Dr. Moya Bailey’s work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She currently curates the #transformDH Tumblr initiative in Digital Humanities. She is also the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. She is an associate professor at the School of Communication and Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.

Dr. Whitney Peoples is a feminist scholar and facilitator who serves as the Director of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion for the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Dr. Peoples’ work focuses on issues of equity and justice in higher education. She earned a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University and has over seventeen years experience in feminist and critical race research, activism, and teaching. Her research and writing has also addressed the intersections of race, gender, health, and popular culture. Her work has appeared in journals and edited volumes including Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is a co-editor of the book Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations|Theory|Practice|Critique. Most recently, her writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the edited volume A History of African American Autobiography.

Sheyda Aboii is a fourth-year MD/PhD student. Her graduate program is in Medical Anthropology. Originally from Pflugerville, Texas, she graduated from Harvard University in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in Government. From 2014 to 2017, she served as a political appointee within the Obama Administration. Sheyda’s current research interests include toxic narratives, immigration, and late-industrial settings. She is interested in exploring what occurs when race, immigration, urban decline, and the environment collide—when people, toxins, and policies merge to form bodily and social narratives. Her current research proposals include the question of subsistence fishing and membership in Flint, Michigan; Washington, DC; Central Texas; and the Bay Area.

Adegoke is an OB/GYN provider with MPH focusing on women’s and international health. She is passionate about improving healthcare access for women in underserved populations, eliminating racial disparities in women’s health outcomes, and promoting education in health equity and cultural competency for medical trainees, providers and staff. She advocates for a truly diverse and inclusive healthcare workforce Special interests in Global/Refugee women’s health, health systems building, health financing, and medical education in low-resource settings. Dr. Adegoke’s other focuses lie within Pregnancy and Prenatal care, Minimally Invasive Surgery, Contraception, Abnormal Bleeding/Menstrual Problems, and Benign Gynecologic Surgery.

Madina Agénor, ScD, MPH is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences and the Center for Health Promotion and Health Equity at Brown University School of Public Health. She is also Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Tufts University School of Medicine and The Fenway Institute. As a social epidemiologist, Dr. Agénor uses quantitative and qualitative research methods to investigate sexual and reproductive health inequities in relation to sexual orientation and heterosexism, race/ethnicity and racism, and gender identity and cisgenderism. Guided by intersectionality, her research specifically focuses on the sexual and reproductive health care (e.g., cervical cancer screening) experiences of multiply marginalized groups, including Black queer and transgender people. Dr. Agénor also teaches courses on gender, sexuality, and health and reproductive health, rights, and justice.

Professor Baker is a leading expert on environmental and energy law. In 2018, she co-founded the Initiative for Energy Justice to support the delivery of equity-centered energy policy research and technical assistance to policymakers and frontline communities across the country. She also works closely with colleagues in Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute, linking it to the School of Law’s Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity (CLIC). She teaches courses at the law school and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities related to her research interests and is the author of Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Field Guide to the Energy Transition (Island Press 2021).

Professor Baker served as an Air Force officer prior to her honorable discharge under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and became a vocal advocate for repeal of the policy. Following her graduation from law school, Professor Baker clerked for Justice Roderick Ireland of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. She also worked as a corporate and project finance associate for Bingham McCutchen, initially in Boston and later in Japan. Professor Baker completed a William H. Hastie Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she received her LLM. In 2016, she was awarded a Fulbright and spent a year in Mexico exploring energy reform, climate change and indigenous rights.

Before joining Northeastern’s faculty, Professor Baker spent three years as an associate professor of law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai’i, where she was the founding director of the Energy Justice Program. Prior to that, she served on the faculty at University of San Francisco School of Law.

Ruha Benjamin is a professor in the Department of African American studies at Princeton University where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. She is also the founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab, and a faculty associate in the Center for Information Technology Policy, Program on History of Science, Center for Health and Wellbeing, Program on Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Department of Sociology. Benjamin serves on the executive committees of the Program in Global Health and Health Policy and Center for Digital Humanities.

Benjamin’s first book, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), investigates the social dimensions of stem cell science with a particular focus on the passage and implementation of a “right to research” codified in California. Her second book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity 2019) examines the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, analyzing specific cases of “discriminatory design” and offering tools for a socially-conscious approach to tech development. She has also edited a volume titled Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press 2019), which brings together an incredible group of scholars to explore the interplay between innovation and containment across a wide array of social arenas, past and present.

Benjamin is currently working on a fourth book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton 2022). Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is born out of the twin plagues of COVID-19 and police violence — a double crisis that compels us to rethink all that we’ve taken for granted about social order and life on this planet. Taken together, this body of work addresses debates about how science and technology shape the social world and how people can, should, and do engage technoscience, grappling all the while with the fact that what may bring health and longevity to some may threaten the dignity and rights of others.

