Abstract
Dr. Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, academician, and writer who has navigated and discussed issues of race, class, gender, and USA social policies across her 75 years of life. Davis’s activism established her as the icon of a larger social movement and further related to her decision-making and legacy. Using psychobiographical methods, data were gathered through publicly available sources to explore Davis’s personal, professional, and representational life, as well as understand Davis’s lived experience through a socio-cultural-historical perspective. Two established theories, Social Cognitive Career Theory and Politicized Collective Identity model, were applied to Davis’s life. Findings suggested that in addition to her unique intersectional identities, a confluence of factors including growing up in a family of activists, incarceration, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance, Communist Party involvement, marginalization within activist spaces, and practicing radical self-care impacted Davis committing to a life as an activist, academic, and the leader of a social movement.
Highlights
She has worked as a professor at various ranks at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the Claremont Colleges, San Francisco State University, and is currently Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) where she continues her work as an activist fighting against discrimination and injustices
To become a leader and the face of a world-wide social movement requires more than heredity and early exposure
Davis’s experiences with hardship, in particular her incarceration in her late twenties, her commitment to the Communist party and the subsequent discrimination she experienced from the USA government, and her experiences as a Black woman in largely male-driven activist spaces had a profound impact on her work as a revolutionist and affected the causes to which she dedicated her time and energy
Summary
The four-person research team initially researched psychobiography and psychobiographical methods. The team chose Davis’s 1974 autobiography, books she had written, recorded interviews and commentary, and live conferences in which Davis was the keynote speaker over the course of a year. These sources were chosen because they provided a balanced range of media and were psychologically salient to understanding Davis across her full lifespan, with partic ular attention to her upbringing, young adult experiences including Communist Party involvement and incarceration, her intersectional identities, as well as her later life work accomplishments and activism (Schultz, 2005a). While every psychobiography has some level of subjectivity and choosing psychological theories varies, attempts were made to provide balanced findings and a clear outline of how the project was completed
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