Simone Davis
University of Toronto, Ethics, Society, and Law (ES&L), Department Member
- Simone Weil Davis teaches Ethics, Society and Law at the University of Toronto. Simone is co-founder of the national ... moreSimone Weil Davis teaches Ethics, Society and Law at the University of Toronto. Simone is co-founder of the national Walls to Bridges program in Canada, and remains a proud member of the Walls to Bridges Collective. Her work today centers on critical, holistic, decolonizing and anti-racist pedagogies; educational justice; working alongside people in and emerging from prison; and the ethics of accountability and interconnection. Davis's past work , rooted in cultural and literary studies and feminist theory, focused on commodification and subjectivities. She got a PhD in American literature from UC Berkeley, and pre-U of T, she taught at New York University, Long Island University, and Mount Holyoke College.edit
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Prison bars are meant to keep people in; they are also meant to keep people out. In tandem with the other powerful social forces that keep us divided, especially those that cluster around race, class and gender, the tall walls and razor... more
Prison bars are meant to keep people in; they are also meant to keep people out. In tandem with the other powerful social forces that keep us divided, especially those that cluster around race, class and gender, the tall walls and razor wire fences of North American prisons and jails ensure that our internalized maps of what we consider home are skewed, pitted with lacunae. These blanks, blind spots, and alienations do not just impoverish us; they make it possible for things as they are to continue—including the United States’ unprecedentedly high rate of incarceration. With our sense of connection, community, place, and identity distorted, our ability to militate for change—or even to envision it—is severely limited. Inside-Out seeks to loosen the foundations beneath the conceptual walls that our carceral system throws up.
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Research Interests: Engineering and Pedagogy
A review of two new books (2019 & 2020) that surface, with equal urgency, the 1980s executions of thousands of people in Iran. Communicating in very different registers, they each engage and inform this newly current history of... more
A review of two new books (2019 & 2020) that surface, with equal urgency, the 1980s executions of thousands of people in Iran. Communicating in very different registers, they each engage and inform this newly current history of repression with profound impact. The books' Forwards are by Angela Davis and Shahrzad Mojab. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2020/autumn/voices-massacre-untold-stories-life-and-death-iran-1988-lives-lost-search-new-tomorrow
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Several years into what is still a new initiative, I reflect briefly in this chapter on Inside-Out Canada, the first national iteration of Inside-Out in a country other than the United States.1 Any US-originated program may confront... more
Several years into what is still a new initiative, I reflect briefly in this chapter on Inside-Out Canada, the first national iteration of Inside-Out in a country other than the United States.1 Any US-originated program may confront questions as it moves toward international expansion—questions about national differences and how to see and act past the blind spots of internalized US hegemony. Educators who work in study abroad or in globally focused intercultural dialogue are deeply engaged with these questions, of course, and some propose answers.2 But many programs that start with a one-country focus, like Inside-Out, grow toward an international presence and understand the process only as they go. Perhaps Inside-Out Canada’s experiences can suggest some things about how program replication is best conceived and framed more generally.
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In "Living Up to the Ads" Simone Weil Davis examines commodity culture's impact on popular notions of gender and identity during the 1920s. Arguing that the newly ascendant advertising industry introduced three new metaphors... more
In "Living Up to the Ads" Simone Weil Davis examines commodity culture's impact on popular notions of gender and identity during the 1920s. Arguing that the newly ascendant advertising industry introduced three new metaphors for personhood - the ad man, the female consumer, and the often female advertising model or spokesperson - Davis traces the emergence of the pervasive gendering of American consumerism. Materials from advertising firms - including memos, manuals, meeting minutes, and newsletters - are considered alongside the fiction of Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, Bruce Barton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Davis engages such books as "Babbitt", "Quicksand", and "Save Me the Waltz" in original and imaginative ways, asking each to participate in her discussion of commodity culture, gender, and identity. To illuminate the subjective, day-to-day experiences of 1920s consumerism in the United States, Davis juxtaposes print ads and industry manuals with works of fiction. Capturing the maverick voices of some of the decade's most influential advertisers and writers, Davis reveals the lines that were drawn between truths and lies, seduction and selling, white and black, and men and women. Davis's methodology challenges disciplinary borders by employing historical, sociological, and literary practices to discuss the enduring links between commodity culture, gender, and identity construction. "Living Up to the Ads" will appeal to students and scholars of advertising, American studies, women's studies, cultural studies, and early-twentieth-century American history.
