Mike Davis (scholar)
| Mike Davis | |
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| Born | 1946 (age 70–71) Fontana, California, United States |
| Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles |
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Mike Davis (born 1946) is an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California.
Born in Fontana, California and raised in El Cajon, California, Davis' education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and a Congress of Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist. He briefly studied at Reed College in the mid-1960s but did not begin his academic career in earnest until the early 1970s, when he earned BA and MA degrees but did not complete the PhD program in History from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Davis has stated that one of the moments prompting him returning to study after working was a violent strike, "I had this job with a bus-tour company when suddenly this insanely violent strike broke out. A strikebreaker ran a bus over one of our guys, and next thing I knew I was in a room with forty guys voting on whether each of us is gonna put up $400 to hire a hit man to kill the head of the strikebreakers. I said, 'Hey, guys, this is just crazy,' and made the best speech of my life. I was outvoted thirty-nine to one. I thought to myself, 'Typical American workers'; I think I said 'pussies.' Instead of coming up with a political strategy, they reach for their guns as soon as they see a scab driving their bus. And here I am about to become a freshman at UCLA, and I'm going to get arrested for criminal conspiracy."
He was a 1996–1997 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute and received a MacArthur Fellowship Award in 1998. He won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007.
Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New Left Review. Davis has taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and at Stony Brook University before he secured a position at University of California, Irvine's history department. He also contributes to the British monthly Socialist Review, the organ of the British Socialist Workers Party. As a journalist and essayist, Davis has written for, among others, The Nation and the UK's New Statesman.
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