Benjamin arrived here by way of a winding road that has snaked through South Central Los Angeles; Conway, South Carolina; Majuro, South Pacific, and Swaziland, Southern Africa. She comes from many Souths, and she tend to bring this perspective, of looking at the world from its underbelly, to her analysis.

Jalylah Burrell is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at San José State University. She holds a PhD in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University and her scholarship was previously supported by postdoctoral fellowships at DePaul University’s African and Black Diaspora Department and Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality as well as visiting research fellowships at the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University Bloomington, the Vivian G. Harsh Society, and the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University. Her research and teaching are focused on African Diasporic literature and popular culture and enhanced by experience as a multiplatform storyteller—pop culture critic, digital producer, oral historian, and deejay. Her current book project is titled “Capacity for Laughter: Black Women and the American Comedic Tradition.”

Chelsey R. Carter is an anthropologist of medicine, public health and race. Her current research examines how people with neuromuscular diseases (like ALS) live with a mysterious disease and navigate racialized healthcare institutions in post-Ferguson St. Louis, Missouri. In Fall 2020, Chelsey served as Lab Coordinator and phlebotomist for the COVID St. Louis County Prevalence Project, where she collected samples and managed recruitment for thousands of residents. In May of 2021, Chelsey will hold a master’s in Public Health, a Certificate in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and a doctorate in socio-cultural Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. She will be an incoming Presidential Post-doctoral Fellow at Princeton University starting July 2021 and Assistant Professor of Public Health at Yale University the following year. Chelsey’s scholarship has been recognized and funded by the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the Edward Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. She is a public writer with essays about the racial politics of US medicine published in Anthropology News, Somatosphere, Footnotes, American Ethnologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Museum Anthropology and more. She can often be found on Twitter tweeting about anti-Black racism, medicine, and her pitbull Nala at @AudreTaughtMe2.

Dr. Nicole Charles is an Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies, Feminist Studies in Culture and Media in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Inside and outside of academia, she thinks about questions and cultures of care, healing, affects, technoscience, anti-racism and colonialism in the Black Atlantic. Her forthcoming book Suspicion (Duke University Press) examines the (post)colonial, transnational and affective stakes behind the promotion and refusal of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in Barbados.

Dána-Ain Davis is Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and is also on the faculty of the
PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology at the Graduate Center. Presently, she is
serving her second terms as the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at
the Graduate Center. Davis’ work covers two broad domains: Black feminist ethnography and
the dynamics of race and racism. She is the author or co-editor of five books. Her most recent
book Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (2019) was published by
NYU Press. Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press 2019).
The book received the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical
Anthropology; The Senior Book Prize from the Association of Feminist Anthropology; was
named a Finalist for the 2020 PROSE Award in the Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology
category, given by the Association of American Publishers. The Victor Turner Ethnographic
Writing Award Committee of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology awarded the book an
Honorable Mention. The book was also listed in New York Magazine's Strategist column in an
article, “Anti-Racist Reading List”
https://nymag.com/strategist/article/anti-racist-reading-
list.html?fbclid=IwAR2RmW7CeOmgIYouAVlJnq8ahp9UMtJhfIH6T_6xVR2oXnhC8JffR9mj
gOo and The Black Feminism Book List https://bookshop.org/lists/black-feminism-book-list​.
Reproductive Injustice examines the ways in which Black women experience racism in medical
encounters during preconception, conception, pregnancy, labor, delivery and post-partum.
Relative to her work on reproductive justice, Davis has served as Co-Chair of NARAL-NY; was the
Coordinator of the Reproductive Rights Education Project at Hunter College; has consulted with
the National Network of Abortion Funds, and is currently on the boards of the National Institute
for Reproductive Health and the Civil Liberties Public Policy at Hampshire College. Davis is a
former past president of the Association of Black Anthropologists and was also co-editor of the
Association’s journal, Transforming Anthropology. Currently, Davis is the co-editor of Feminist
Anthropology with Sameena Mulla, the journal of the Association of Feminist Anthropologists.
Davis is also a doula who supports birthing people and their families/partners and in 2018, was
appointed to New York Governor Cuomo’s Maternal Mortality Taskforce.

Dr. Christin Drake is a general and reproductive psychiatrist and psychotherapist. She is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the Vice Chair for Diversity and Health Equity in the Department of Psychiatry.

