been a fellow at the Getty Institute and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.