Tuesday, March 07, 2023
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
University Center
Wednesday, March 08, 2023
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Humanities 1, 210
On Tuesday, March 7 at 5:00pm at the University Center, Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Wangui Muigai, will present a talk titled, “Fighting for Life: Race and the Limits of Infant Survival.” Then, on Wednesday, March 8, we will host a reading group with Muigai at 4:00pm. Both activities will be in-person only.
Join Dr. Wangui Muigai as she charts the history of one of the most enduring health disparities in America, the racial gap in infant survival. Drawing on a trove of historical records and archival materials, this talk follows Black families as they have journeyed from birthing rooms to burial grounds, fighting for the ability to birth and nurture healthy babies. In charting the historical landscapes of Black infant death across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dr. Muigai will examine the role of cultural practices, medical theories, and communal initiatives to explain and address the causes of Black infant death. The talk considers the legacy of these ideas and efforts in ongoing struggles to preserve Black life.
Wangui Muigai is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University in the departments of History, African & African American Studies and the Health: Science, Society, and Policy Program. Dr. Muigai was named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and selected as a Class of 2025 Fellow in the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics. Her first book, on the history of infant death in the Black experience, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.
The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.