Race, Love, and Reproductive Justice: An Evening in Conversation with Dorothy Roberts
Bush House, Strand Campus, London
All are welcome for this evening engaging with the new memoir and life’s work of internationally acclaimed scholar, public intellectual, and activist Professor Dorothy Roberts.
Event Outline
First, Professor Roberts will give a short presentation about her new book the 'Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family'. This will be followed by comments from two invited respondents: Professor Jenny Douglas will help to put the book into the context of Roberts’ foundational work on reproductive justice Dr Alanah Mortlock will draw out the book’s insightful reflections on mixed-race relationships and identities historically and in the current political moment.
Each of these respondents will help articulate the UK relevance of this work, and lead into a broader discussion with the audience, facilitated by Professor Anne Pollock. There will then be the opportunity to continue the conversation over refreshments, where books will also be available for sale and signing.
About the Author
Professor Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society, a 2024 MacArthur Fellow, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and recipient of honorary doctorates from Rutgers University and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in reproductive justice, policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and bioethics. Her major books include Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2001); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011); and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022), as well as more than 100 articles and essays in books and journals, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book.
About the Correspondents
Prof Jenny Douglas is Professor of Social Justice and Health Equity in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at the Open University. Jenny is passionate about the health and wellbeing of Black women, and her scholarship is concentrated on changing policy, practice and approaches to research in health promotion and public health. A medical sociologist with a PhD in Women’s Studies, her research is both varied and wide ranging, spanning 40 years on issues of race, health and ethnicity. The key theme unifying her research and activism, is intersectionality – exploring how racism, sexism and other intersecting oppressions affect particular aspects of African - Caribbean women’s health. She established and chairs the Black Women’s Health and Wellbeing Research Network, and has a long history of community action on the sexual and reproductive health of Black women. She is currently leading a Wellcome funded research project on Improving Black women’s health and wellbeing in the UK through the development of an evidence base and is co-lead of The Black Women’s Health Manifesto Collective. She is a member of the Intersectionality Collective, Intersectionality Training Institute.
Dr Alanah Mortlock is a feminist theorist of identity, with particular investments in Black feminist thought and theories of Blackness. She is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Centre for Public Policy Research at King’s College London. Alanah’s current project is about Black British feminist theory and frameworks of Black metaphysics. She has previously written about discourses of transracialism as a site at which definitions of Blackness are (re)produced and debated. Alanah’s writing has appeared in Feminist Theory and Hypatia. Her wider research interests include Black and trans feminisms; theories and critiques of identity; and feminist epistemologies and methodologies.
This event is co-sponsored by the Reproduction Research Group and the Decoloniality and Anti-Racism Research Group (previously the Anti-Racism Steering Group) in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine.
At this event
Professor of Global Health & Social Medicine
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
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