The Literature, Medicine, and Culture Colloquium (LMCC) at UNC is excited for our next meeting! Our next meeting for Spring 2024 will take place on Wednesday, February 28 at 5:30pm in UNC’s HHIVE Lab, also known as Gaskin Library or Greenlaw 524.
Note: All of our meetings this semester will take place at 5:30pm on the last Wednesday of each month in the HHIVE Lab!
If you can’t attend in person, you can always attend via our usual Zoom link: https://unc.zoom.us/j/99228197675. If you have trouble with the Zoom link, please email either of the Co-Directors. (Our email addresses are available on the Home page of the LMCC website.)
For our February meeting, we’ll be discussing Dána-Ain Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press, 2019). Specifically, we’d like everyone to read the following:
- Introduction (pp. 1-26)
- Chapter 1: “Premature Predicaments” (pp. 29-58)
Regarding the reading: All members of the UNC community can access the full text of the book online through the UNC Libraries. We’ve also posted .pdfs of these materials onto the “Readings” page of the LMCC website: the book’s front matter and table of contents, the introduction and first chapter, and the book’s endnotes. If you run into trouble getting access to the text, please contact one of the Co-Directors. (See our email addresses on the Home page of this site).
In addition to completing these readings, we want to share this important announcement about an upcoming event featuring this month’s author, Dána-Ain Davis! The Moral Economies of Medicine (MEM) working group at UNC is sponsoring the following event, which inspired the LMCC’s choice for this month’s reading:
- Please join us for our first event of the spring: a Zoom discussion with Dána-Ain Davis, who will be discussing with us her work-in-progress, “Black Anti-Bodies and the Repercussions of Obstetric Racism.” Dr. Davis is Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and on the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center.
- Title of presentation: “Black Anti-Bodies and the Repercussions of Obstetric Racism” with Dr. Dána-Ain Davis
- Date: Friday, February 23, 2024
- Time: 1:00pm–2:30pm est
- Attendance type: via Zoom
- To receive the Zoom link and the reading for discussion, please RSVP to Jocelyn Chua (jlchua@email.unc.edu). All are welcome.
[If you are interested in attending, please email Jocelyn Chua as soon as possible.]
More details on the event from Jocelyn Chua:
- “And just to clarify, the event is structured so that Dr. Davis who will speak for around 20 minutes, after which the bulk of the meeting will be a discussion with her based on the pre-circulated reading. Just wanted to make that clear in case folks are expecting a more ‘traditional’ talk format. But yes, your members [UNC’s LMCC participants] are certainly welcome to be part of the conversation!”
If you are interested in joining our conversation on Wed. Feb. 28, we encourage you to explore the readings for that meeting. In addition, we highly encourage you to join us for Dr. Davis’s talk on Fri. Feb. 23. Again, you will need to email jlchua@email.unc.edu directly to receive the Zoom link so you can attend that event in real time and so you can access the relevant readings prior to that event. We expect that this event will be productive in and of itself, but we also expect that the insights from this event (and its accompanied readings) will overlap with insights gleaned from our reading of Davis’s text and will contribute to a highly productive discussion on Wed. Fed. 28 for our LMCC meeting.
Again, we encourage you to attend the MEM event on 2/23 and then meet with LMCC on 2/28, supplementing our reading with insights gained from the MEM talk.
If you have any questions about any of this, please contact us directly. Please also feel free to share this info with other graduate or professional students who might be interested! We look forward to meeting with you all for an exciting discussion of this work!
Best wishes, Paul Blom and Mindy Buchanan-King
LMCC Co-Directors