Conversations in Black Freedom Studies, featuring Anne Gray Fischer, Dorothy Roberts and Loretta Ross, who will be conversing about the devastating effects of the carceral system.
This panel of leading authors, educators and activists looks beyond today's headlines to analyze how larger histories of environmental policies, child welfare agencies, broken windows policing and attacks on the rights of birthing people reflect interlocking systems of oppression. This panel will point to historic and contemporary means of resistance in the fight to build a more just world.
THE SPEAKERS
Anne Gray Fischer is a historian of the twentieth-century United States whose research and teaching explores histories of gender, sexuality, and race; law enforcement and the state; and feminist activisms in the modern United States. Her book, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification, is a history of sexual policing between Prohibition and the rise of broken windows policing in the 1980s.
Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, is the University of Pennsylvania’s 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies, Sociology, and the Law School, where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. Roberts’ path-breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and bioethics. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.
Loretta Ross is a visiting associate professor at Smith College. Since beginning her academic career in 2017, she has taught at Hampshire College, Arizona State University and Smith College as a visiting professor of clinical practice teaching courses white supremacy, race, and reproductive justice.She has co-written three books on reproductive justice: Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice; Reproductive Justice: An Introduction; and Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique.
All books will be available for purchase from the Schomburg Shop by the date of the event.
