T.D. Harper-Shipman (any)
T.D. Harper-Shipman is Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Davidson College, teaching and publishing on political economy, race, and gender in Africa. Her work appears in Journal of Asian and African Studies, Third World Quarterly, International Studies Review, Africa Is a Country, and The Global African Worker. Her book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa, was published by Routledge in 2019. She is an academic editor at Third World Quarterly and forum editor at Miami Institute of Social Sciences.
Facilitator of: Becoming Unruly Together: decolonial reproductive politics
How have poor Black women’s wage labor and their fertility become foundational sites of political and economic governance? How do poor Black women’s decisions to birth and work figure into national and even global efforts to manage poverty and future labor needs? More importantly, how have poor Black women resisted efforts to manage and surveil both their fertility and their labor through practices that we have come to understand as deviant and unhealthy?
This workshop is an invitation to expand these deviant and unhealthy practices into a liberatory framework for collective reproductive and material freedom for all people. Together we explore how poor Black women in North Carolina and Senegal craft alternate routes and ends to reproductive freedom, and how we can expand these practices as anti-capitalist and anti-nationalist world-making efforts.