OmiSoore H. Dryden, PhD is an interdisciplinary scholar who examines the symbolics of blood and the “social life” of blood donation. Engaging with black queer diasporic analytics, health and medical humanities, and feminist science studies, Dryden’s research interrogates the narratives about life, health, illness, and belonging that are embedded in the systems and tools of blood donation, including screening questionnaires. She also explores national and international constructions of the ideal blood donor (who gives life) alongside the pathologized tainted ‘other’ (who brings death). Dryden is the Principal Investigator of a two-year research project that seeks to identify the barriers African/Black gay, bisexual, and trans men encounter to donating blood in Canada. Funded by the Canadian Blood Services’ MSM Research Grant Program, #GotBlood2Give / #DuSangeÀDonner analyzes how anti-black racism, colonialism, and sexual exceptionalism shapes the blood system in Canada. Dryden has published in peer-reviewed journals and has an edited collection (with Dr. Suzanne Lenon) titled, Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging (UBC Press, 2015). Dryden’s forthcoming monograph examines Canadian Blood Services’ blood donation questionnaire and how the blood stories assembled within this document, and in the larger blood system, intersect with and depict Blackness, queer sexualities, and Canadian (homo)nation-making. By centering a Black queer diasporic analytic and reading practice, Dryden interrogates the ontological problem made of Blackness’ blood. Dr. Dryden teaches courses in women’s, gender and sexuality studies and has had her teaching skills and pedagogy acknowledged by teaching awards and nominations.

Rachel Dudley, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Toledo. She received her doctorate in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies in 2016 from Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Her dissertation was entitled, “Haunted Hospital: J. Marion Sims & the Legacies of Enslaved Women, 1841-1850”. Using interdisciplinary frameworks, it explored the medical exploitation and the continuing cultural legacies of enslaved women as medical research subjects, within the development of modern gynecology. She is interested in exploring this history in relation to larger themes in cultural medical history and the health humanities. Dr. Dudley also holds a Master’s in Women’s Studies from The Ohio State University (2009) and a minor in Women and Gender Studies from Grand Valley State University in Michigan (2007). She has held Assistant Visiting Professor positions at Emory University and Grand Valley State University (her alma maters). She has also worked as the Program Coordinator and Advisor for Cornell University’s McNair Scholars Program. Dr. Dudley’s teaching interests include: Introductory Level Courses, Feminist Theory and Gender, Race & Health. Her research interests include: Feminist Health Humanities, Medical History, U.S. Slavery, Gender & Medical Research and Interdisciplinary Knowledge Production.

Ugo F. Edu is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, black feminism, and science, technology, and society studies (STS). Using interdisciplinary approaches, her scholarship focuses on reproductive and sexual health, gender, race, aesthetics, body knowledge, and body modifications. Her book project: The “Family Planned”: Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity in Brazil, traces the influence of an economy of race, aesthetics, and sexuality on reproductive and sterilization practices of women in Brazil. She is working on a play, Securing Ties, which draws heavily on her book project as a means for critical public engagement and incorporation of the arts in her scholarship. She is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department at UCLA.

El-Hadi is a writer and researcher whose work explores the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual), and technology (internet, health). As a scholar, her hybrid digital/material research methods are informed by her training and experience as a science and environmental journalist. She advocates for the responsible, accountable, and ethical treatment of user-generated content in the fields of journalism, planning, and healthcare. El-Hadi’s writing has appeared in academic journals, general scholarship publications, literary magazines, and is forthcoming in several anthologies and edited collections. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the City Institute at York University and the Science + Technology Editor at The Conversation Canada.

Dr. Nessette Falu is a socio-cultural anthropologist with interdisciplinary research that intersects feminist/race/queer anthropologies, medical anthropology, and anthropology of ethics as well as the humanities. Her book manuscript titled, Bem-Estar Negra: Affective Disruptions of Brazilian Gynecology as a Social Laboratory (currently under review) is concerned with Brazilian Black lesbians’ affective experiences caused by entrenched intersectional preconceito (prejudice) within gynecology. She offers an afrofuturistic vision to reimagine freedom and legitimize non-normative Black female patient bodies’ creativity, beauty, love, and collective wellbeing. Her short film based on this project is currently in post-production.

Her current new project examines the extensive sexual misconduct and abuse of medical authority by gynecologists in the U.S. It interrogates sexual assault within a broader culture of neglect on multiple scales that undermines women’s vulnerabilities within medical institutional spaces. The project further explores the interconnected behavioral, ideological, and capitalist ties to a medical-industrial complex infrastructure enabling these structures of violence and power in health care.

Prior to joining the UCF faculty in 2017, she completed a 2016-2017 postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Research of the African Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean (IRADAC), at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was a 2014-2016 Visiting Scholar at Lehigh University in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She was the 2013-2014 Sarah Pettit Dissertation Fellow in LGBT Studies at Yale University.

