Join us on March 7, 2024 at 2pm for an in-person lecture, “Traumatic Repercussions: Black Women and Obstetric Racism,” by Dána-Ain Davis, Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and on a member of the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology.
This talk will chart the way two Black reproducing bodies are shaped by obstetric racism. Davis will share the birthing experiences of two women and think through their medical encounters by considering how Black bodies are degraded, ushering them toward mistreatment. Here, Davis argues that obstetric racism produces traumatic repercussions weighed down by disposability, neglect, and medical abuse.
The talk will be moderated by Andrew Wooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology at UC Berkeley.
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, the Medical Anthropology Program, the Department of Sociology, the Maternal, Child, and Adoloescent Health (MCAH) Program in the School of Public Health, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for Social Medicine, the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, and the Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster in the Othering and Belonging Institute.
About the Speaker
Dána-Ain Davis is Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and on the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center. Most recently, she is the author of Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press 2019), which received the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology and The Senior Book Prize from the Association of Feminist Anthropology.
Davis has been engaged in social justice, particularly reproductive justice and racial justice for over 30 years and has been widely recognized for her scholarship, community work, and activism. Most recently, Davis was awarded the 2023 Gender Equity Award from the American Anthropological Association. She has worked with a number of national reproductive justice organizations and initiatives, including the New York State Governor’s Task Force on Maternal Mortality and Disparate Racial Outcomes. Davis is also a doula and co-founded the Art of Childbirth with doula/midwife Nubia Earth-Martin, offering free birth education workshops that incorporate artistic expressions in Yonkers, New York.
