The 48th Annual W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Lecture
Dr. Takiyah Harper-Shipman
"On Deviance and Defiance: Commandeering Futures Through Poor Black Women’s Social Reproduction”
Please join us for the 48th Annual W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Lecture on Monday, November 9, 2026, in the University Center Ballroom at 6:00PM!
Dr. Takiyah Harper Shipman
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. Dr. 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.
Bio: Takiyah Harper-Shipman is the Chair of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Davidson College in North Carolina. 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.