S2E5: Black Women and Health Equity: Spotlight on Black Maternal Health and COVID-19

05/04/20 • 66 min

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CBW Collective member Dr. Whitney Pirtle speaks with Dr. Monica McLemore about her career trajectory, moving from her long-time position as a clinical public health nurse to becoming a prominent researcher on Black maternal health and reproductive justice. They discuss the importance of centering and listening to Black women in reaching health equity, and why this matters especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic crises. Dr Monica McLemore, a tenured associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department at the University of California, San Francisco, an affiliated scientist with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, and a member of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. Dr. McLemore retired from clinical practice as a public health and staff nurse after a 28-year clinical nursing career. Her research is grounded in reproductive justice across the reproductive spectrum including abortion, birth, cancer risk, contraception, family planning, and healthy sexuality, pleasure, and consent. She has over 50 peer reviewed articles, OpEds and commentaries and her research has been cited in places including the Huffington Post, Lavender Health, a National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report. AND three amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States. She is an elected member of the governing council and chair-elect for Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) section of the American Public Health Association. She is recipient of numerous awards and was recently inducted into the American Academy of Nursing in October, 2019. Whitney Pirtle PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Public Health at the University of California Merced. Her areas of expertise are in race and nation, racial/ethnic health disparities and equity, Black feminist sociology, and mixed methodologies. Pirtle oversees the Sociology of Health and Equity (SHE) Lab at UC Merced and is a Cite Black Women Collective member.

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S2E4: Experiences Embodied in Language and Flesh: Dr. Dora Santana

In celebration of International Transgender Day of Visibility 2020, CBW Collective member Michaela Machicote talks with trans woman warrior, scholar, activist, artist, and story-teller, Dr. Dora Santana, about experiences embodied in language and flesh. Dr. Santana is an assistant professor of Gender Studies at John Jay College CUNY and holds a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies by the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published in the Transgender Studies Quarterly – TSQ – The Issue of Blackness under the title “Transitionings and Returnings: Experiments with the Poetics of Transatlantic Water,” where she emphasizes the healing role of ancestral energies in the African Diaspora as an important embodied knowledge that guides black trans people in their path of resistant and transitioning across imposed limits of gender, geographies and the secular. She also published in TSQ Trans En Las Americas, whose title is "Mais Viva: Reassembling Transness, Blackness, and Feminism." She is currently working on her book, Trans Stellar Knot-works: Afro Diasporic Technologies, Transtopias, and Accessible Futures, where she centers the knowledge production by and on Black trans women in the Black Diaspora through a range of digital and embodied media, especially in Brazil, the U.S., and African countries such as Angola.

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S2E6: Juneteenth and the History of Black Emancipation Days in the U.S, Dr. Melissa Stuckey

In this episode of the Cite Black Women podcast, Dr. Christen Smith sits down with Dr. Melissa Stuckey to discuss the history of Black emancipation days in the United States, Juneteenth, and the special tone this year's commemoration takes in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Dr. Stuckey discuss the special connections between George Floyd and Juneteenth in Emancipation Park in Houston, the tradition of Emancipation Days across the country, and why the history of our freedom celebrations has everything to do with our current moment. *Erratum! Please note In the podcast Dr. Stuckey mistakenly states that Watchnight Emancipation observation was 1863/1864. It should say 1862/1863. Dr. Melissa N. Stuckey is assistant professor of African American history at Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) in North Carolina. She is a specialist in early twentieth century black activism and is committed to engaging the public in important conversations about black freedom struggles in the United States. Dr. Stuckey is the author of several book chapters, journal, and magazine articles including “Boley, Indian Territory: Exercising Freedom in the All Black Town,” published in 2017 in the Journal of African American History and "Freedom on Her Own Terms: California M. Taylor and Black Womanhood in Boley, Oklahoma" (forthcoming in This Land is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma, 1870s to 2010s, edited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). Stuckey is currently completing her first book, entitled “All Men Up”: Seeking Freedom in the All-Black Town of Boley, Oklahoma, which interrogates the black freedom struggle in Oklahoma as it took shape in the state’s largest all-black town. Stuckey is also working on several public history projects. She has been awarded grants from the National Parks Service and the Institute for Museum and Library Services to rehabilitate a historic Rosenwald school on ECSU's campus and to preserve the history and legacy of these important African American institutions. In addition, she is a contributing historian on the NEH-funded “Free and Equal Project” in Beaufort, South Carolina, which is interpreting the story of Reconstruction for national and international audiences and is senior historical consultant to the Coltrane Group, a non-profit organization in Oklahoma committed to economic development and historic rehabilitation in the thirteen remaining historically black towns in that state. Melissa Stuckey earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Yale University