Professor Khiara Bridges delivers Annual Lecture of the Centre for Law and Social Justice

Professor Bridges discussed her study on the complicated relationship between race and class.

On Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th of March, the Centre for Law and Social Justice hosted Professor Khiara Bridges, a professor of law at UC Berkeley. She delivered the Centre’s Annual Lecture, as well as presented a work in progress panel. In both events, she discussed her current research into wealthier, pregnant black women receiving prenatal care in a well-resourced private hospital in San Francisco, California.  

In the Work in Progress (WIP), she discussed her plans 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. Professor Marie-Andrée Jacob (University of Leeds) chaired the WIP discussion, while Dr Priyasha Saksena, Zoe Tongue and Damarie Kalanzo provided reflections. 

The Centre for Law and Social Justice is co-directed by Dr. Mitchell Travis and Professor Ilias Trispiotis. Professor Trispiotis said of the visit: “The Centre for Law & Social Justice was delighted to have Professor Khiara Bridges deliver our Annual Lecture. Our students and colleagues were truly inspired by her ground-breaking ethnographical work on the relationship between race, class and gender in the context of prenatal care.”