She has 17 years of clinical experience as a Physician Assistant across neurosurgery, internal medicine, HIV Care, and hematology-oncology mostly in New York City. She earned a Master of Divinity in 2008 from New York Theological Seminary where she received training in ethics, religious intolerance, social justice, and Black feminist/Womanist movements.  She is a native to Harlem in New York City and Afro-Puerto Rican and loves the ocean, moringa plants and succulents, tarot, and lots of wine.

Dr. Sandra Harvey’s research broadly engages the intersections of Enlightenment political thought, the black diaspora, indigeneity, and cultural studies. Her book project, tentatively titled Passing for Free, Passing for Sovereign: Blackness and the Formation of the Nation, traces the production of race and gender through surveillance technologies originating in colonialism and chattel slavery. She is currently a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies and the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Taryn D. Jordan received her PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University in 2020 and was a recipient of the Mellon/ACLS dissertation completion fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year. Her current book project, “A Peculiar Sense: A Black Feminist Genealogy of Soul,” traces a genealogy of the decent, emergence, and use of “soul” shown in black women’s domesticity. Taryn has invested her life in social justice work. Her political and academic interests mutually inform one another creating the conditions for an intellectual and political spiral.

Tiffany Joseph is an Associate Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in the International Affairs Program at Northeastern University. After completing her PhD in Sociology at the University of Michigan, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar at Harvard University and began her career as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University from 2013-2018. Her research and teaching interests explore: race, ethnicity, and migration in the Americas; the influence of immigration on the social construction of race in the U.S., immigrants’ health and healthcare access; immigration and health policy, and the experiences of faculty of color in academia. Her current project explores how documentation status, race, and ethnicity influence the healthcare access and utilization of immigrants across the U.S. after comprehensive health reform. She has received grants and awards from the Ford Foundation, Institute for International Education Fulbright Program, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is the author of Race on the Move: Brazilian Migrants and the Global Reconstruction of Race (Stanford University Press, 2015) and her work has been published in various peer-reviewed journals and national media outlets. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Joseph is also a graduate of Phillips Academy-Andover and Brown University.

Judd’s research interests engage the intersections of race, gender, health, and history.  Her book of poetry Patient gives voice to the enslaved Black women who were experimented on by J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology.

Dr. Angel Miles is an experienced Postdoctoral Research Associate with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. She is skilled in Research Design, Program Evaluation, Literature Reviews, and Public Speaking. Miles is a strong research professional with a Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland College Park. Her research and professional expertise are in the study of intersections of race, class gender and disability as they pertain to housing and other social-economic disparities for women and minorities with disabilities.

Izetta Autumn Mobley is a native Washingtonian with more than 15 years of experience working as a facilitator and social justice educator specializing in organizational climate and development, youth engagement, and diversity and equity. She has planned, facilitated, and presented in conferences on student diversity leadership, race, gender and sexuality, social justice, and youth empowerment. She also has extensive experience within the art field: working with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Museum of African Art, Ms. Mobley works as a museum educator, community capacity builder, and project manager.

Michelle Munyikwa is an MD/PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2011 graduate of The College of William and Mary. Her current research explores the intersection of care and governance in Philadelphia through the lens of displacement, beginning with an ethnographic study of refugees and the institutions that serve them. She analyzes Philadelphia as a place formed through migration and displacement, from successive refugee migrations beginning in the 20th century to other movements, like the Great Migration, that have shaped demographic patterns and social life in the City of Brotherly Love. Drawing from a large, diverse archive that brings news, personal narratives, oral histories, and cultural representations into conversation with semi-structured interviews and ethnographic participant-observation at multiple sites, her work strives to understand what making refuge looks like and for whom true asylum is possible.

Dr. Onye Nnorom is a Family Doctor and a Public Health & Preventive Medicine specialist. She is the Associate Program Director of the Public Health & Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Toronto, and is the Black Health Theme Lead for the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. As the Black Health Theme Lead, she is tasked with developing educational content for teaching medical students about Black Canadian health, and inequities due to systemic racism. She is also a clinical consultant for the Nicotine Dependence Clinic at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

She is the President of the Black Physicians’ Association of Ontario. She was also the chronic disease prevention lead at TAIBU Community Health Centre, where she led a number of successful cancer screening initiatives. Most recently she has taken the role as the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Lead, within the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. And she is the host of a podcast called Race, Health and Happiness where she interviews successful Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, providing wisdom on how to stay well in a “racialized world”.

Dr. Nnorom completed her medical degree at McGill University and then completed a Masters of Public Health (Epidemiology) and residency training at the University of Toronto. Being of Nigerian and Trinidadian heritage, she is particularly interested in Black community health and wellness, and racism as a social determinant of health.

