Khiara Bridges

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Khiara Bridges
Khiara Bridges July 12 2022.jpg
Bridges in 2022
Born1978or1979(age 44–45)
Education Spelman College (BA)
Columbia University (JD, PhD)
Occupation(s)Professor of Law at Berkeley School of Law
Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston University School of Law

Khiara M. Bridges (born 1978/1979) [1] is an American law professor and anthropologist specializing in the intersectionality of race, reproductive justice, and law. [2] She is best known for her book, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization, in which she argues that race and class largely affect the prenatal, childbirth, and postnatal experiences of women. [3]

Contents

In 2011, Bridges received an honorable mention for the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize for the Critical Study of North America. [4]

Education

In 1999, Bridges completed her bachelor's degree in sociology after three years at Spelman College, where she served as valedictorian and graduated summa cum laude. [5] [6] Bridges then pursued a degree in law, graduating with a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2002. Bridges earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2008. [2]

Career

During her time at Spelman College, Bridges worked in Atlanta as a counselor at the Feminist Women's Health Center. At Columbia University, she worked with David Leebron and E. Allan Farnsworth as a teaching assistant, and was a member of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. Bridges has also worked for the Miami Herald as a reporter. [7]

Bridges is currently a professor of law at University of California, Berkeley School of Law. She has published numerous journal articles and the book, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization. She is on the board of directors for Pregnancy Justice [formerly National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW)] [8] as well as on the Academic Advisory Council for Law Students for Reproductive Justice. Bridges is co-editor of a University of California Press book series on reproductive justice. [9]

Bridges is also a professional dancer trained in classical ballet, and performs with Ballet Inc. [10] [11]

Published works

Bridges first book, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization, published in 2011, documents the findings of eighteen months of Bridges' ethnographic fieldwork spent in a large, metropolitan hospital in New York City. In Reproducing Race, Bridges argues that race affects the ways that women receive prenatal care and alters their experiences of hospital childbirth. Bridges focuses on how race and socioeconomic status interact and comes to the conclusion that medical professionals are influenced by racial stereotypes when making decisions about the treatment of women. [12] In Reproducing Race, Bridges discusses topics such as stratified reproduction, eugenics, and the racialization of disease. Rayna Rapp, an anthropologist who has written much on birth in the United States, commends Reproducing Race for Bridges' argument that "racist eugenics haunts contemporary hospital-speak, whatever individual intentions may be." [3]

Bridges is also the author of The Poverty of Privacy Rights, published in June 2017. In this book, Bridges argues that poor mothers as a marginalized population do not share in privacy rights and that they face repeated privacy violations by the state. [13] In 2019, she released Critical Race Theory: A Primer, [14] a book examining critical race theory's basic commitments, strengths, and weaknesses. [15]

Related Research Articles

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Civil liberties in the United States are certain unalienable rights retained by citizens of the United States under the Constitution of the United States, as interpreted and clarified by the Supreme Court of the United States and lower federal courts. Civil liberties are simply defined as individual legal and constitutional protections from entities more powerful than an individual, for example, parts of the government, other individuals, or corporations. The explicitly defined liberties make up the Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and the right to privacy. There are also many liberties of people not defined in the Constitution, as stated in the Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Reproductive rights are legal rights and freedoms relating to reproduction and reproductive health that vary amongst countries around the world. The World Health Organization defines reproductive rights as follows:

Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.

Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.

Reproductive justice is a critical feminist framework that was invented as a response to United States reproductive politics. The three core values of reproductive justice are the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments. The framework moves women's reproductive rights past a legal and political debate to incorporate the economic, social, and health factors that impact women's reproductive choices and decision-making ability.

