Professor Dorothy Roberts visited the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, campus in early November 2013. Professor Karen Flynn, who holds appointments in the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, joined Professor Roberts in this video dialogue (embedded above) with me about the keyword, BODIES.
Professor Flynn received her Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University, Toronto, Ontario, in 2003. Her research interests include migration and travel, Black Canada, health, popular culture, feminist, Diasporic and post-colonial studies. Dr. Flynn’s 2011 book from the University of Toronto Press is Moving Beyond Borders: Black Canadian and Caribbean women in the African Canadian Diaspora. She is currently working on a second book project that maps the travel itineraries of Blacks across borders. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Flynn has published numerous editorials in Share, Canada’s largest ethnic newspaper, which serves the Black & Caribbean communities in the Greater Metropolitan Toronto area. She was also a free-lance writer for Canada Extra, and most recently for Swaymag.ca where she wrote passionately about contemporary issues considering issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and nation. Dr. Flynn was recently nominated as a Dean’s fellow for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, a program geared towards strengthening and expanding the cadre of leaders in the College.
Dorothy Roberts joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Law School where she also holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander chair. Her scholarship in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She received her JD in 1980 from Harvard.
The transcript of this dialogue is available here.