Social Sciences Forum — 48th Annual W.E.B. DuBois Lecture — Takiyah Harper-Shipman: On Deviance and Defiance: Commandeering Futures Through Poor Black Women’s Social Reproduction

Social Sciences Forum lecture with Takiyah Harper-Shipman 48th Annual W.E.B. DuBois Lecture On Deviance and Defiance: Commandeering Futures Through Poor Black Women’s Social Reproduction This lecture is part of the Fall 2026 Social Sciences Forum As poor Black women’s wage labor and fertility remained foundational sites of political and economic governance and surveillance, women have devised resistance practices that we have come to understand as deviant and unhealthy. Harper-Shipman’s talk invites us to explore deviant and unhealthy practices of poor Black women within a liberatory framework for collective reproductive and material freedom for all people. It will examine how poor Black women in North Carolina and Senegal craft alternate routes and ends to reproductive freedom, and how we can expand these practices as anti-capitalist and anti-fascist world-making efforts. T.D. Harper-Shipman is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Davidson College in North Carolina. She is a community organizer and activist whose activism spans social justice issues related to stopping the Charlotte’s Cop City and support for Palestine. Her scholarly work explores political economy at the intersections of race and gender. Dr. Harper-Shipman has authored two books: Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics (Stanford University Press, July 2026) and Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (Routledge, 2019); and published in leading scholarly journals, including Third World Quarterly , Journal of Asian and African Studies , International Studies Review , and Philosophy and Global Affairs . She has also contributed to public-facing intellectual forums such as Africa Is a Country, The Global African Worker, and Pambazuka. She serves on the editorial board of Third World Quarterly and is a former forum editor with the Miami Institute of Social Sciences. Admission is free. Organized by the Department of Africana Studies , and is co-sponsored by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Dean’s Office; the Center for Social Science Scholarship ; and the Shriver Center . CS3 sponsored events are open for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University’s nondiscrimination policy.