Adeola Oni-Orisan is a medical anthropologist and resident physician in the Department of Family and Community Medicine specializing in critical race theory, black feminist studies, and science, technology, and society studies. She has conducted research on issues related to reproductive health, health disparities, religion, secularism, and the politics of knowledge. Her book project, “To Be Delivered: Pregnant and Born Again in Nigeria” is an ethnographic and historical exploration of the lived experiences of pregnant women as they navigate intersecting yet competing systems of care proposed by state, church, and international development organizations in search of successful deliveries. She received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School and her Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the joint program at the University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley.

Deirdre Cooper Owens is the Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer, a past American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Research Fellow, and has won a number of prestigious honors and awards for her scholarly and advocacy work in reproductive and birthing justice. Most recently, the University of Virginia’s Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry selected Dr. Cooper Owens as the 2022 Agnes Dillon Randolph Award Winner for her historical work. A popular public speaker, Dr. Cooper Owens has spoken widely across the U.S. and Europe. She has published articles, essays, book chapters, and think pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences and reproductive justice. Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology won a Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history. It has just been translated into Korean.

Dr. Sami Schalk is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at UW-Madison. Her research focuses on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture, especially African American and women’s texts. Dr. Schalk’s work has appeared in a variety of journals such as Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Popular Culture, Girlhood Studies, and African American Review. Her first book, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2018. 

Professor Williams, one of the most provocative intellectuals in American law and a pioneer of both the law and literature and critical race theory movements in American legal theory, holds a joint appointment between the School of Law and the Department of Philosophy and Religion in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She is also director of Law, Technology and Ethics Initiatives in the School of Law and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Professor Williams has published widely in the areas of race, gender, literature and law. Her books, including The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard University Press, 1991), illustrate some of America’s most complex societal problems and challenge our ideas about socio-legal constructs of race and gender. Her work remains at the cutting edge of legal scholarship. Drawing on her prior interrogation of race, gender and personhood, Professor Williams’ current research raises core questions of individual autonomy and identity in the context of legal and ethical debates on science and technology. Her work in the area of health and genetics, for example, questions how racial formation is shaped by the legal regulation of private industry and government. Her work on algorithms grapples with the auditing function of technology in our everyday lives — shaping how we understand who we are.

Professor Williams has authored hundreds of essays, book reviews and articles for leading journals, popular magazines and newspapers, including the Guardian, Ms., The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Professor Williams’ other books include The Rooster’s Egg (Harvard Press, 1995), Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998) and Open House: On Family, Food, Piano Lessons, and The Search for a Room of My Own (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2004).

Professor Williams’ current research agenda includes three books in progress: The Complete Mad Law Professor (compilation of The Nation columns); The Talking Helix (focused on bioethics and genetics); and Gathering the Ghosts (a literary and historical text based on Professor Williams’ family archival materials). In addition, she is working on a documentary film that knits together a narratively linked series of video images about the deaths of unarmed citizens beginning with Trayvon Martin.

Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey were just three of the young, Black and enslaved women who slave owners gifted to Dr. James Marion Sims, widely known as the “father of modern gynecology”. These women had recently given birth and suffered irreparable post-delivery trauma, which meant they were unable to work to their full capacity. Their post-labor injuries made the three young women perfect specimens for Sims and his experiments with surgical techniques to treat vesicovaginal fistulas starting in 1845.

Sims used these women to pioneer a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula, a common 19th-century complication of childbirth in which a tear between the uterus and bladder caused constant pain and urine leakage. He went on to use them to perfect his techniques in the most abhorrent conditions imaginable. Sims believed that Black people did not feel pain like white people so he did not use anesthesia on these women, even when it was widely available at the time.

The first one he operated on was 18-year-old Lucy, who had given birth a few months prior and hadn’t been able to control her bladder since. During the procedure, patients were completely naked and asked to perch on their knees and bend forward onto their elbows so their heads rested on their hands. Lucy endured an hour-long surgery, screaming and crying out in pain, as nearly a dozen other doctors watched. As Sims later wrote, “Lucy’s agony was extreme.” She became extremely ill due to his controversial use of a sponge to drain the urine away from the bladder, which led her to contract blood poisoning and take two or three months to recover entirely from the operation. Anarcha, aged just 17, also suffered up to 30 brutal operations at the hands of Sims.

