48th Annual W.E.B. DuBois Lecture — Takiyah Harper-Shipman: On Deviance and Defiance: Commandeering Futures Through Poor Black Women’s Social Reproduction

Social Sciences Forum lecture with Takiyah Harper-Shipman
48th Annual W.E.B. DuBois Lecture
On Deviance and Defiance: Commandeering Futures Through Poor Black Women’s Social Reproduction
This lecture is part of the Fall 2026 Social Sciences Forum

As poor Black women’s wage labor and fertility remained foundational sites of political and economic governance and surveillance, women have devised resistance practices that we have come to understand as deviant and unhealthy. Harper-Shipman’s talk invites us to explore deviant and unhealthy practices of poor Black women within a liberatory framework for collective reproductive and material freedom for all people. It will examine 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-fascist world-making efforts.