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A powerful classroom experience results in a radical and lasting positive change, a metamorphosis. Transformation. Educators seek to define that process, to account for it, and especially to incite it, to open up possibilities for the... more
A powerful classroom experience results in a radical and lasting positive change, a metamorphosis. Transformation. Educators seek to define that process, to account for it, and especially to incite it, to open up possibilities for the kind of engaged learning and teaching that will prove transformational. This volume offers an extended reflection on the wider implications of one uniquely powerful pedagogical model. Founded in 1997, the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program weds community-based learning and prison education, bringing college or university students and people in prison together as classmates for a semester of shared experiential learning. Fifteen thousand incarcerated (“inside”) and campus-based (“outside”) students have taken at least one Inside-Out class, and in many areas, inside students are now taking multiple Inside-Out courses for credit in subjects as diverse as sociology, philosophy, performance art, social work, literature, and the law. While these academic classes are the core of our work, they have become an integral part of a larger mosaic of sustained engagement. We will see reflected in this volume the program’s emphasis on alumni activities on both sides of the wall, innovative region-wide collaborations, longstanding Inside-Out think tanks in prisons that engage in public education, trainings, and research projects, and an increasing number of initiatives that take the co-learning pedagogy to sites beyond the prison entirely. This book considers the broader lessons that Inside-Out provides for community-based learning praxis and for postsecondary teaching in general, on campus, in prisons, and in other community settings.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Law, Gender Studies, Politics, and 5 moreFeminism, Human Sexuality, Feminist, Memoir, and Prison
A review of two new books (2019 & 2020) that surface, with equal urgency, the 1980s executions of thousands of people in Iran. Communicating in very different registers, they each engage and inform this newly current history of... more
A review of two new books (2019 & 2020) that surface, with equal urgency, the 1980s executions of thousands of people in Iran. Communicating in very different registers, they each engage and inform this newly current history of repression with profound impact.
The books' Forwards are by Angela Davis and Shahrzad Mojab.
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2020/autumn/voices-massacre-untold-stories-life-and-death-iran-1988-lives-lost-search-new-tomorrow
The books' Forwards are by Angela Davis and Shahrzad Mojab.
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2020/autumn/voices-massacre-untold-stories-life-and-death-iran-1988-lives-lost-search-new-tomorrow
ABSTRACT Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building... more
ABSTRACT Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building – of flourishing, free and caring communities. Collectively developed responses and resources for people and ecosystems, led by those with lived experience of oppression, are the foundation for a world without prisons.
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LET US START BY LOCATING THETWO PARTICIPANTS IN THIS EXCHANGE: AS A MEMBER OF the Walls to Bridges Collective, a group of incarcerated and non-incarcerated people that meets regularly at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in... more
LET US START BY LOCATING THETWO PARTICIPANTS IN THIS EXCHANGE: AS A MEMBER OF the Walls to Bridges Collective, a group of incarcerated and non-incarcerated people that meets regularly at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario (with a second circle in Toronto), Simone Davis helps to coordinate the Walls to Bridges program. The Collective offers a reciprocal learning model and we seek to help usher into this world profound transformations of both educational and justice paradigms. Our work includes training and supporting faculty from around Canada who want to bring incarcerated and non-incarcerated students together to learn in community. While the "I" voice in this essay is Simone Davis's (and I take full responsibility for the views I present), this piece emerges out of and introduces an ongoing conversation between Davis and Bruce Michaels, a peer-to-peer educator (his chosen term) who has helped to found, facilitate, and grow a multifaceted, ro...
Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building – of... more
Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building – of flourishing, free and caring communities. Collectively developed responses and resources for people and ecosystems, led by those with lived experience of oppression, are the foundation for a world without prisons.
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Page 1. LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS Simone Weil Davis [They are] two excresences of muscular flesh which hang, and in some women, fall outside the neck of the womb; lengthen and shorten as does the comb of a turkey, principally when they desire... more
Page 1. LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS Simone Weil Davis [They are] two excresences of muscular flesh which hang, and in some women, fall outside the neck of the womb; lengthen and shorten as does the comb of a turkey, principally when they desire coitus.... ...
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Informed by my experiences in prison/university co-learning projects, this essay centres two community-based learning practices worth cultivating. First, what can happen when all participants truly prioritize what it means to build... more
Informed by my experiences in prison/university co-learning projects, this essay centres two community-based learning practices worth cultivating. First, what can happen when all participants truly prioritize what it means to build community as they address their shared project, co-discovering new ways of being and doing together, listening receptively and speaking authentically? How can project facilitators step beyond prescribed roles embedded in the charity paradigm of service-learning to invite and support egalitarian community and equity-driven decision-making from a project’s inception and development, through its unfolding and its assessment? Second, the sheer fact of a project taking place in the marginal place between two contexts gives all participants—students, faculty, community participants and hosts—the opportunity for meta-reflection on the institutional logics that construct and constrain our perspectives so acutely. What can we do, by way of project-conception and p...
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Page 156. Chapter$ In the Tutu or out the Window Zelda Fitzgerald and the Possibility of Escape On the cocktail tray, mountains of things represented something else, canapes like goldfish, and caviar in balls, butter bearing ...
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... industry manual by Carl Naether instructs that the advertiser can mold permanentty, the thought and attitudes ... alleviated the sense of tragedy implicit in the story line of his wife (Save Me the ... writer relishes so: And I... more
... industry manual by Carl Naether instructs that the advertiser can mold permanentty, the thought and attitudes ... alleviated the sense of tragedy implicit in the story line of his wife (Save Me the ... writer relishes so: And I found that I could carry this imagination into every department ...