Modified from History.com

BEAM is a collective of advocates, yoga teachers, artists, therapists, lawyers, religious leaders, teachers, psychologists and activists committed to the emotional/mental health and healing of Black communities. Their mission is to remove the barriers that Black people experience getting access to or staying connected with emotional health care and healing. BEAM does this through education, training, advocacy, and the creative arts. The collective believes that 1) dismantling the systems that dehumanize Black people in America is a long-term project, 2) effective emotional health systems affirm the value of all Black lives: Cis and transgender, heterosexual, gender non-conforming, disabled and able-bodied, lesbian, queer, gay and bisexual Black people, 3) effective emotional health strategies must include a variety of approaches. Practices such as dance, yoga, generative somatics,  spiritual and religious practices, psychotherapy, creative arts, medication and more must be used together in order to transform our emotional health landscape, 4) therapeutic and public health models that isolate individuals or subsets of the community and do not support the capacity of the broader community to support them; are not effective in transforming the emotional health of Black communities, 5) emotional health work can not see progress, if that work is not done alongside addressing the inequities in the criminal legal system, economic reform, HIV/AIDS, transphobia, homophobia, racism, misogynoir, reproductive justice, sexual assault,  intimate partner violence, child sexual abuse and other issues that challenge the wellness of Black communities, and 6) in order to be sustainable, community-based systems of care must integrate into current practices in Black life and build upon current traditions and norms in Black communities.

The Combahee River Collective (CRC) was a Black feminist lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. The CRC emerged as a radical alternative to the National Black Feminist Organization, taking its name from a raid led by Harriet Tubman at the Combahee River in South Carolina in 1853 which freed some 750 enslaved people. As Barbara Smith, one of the original founding members, explains, ‘Let’s not name ourselves after a person. Let’s name ourselves after an action. A political action.” The CRC is perhaps best known for publishing The Combahee River Collective Statement in: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties in 1977.

The Statement is comprised of four sections. The first, ‘The Genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism’, outlines the way in which the CRC had ‘found its origins in the historical reality of the Afro-American women’s continuous life-and-death struggles for survival and liberation’. The Statement’s second section, ‘What we believe’, notes that the CRC’s politics had evolved from ‘a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community, which allows us to continue to struggle and work’. As feminists and lesbians, the CRC were of the view that ‘the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy’. In the third section, the CRC address questions of racial, sexual, heterosexual and class privilege when being politically active across multiple fronts, as well as the experience of psychological harm and dispossession. The fourth section of the statement lists the various ‘Black Feminist Projects and Issues’ the CRC have organized and been involved in. These include, but are not limited to: discussion, reading and writing retreats, ‘sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women, rape and health care’, ‘conscious raising sessions’ and ‘workshops and educationals on Black feminism on college campuses, at women’s conferences, and most frequently for high school women’.

Modified from Global Social Theory

Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer rose from humble beginnings in the Mississippi Delta to become one of the most important, passionate, and powerful voices of the civil and voting rights movements and a leader in the efforts for greater economic opportunities for African Americans. In 1961, Hamer received a hysterectomy by a white doctor without her consent while undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Such forced sterilization of Black women, as a way to reduce the Black population, was so widespread it was dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Unable to have children of their own, the Hamers adopted two daughters.

That summer, Hamer attended a meeting led by civil rights activists James Forman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Hamer was incensed by efforts to deny Blacks the right to vote. She became a SNCC organizer and on August 31, 1962 led 17 volunteers to register to vote at the Indianola, Mississippi Courthouse. Denied the right to vote due to an unfair literacy test, the group was harassed on their way home, when police stopped their bus and fined them $100 for the trumped-up charge that the bus was too yellow. That night, Marlow fired Hamer for her attempt to vote; her husband was required to stay until the harvest. Marlow confiscated much of their property. The Hamers moved to Ruleville, Mississippi in Sunflower County with very little. In June 1963, after successfully registering to vote, Hamer and several other Black women were arrested for sitting in a “whites-only” bus station restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. At the jailhouse, she and several of the women were brutally beaten, leaving Hamer with lifelong injuries from a blood clot in her eye, kidney damage, and leg damage.

In 1964, Hamer’s national reputation soared as she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the local Democratic Party’s efforts to block Black participation. Hamer and other MFDP members went to the Democratic National Convention that year, arguing to be recognized as the official delegation. When Hamer spoke before the Credentials Committee, calling for mandatory integrated state delegations, President Lyndon Johnson held a televised press conference so she would not get any television airtime. But her speech, with its poignant descriptions of racial prejudice in the South, was televised later. By 1968, Hamer’s vision for racial parity in delegations had become a reality and Hamer was a member of Mississippi’s first integrated delegation.

In 1964 Hamer helped organize Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of college students, Black and white, to help with African American voter registration in the segregated South. In 1964, she announced her candidacy for the Mississippi House of Representatives but was barred from the ballot. A year later, Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine became the first Black women to stand in the U.S. Congress when they unsuccessfully protested the Mississippi House election of 1964. She also traveled extensively, giving powerful speeches on behalf of civil rights. In 1971, Hamer helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus. Unfortunately, in 1977, Hamer died of breast cancer at age 59.