Black Women's Health Imperative, previously the National Black Women's Health Project, was formed in 1983 in Atlanta, Georgia out of a need to address the health and reproductive rights of African American women. NBWHP was principally founded by Byllye Avery. Avery was involved in reproductive healthcare work in Gainesville, Florida in the 1970s and was particularly influenced by the impact that policy had on women of color and poor women. Additionally Avery was also concerned with healthcare choices and wanted "to provide an environment where women could feel comfortable and take control of their own health".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugenics in the United States</span>

Eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century. The cause became increasingly promoted by intellectuals of the Progressive Era.

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Rayna Rapp is a professor and associate chair of anthropology at New York University, specializing in gender and health; the politics of reproduction; science, technology, and genetics; and disability in the United States and Europe. She has contributed over 80 published works to the field of anthropology, independently, as a co-author, editor, and foreword-writing, including Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent's Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge. Her 1999 book, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, received multiple awards upon release and has been praised for providing "invaluable insights into the first generation of women who had to decide whether or not to terminate their pregnancies on the basis of amniocentesis result". She co-authored many articles with Faye Ginsburg, including Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship, a topic the pair has continued to research.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iris López</span>

Iris López is a contemporary professor, anthropologist, sociologist, and author, whose work focuses on feminist, Latino, and Latin American studies. She has one full-length book published, an ethnography about sterilization within female Puerto Rican populations, titled Matters of Choice. She received both her Masters and Doctoral degrees in Anthropology from Columbia University. Currently, López teaches sociology at the City College of New York, part of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she has been the Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program since 2016.

Testing Women, Testing the Fetus by Rayna Rapp is a book, published in 1999, about analysis of the social repercussions of prenatal genetic testing. Rapp combines the data she collected herself with historical context of amniocentesis and genetic counseling to argue that amniocentesis and those abortions following positive test results is a social decision as much as an individual one.

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Sterilization of Latinas has been practiced in the United States on women of different Latin American identities, including those from Puerto Rico and Mexico. There is a significant history of such sterilization practices being conducted involuntarily, in a coerced or forced manner, as well as in more subtle forms such as that of constrained choice. Forced sterilization was permissible by multiple states throughout various periods in the 20th century. Issues of state sterilization have persisted as recently as September 2020. Some sources credit the practice to theories of racial eugenics.

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References

  1. ↑ Style Across America, ELLE Magazine, September 2016
  2. 1 2 "Faculty: Khiara M. Bridges". Harvard Law School. Archived from the original on 2017-06-22. Retrieved 2017-02-21.
  3. 1 2 Rapp, Rayna (2012). "Book Review: Khiara Bridges, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization". Anthropological Quarterly. 85 (2): 643–648. doi:10.1353/anq.2012.0022. S2CID   144401115.
  4. ↑ "Section Awards". American Anthropological Association. Archived from the original on 2016-09-05. Retrieved 2017-03-04.
  5. ↑ "Alumnae Stories: Khiara M. Bridges, Professor at the Boston University School of Law". Spelman College.
  6. ↑ "New Faculty Posts for Five Black Scholars at Leading Universities". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. May 26, 2015.
  7. ↑ Lawrence, Sonia (May 27, 2011). "New in Print (March 2011) Reproducing Race : Khiara M. Bridges". The Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode.
  8. ↑ pregnancyjusticeus.org, Pregnancy Justice, Wikidata   Q118970480 , "About us" > "Our team" > "Board", accessed 2023-06-02.
  9. ↑ "Staff". National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
  10. ↑ Hsu, Richard. "Khiara Bridges (Boston Univ Law School) and Classical Ballet". Hsu Untied.
  11. ↑ Bullock, Maggie (Aug 25, 2016). "ELLE on Wheels". ELLE.
  12. ↑ Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  13. ↑ The Poverty of Privacy Right. Stanford University Press. 2017. ISBN   9780804795456.
  14. ↑ "Khiara M. Bridges". Berkeley Law. Retrieved 2020-08-26.
  15. ↑ "Bridges's Critical Race Theory: A Primer (Concepts & Insights Series) - 9781683284437 - West Academic". faculty.westacademic.com. Retrieved 2020-08-26.
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