GWSS professors Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz and Lina-Maria Murillo have had their working group proposal accepted by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.
This working group brings together faculty, graduate students, and community activists with diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds to explore urgent matters that center on motherhood and the struggle for reproductive justice. Drawing on anthropology, history, sociology, communication, and critical cultural studies, our goal is to craft a rigorous space of inquiry that can begin to untangle the stakes and challenges (perhaps even potential paths forward) for a complex set of issues that bears meaningfully and immediately on the lives of women and girls in particular and increasingly in the lives of trans and gender non-conforming people. Shared readings will inform an ongoing and nuanced conversation about reproductive politics in local, regional, national, and transnational contexts. Topics include racism and reproductive injustice, teen motherhood and stigma, public policy and legislative initiatives, histories/meanings of motherhood, movements for reproductive health, queer family formation, and how these intersect with immigration, environmental devastation, the rise of white nationalism and white supremacy, and the carceral state.
Obermann Center Working Groups provide space, structure, and discretionary funding for groups led by faculty that may include advanced graduate students, staff members, and community members with a shared intellectual interest. Groups have used this opportunity to explore new work and to share their own research, to organize a symposium, and to develop grant proposals.
This program allows participants from across the campus and beyond to explore complex issues at a moment when cross-disciplinary collaboration is crucial to address shifting domains of knowledge and a rapidly changing world.