National Women’s History Museum

Professor Hammonds is the author of Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City , 1880–1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). She co-edited with Barbara Laslett, Sally G. Kohlstedt, and Helen Longino Gender and Scientific Authority (University of Chicago Press, 1996). She has published articles on the history of disease, race and science, African American feminism, African American women and the epidemic of HIV/AIDS, and analyses of gender and race in science and medicine. She is also the author of the article is “Gendering the Epidemic: Feminism and the Epidemic of HIV/AIDS in the United States, 1981-1999” which appears in Science, Medicine, and Technology in the 20th Century: What Difference Has Feminism Made? (2000).

Professor Hammonds’s current work focuses on the intersection of scientific, medical, and socio-political concepts of race in the United States. She is completing a history of biological, medical, and anthropological uses of racial concepts entitled, The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States, 1850–1990. She is also completing the MIT Reader on Race and Gender in Science co-edited with Rebecca Herzig and Abigail Bass. Professor Hammonds was named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2003–2005) by Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a Fellow in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In July 2005, Professor Hammonds was named Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University, and in March 2008, Professor Hammonds was named Dean of Harvard College.

Professor Hammonds earned a Ph.D. here in the Department of History of Science, an S.M. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.E.E. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in physics from Spelman College. She taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before coming to Harvard. While at MIT she was the founding director of the MIT Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and medicine. Professor Hammonds has been a Visiting Professor at UCLA and Hampshire College.

Karla Holloway is James B.Duke Professor of English at Duke University. She also holds appointments in the Law School, Women’s Studies and African & African American Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on African American cultural studies, biocultural studies, gender, ethics and law. Professor Holloway serves on the boards of the Greenwall Foundation’s Advisory Board in Bioethics, the Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, and the Princeton University Council on the Study of Women and Gender. She is an affiliated faculty with the Duke Institute on Care at the End of Life and the Trent Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. She has served as Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Chair (and member) of Duke’s Appointments, Promotion and Tenure Committee, and as an elected member of the Academic Council and its Executive Council.

She is founding co-director of the John Hope Franklin Center and the Franklin Humanities Institute. Professor Holloway is the author of eight books, including Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories (2002) and BookMarks–Reading in Black and White, A Memoir (2006) completed during a residency in Bellagio, Italy as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. BookMarks was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for non-fiction. Professor Holloway spent Spring 2008 as Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard University’s DuBois Institute. The book she completed during that fellowship, Private Bodies/Public Texts: Race, Gender, & a Cultural Bioethics was published in 2011 by Duke U Press. Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literatures was published by Duke Press in 2014.

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a young African American woman was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. A scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland subsequently created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from Henrietta. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades.

Henrietta was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30. A doctor at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades without success. No one knows why, but her cells never died. Mrs. Lacks’ cells were unlike any of the others he had ever seen: where other cells would die, Mrs. Lacks’ cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours.

Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. Her cells were commercialized and have generated millions of dollars in profit for the medical researchers who patented her tissue.

When the cells were taken, they were given the code name HeLa, for the first two letters in Henrietta and Lacks. However, her real name didn’t leak out into the world until the 1970s. Twenty-five years after Henrietta died, a scientist discovered that many cell cultures thought to be from other tissue types, including breast and prostate cells, were in fact HeLa cells. It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. Lacks’ family didn’t even know the cell cultures existed until more than 20 years after her death.

Smithsonian Magazine

La Gender, Inc. is a nonprofit organization led by African-American trans women that empower and lifts up the spirits of transgender women of color in the metro Atlanta area. We at La Gender strive to brighten, improve the qualities of lives, and assist our transgender women and youth clients. La Gender, Inc is a standing point to take on the challenges of being a transgender female.

On December 20th, Michigan-based family medicine physician Dr. Susan Moore died due to complications from COVID-19. Moore was born in Jamaica and grew up in Michigan before studying engineering at Kettering University. She then earned her medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School.

Less than two weeks before her death, Moore shared her experience with racism at Indiana University Health North Hospital (IU North). She published a video and accused her doctor of ignoring her complaints of pain and requests for medication because she was Black, even though she was both a patient and a doctor herself. In her post, which has since circulated widely on social media, she showed a command of complicated medical terminology and an intricate knowledge of treatment protocols as she detailed the ways in which she had advocated for herself with the medical staff. She knew what to ask for because she, too, was a medical doctor.

