Amanda Heffernan, Assistant Professor of Nursing at Seattle University, will discuss her study of the impact of pregnancy-related immigration policies on the lived experiences of pregnant migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border during the Trump and Biden administrations. The findings demonstrate, she will argue, that under every policy regime, pregnant persons have been negatively impacted. Denise Gilman, Clinical Professor at UT School of Law, will respond.
Wendy Bach, Professor of Law at University of Tennessee College of Law, will present the preliminary findings of a national research study tracking prosecutions for pregnancy-related conduct in the first year after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, contextualizing them within larger conversations about pregnancy criminalization. Jennifer Laurin, Wright C. Morrow Professor of Law at UT School of Law, will respond.
Cary Franklin, McDonald/Wright Chair of Law at UCLA School of Law, will consider the attempted revitalization of the Comstock Act of 1873 to criminalize abortion at the federal level following Dobbs. Analyzing the approach to Constitutional interpretation undergirding this effort, she will argue that it subverts 50 years of equality law, aggrandizes judicial power, and buries the value judgments that continue to influence major constitutional battles over abortion. Elizabeth Sepper, Crillon C. Payne, II Professor in Health Law at UT School of Law, will respond.
The tenth annual lecture will feature Dr. Rupa Marya, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. The lecture will be moderated by Dr. Stephen Chao, assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Previous Sissy Farenthold Fund for Peace and Social Justice Events
Isabel Jaramillo Sierra, Professor of Law at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, will outline the feminist strategies that contributed to the decriminalization of abortion in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. She will contrast those “old feminisms” with “new” feminist approaches more inclined toward social media, arguing for the need to bridge gaps between old and new feminisms to continue to work toward reproductive justice. Neville Hoad, Associate Professor of English and co-director of the Rapoport Center, will respond.
Using a disability justice lens, Robyn Powell, Professor of Law at Stetson University College of Law, will argue that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization exacerbates a paradox for disabled people: they may be forced to bear children but subsequently denied the opportunity to rear them because of laws, policies, and practices that assume incompetence among disabled parents. Julie Minich, Associate Professor of English at UT Austin, will respond.
Prize-winning poet and physician Fady Joudah will read from his visionary sixth collection of poems, [...], and engage in conversation with UT professor and poet Roger Reeves.
Join If/When/How, EC4EC, and Students for Planned Parenthood for a presentation to answer your questions about what reproductive rights you have as a Texan and how to access confidential, accurate, and legal reproductive health resources.
The Rapoport Center's Spring 2024 conference, Disarming Toxic Empire, brought together academics, advocates, and artists working through intergenerational channels of memory and justice to respond to nuclear toxicity in all its forms and manifestations, in sites ranging from the Navajo Nation and the Pacific Islands to Japan, North Africa, and Ghana.
Join us for a special lunchtime event with Dr. Karen Korematsu, Executive Director of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the historic Korematsu V. United States Supreme Court ruling sanctioning the incarceration of thousands of Japanese people during WWII.
In the midst of the most recent war in Sudan, Sudanese-American author Fatin Abbas read to a UT audience from her highly acclaimed book, Ghost Season: A Novel.
Professor Ocen's talk highlighted the racialized and gendered ways that incapacitation, or the idea of removing dangerous people from society, has been used to regulate the bodies and reproductive capacities of marginalized women. Specifically, through the “incapacitation of motherhood,” people in women's prisons are alienated from their children, denied reproductive care, humiliated during pregnancy and postpartum recovery, and in some cases, sterilized. It explored ways to contest these practices through both law and social movements, including prison abolition, informed by the principles of reproductive justice. Nessette Falu, Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, responded.
Ji Seon SongAssistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law
Professor Song's talk examined the extent of hospitals' participation in policing and punishment, arguing that hospitals in the “free world” have become part of the carceral infrastructure, performing functions essential to the operations of mass incarceration by identifying criminals, helping build criminal cases, preparing people for incarceration, and treating and returning people to imprisonment. Snehal Patel, Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at Dell Medical School, responded.
