Race and Reproductive Justice, Past and Present

This microseminar is tied to Dorothy E. Roberts’s visit to campus in Winter 2024. Roberts, a sociologist and law professor, is one of the foremost theorists of reproductive justice and a key critic of racism in science, law, and public policy in the United States. In preparation for Roberts’s visit we will read selections from her landmark works, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1998), Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), and a recent Harvard Law Review article on the U.S. Supreme Court rulings on abortion and civil rights. Our focus will be on exploring the connections between the history of reproductive dispossession in the United States and present crises impacting Black women and families. Participants will attend three events associated with Roberts’s visit: a lecture, a post-lecture discussion with the micro-seminar group, and a panel discussion of Roberts’s scholarship, convened by UW’s Anti-Racist and Community Health Centre. After Roberts’s visit, we’ll meet for a final time in order to reflect on Roberts’s visit and scholarly contributions. Microseminar participants should plan to attend all five events.