She filmed herself from a hospital bed and recounted her experience at IU North. Moore said her doctor brushed off her symptoms, telling her, “You’re not even short of breath.” In the words of Moore: “You have to show proof that you have something wrong with you, in order for you to get the medicine. I put forward, and I maintain: If I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that. My doctor made me feel like I was a drug addict, and he knew I was a physician.” Despite her pain, the doctor told Moore he might send her home, she said, and he didn’t feel comfortable giving her more narcotics.

Moore was aware of these treatment dichotomies and demanded that she be given proper care, but she was met with passive-aggressive responses. Her doctor downplayed her pain and forced her to prove she was in pain. Within a few days, Moore was dead from COVID-19 related complications.

Modified from NY Times and CNN

Alondra Nelson is Deputy Director for Science and Society for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. A scholar of science, technology, and social inequality, she is the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and president of the Social Science Research Council. Nelson is author, most recently, of The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. Her publications also include Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination; Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History; and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. She is also editor of “Afrofuturism,” an influential special issue of Social Text.

She was previously a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science. Nelson began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University, and there was recognized with the Poorvu Prize for interdisciplinary teaching excellence. Raised in Southern California, Nelson is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California at San Diego. She earned her PhD from New York University in 2003. She lives in New York City and Princeton with her husband and stepson.

Beth E. Richie is Head of the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice and Professor of African American Studies at The University of Illinois at Chicago. The emphasis of her scholarly and activist work has been on the ways that race/ethnicity and social position affect women’s experience of violence and incarceration, focusing on the experiences of African American battered women and sexual assault survivors. Dr. Richie is the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012) which chronicles the evolution of the contemporary anti-violence movement during the time of mass incarceration in the United States and numerous articles concerning Black feminism and gender violence, race and criminal justice policy, and the social dynamics around issues of sexuality, prison abolition, and grassroots organizations in African American Communities. Her earlier book Compelled to Crime: the Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women, is taught in many college courses and is cited in the popular press for its original arguments concerning race, gender and crime. Dr. Richie’s work has been supported by grants from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and The National Institute for Justice and The National Institute of Corrections. She has been awarded the Audre Lorde Legacy Award from the Union Institute, The Advocacy Award from the US Department of Health and Human Services, and The Visionary Award from the Violence Intervention Project and the UIC Woman of the Year Award. Dr. Richie is a board member of The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African Community, The National Network for Women in Prison, A Call To Men and a founding member of INCITE!: Women of Color Against Violence. In 2013 she was awarded an Honorary Degree from the City University of New York Law School and in 2014 she was appointed as a Sr. Advisor to the NFL to work on their domestic violence and sexual assault prevention program.

Harriet A. Washington is a science writer, editor and ethicist who is the author of
the forthcoming Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research
(2021, Columbia Global Reports); and A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental
Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind. She has been a Writing Fellow in Bioethics
at Harvard Medical School, the 2015-2016 Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of
Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard
Medical School, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, a
visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law and a senior research scholar at the
National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has also held fellowships at
Stanford University, and teaches bioethics at Columbia University, where she delivered
the 2020 commencement speech to Columbia’s School of Public Health graduates, and
won the 2020 Mailman School Of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award, as well as
the 2020-21Kenneth and Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award. In 2016 she was
elected a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.
Her work helped provide the basis for the AMA apology to the nation’s black
physicians in 2008 and led to the banishment of the James Marion Sims statue from
Central Park in 2018.
Ms. Washington has written widely for popular and science publications and has
been published in refereed books and journals such as Nature, JAMA, The American
Journal of Public Health, The New England Journal of Medicine, the Harvard Public
Health Review, Isis, and The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She has been Editor
of the Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health, a guest Editor of the Journal of Law,
Medicine and Ethics and is a reviewer for the Journal of the American Association of
Bioethics and the Humanities. Her other books include Infectious Madness: The
Surprising Science of How We "Catch" Mental Illness, Deadly Monopolies: The
Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself, and Medical Apartheid: The Dark History
of Experimentation from Colonial Times to the Present, which won a National Book
Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association
Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.
A film buff and lover of baroque music, Ms. Washington has also worked as
manager of a poison-control center, a classical-music announcer for public radio station
WXXI-FM in Rochester, NY and she curates a medical-film series.

Jurema Werneck was born in Morro dos Cabritos, a slum in Rio de Janeiro. She studied medicine and was the only black student in the School of Medicine for many years. Jurema is director of Amnesty International Brazil and co-founder of Criola which works on black women´s health, economic development, human rights, political action and dialogue, dissemination of information, and publications. She has more than 20 years of experience working in the field of human rights with social and activism movements, on the issues of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, developing education initiatives, campaigns and communications. Jurema is a board advisor at Global Fund for Women and United Nations Population Fund.

From Global Fund Women