Aziza AhmedProfessor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar at the Boston University School of Law; Co-Director of the BU Law Program in Reproductive Justice
Using the example of the highly controversial forensic method known as the “floating lungs” test in the context of self-induced abortion and stillbirths, Professor Ahmed's talk interrogated the relationship between scientific expertise, evidence, and lawmaking, and argued that contestation around medical and epidemiological evidence shapes the regulation and criminalization of pregnancy-related outcomes. Jennifer Laurin, Wright C. Morrow Professor of Law, responded.
In this talk, Cynthia Conti-Cook argued that because digital devices and the corporate archives that support them have given police and other system state actors profound access to the details of our daily lives, people forced into self-managed care for issues related to everything between birth through burial will increasingly need to rely on their digital bodies’ ability to safely traverse digital borders. Sarah Brayne, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, responded.
Join us to learn more about what reproductive rights are available to Texans and how to access confidential and accurate reproductive health resources. This event is co-sponsored by the Sissy Farenthold Reproductive Justice Defense Project in partnership with If/When/How at Texas Law, EC4EC, and Students 4 Planned Parenthood.
Rachel RebouchéDean and the James E. Beasley Professor of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law
Professor Rachel Rebouché discussed the attempts by antiabortion activists to stop medication abortion by any means necessary, including through criminalization; the implications for reproductive justice and public health; and how abortion rights advocates can keep these implications at the fore of their own efforts to increase access to abortion pills through federal and state advocacy. Kari White, Associate Professor at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work, responded.
Marking the twentieth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, Iraqi-American poet and novelist Professor Sinan Antoon visited UT for a public reading from his new novel, Khuzama, on the eve of its publication.
This roundtable featured Dr. Raj Patel and Dr. Erin Lentz of the LBJ School of Public Affairs, Dr. Alex Racelis of UTRGV, Carolina Mueller of the National Young Farmers Coalition, and Doris Brown and Ben Hirsch of West Street Recovery (Houston). Dr. Jason Cons, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UT Austin, moderated.
In this talk, Chilean legal scholar Amaya Alvez, who served as an elected member of the 2021-22 Chilean Constitutional Convention, argued that Chile’s Constitutions have long enabled natural resource governance that perpetuates (neo)colonial dispossession and makes Indigenous peoples invisible.
Indigenous scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Dr. Heather Dorries discussed the conflicting and contradictory nature of park management in Toronto, focusing on the ways park management has become part of the City of Toronto’s Reconciliation Action Plan and the ways the City has violently cleared parks of homeless encampments.
This event featured Dr. Shafqat Hussain, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian Studies at Trinity College, who discussed livestock insurance, justice, and policymaking in snow leopard conservation in Northern Pakistan.
This event featured Dr. Julia Dehm, Senior Lecturer at the La Trobe Law School in Melbourne, Australia and 2022-2023 Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and former postdoctoral fellow at the Rapoport Center who discussed reparations and historical responsibility in the international climate regime.
This roundtable discussion, the first event in our Spring 2023 Cultures of Environmental Justice colloquium and co-sponsored by Planet Texas 2050, featured local activists and organizations discussing the ongoing justice implications of Winter Storm Uri.
Professor Wendy A. Bach of the University of Tennessee College of Law discussed new book, "Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care," which focuses on Tennessee’s fetal assault law as an example of the criminalization of care in poor communities. Professor Aziza Ahmed, Boston University School of Law, responded.
Melissa Murray, professor at New York University School of Law and leading expert in family law, constitutional law, and reproductive rights and justice, delivered an address titled “Race-ing Roe and Woke Warriors: Weaponizing Racial Justice at the Supreme Court.”
A discussion with UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, hosted by the University of Minnesota's Human Rights Center.
This two-part inaugural event of the Sissy Farenthold Fund for Peace and Social Justice brought together elected officials representing Austin and Travis County residents at the city, county, state, and federal levels—along with abortion funders and abortion rights advocates—to share strategies for securing post-Roe reproductive justice in Texas and beyond.