scholarship

Current research:

My academic work is deeply influenced by my own experience and is built upon an engagement with Black feminisms. This is clearly demonstrated in my dissertation, Siloed and Sensuous Bodies: Blackness & the Extractive Biomedical Imaginary, which takes up Sylvia Wynter’s vision for the natural sciences in relation to American medicine, including its fundamental connections to chattel slavery and its investments in material wealth. Via my own painful encounters with illness and medicine, I look towards both past and present methods of community care that circumvent such harms.

As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, my current research project, LA Birth Work: Reparative and Enmeshed Care, looks to expand on this work. My article, “Reparative Birth Work: Black Midwifery and the Disruption of Black Inheritance” (American Studies), based on the fourth chapter of my dissertation, considers the history of American obstetrics and gynecology fundamental to the maintenance of the institution of American chattel slavery—a method by which the genetic stagnancy or heredity of the slave was ideologically produced and practically maintained via Black maternity. “Reparative Birth Work” features the testimonies of Black midwives who specifically practice in Los Angeles County. As someone who grew up here—my father from Compton and my mother from Anaheim—this is due to my own personal investments, as well as the specific circumstances this “liberal” city engenders.

As my dissertation turns towards the epigenetic, it makes the point that Black Americans who share similar neighborhoods might be more epigenetically similar than they are genetically, centering our healthcare system’s continued refusal to reckon with the embodied and circumstantial afterlives of slavery. The midwives I interviewed, highlighted the contextualized nature of their care, further, they consistently referenced how their existence as Black women greatly impacted their point of view, fully aware that the way they are treated in the clinic likely extends to their clients—their wisdom is not only a timeless extension of ancient birthing knowledge, it is also energetically present, bodily. As I move forward with this work, I’d like to stay with the inquiries opened up in “Reparative Birth Work,” through a deep consideration of circumstance and its effects on Black maternity. LA Birth Work’s goal is to extensively document what deeply entangled methods of healthcare look like in hopes they might be learned from and replicated.

Publications:

“Reparative Birth Work: Black Midwifery and the Disruption of Black Inheritance,” American Studies, Volume 63, Number 4 (2024): 33-64

“Criminal Composition,” Docalogue, July 2023

“Witness Me: How TikTok Users Broke with the Sociopathic American Gaze in the Wake of George Floyd’s Murder,” Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism, Volume 43, Issue 1 (Spring 2023): 19-30

“Witness Me: How TikTok Users Broke with the Sociopathic American Gaze in the Wake of George Floyd’s Murder,” Flow, September 2020