Annual Lecture for the Centre for Law & Social Justice: Khiara M. Bridges

In this talk, Professor Bridges will discuss her current research with wealthier, pregnant black women receiving prenatal care in a well-resourced private hospital in San Francisco, California.

In this talk, Professor Bridges will discuss her current research with wealthier, pregnant black women receiving prenatal care in a well-resourced private hospital in San Francisco, California. This study focuses on the complicated relationship between race and class.

Abstract

Studies across a range of measures of wellbeing show that class privilege does not necessarily immunize racial minorities in the United States from the structures and processes that produce excess morbidity and mortality in people, communities, and populations without racial privilege. These facts invite a consideration of the complex relationship between race and class in the United States. They invite a theorization of the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion that characterizes class-privileged racial minorities.

In this talk, Bridges will discuss her plan to write an ethnography of the fraught reproduction of middle- and upper middle-class black women in the United States. The ethnography will interrogate both how class privilege affects the experience of race in the United States as well as how race impacts the experience of class privilege.

About the Speaker

Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others.

She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press.

She graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, receiving her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. While in law school, she was a teaching assistant for the former dean, David Leebron (Torts), as well as for the late E. Allan Farnsworth (Contracts). She was a member of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar.

She speaks fluent Spanish and basic Arabic, and she is a classically trained ballet dancer.

Date & Time 

27th March, 5-6 pm

Location

Room LG.06 Liberty Building, School of Law, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT or Online via Zoom. The registration link will be sent out the day before the event.

Registration

All are welcome. This is a free event, though registration is required via Eventbrite.