Guest Talk: Storytelling Black Queer Flesh and Worth-Making for Reproductive Justice and Urban Education, with Nissette Falu

Please join Dr. Nessette Falu and colleagues in the Edmund Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education for the inaugural talk,  Storytelling Black Queer Flesh and Worth-Making for Reproductive Justice and Urban Education, in the Fall 2023 Speaker series.

Nessette Falu (pronouns she/her) is a Black queer feminist anthropologist and assistant professor of African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book entitled, Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth Making in Brazil (2023, Duke University Press), argues that Black lesbians enforce wellbeing against intersectional intimate violence in gynecology, leading them to evaluate, protect, and chart their sense of worth within these spaces and draw upon their daily sense of worth making. She authors peer-reviewed publications in Journal of Latin America and Caribbean Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and Feminist Anthropology journals. Her research lab, Gxnecologx Justice Lab, designs evidence-based multi-media resources and visual materials for community engagement about Black queer reproductive health and justice such as medical illustrations. Her current manuscript examines through a Black feminist lens the extensive sexual violence by gynecologists in the U.S. and its socialhistorical ties to the history of medicine and slavery that serves to undermine racial and gendered vulnerabilities of patients. She partners with allgo, a POC queer organization in Austin to develop community-based participatory research as part of a mentoring program with the Dell Medical School and Population Health Department at UT Austin. She enjoyed a seventeen-year clinical career as a Physician Assistant in neurosurgery, internal medicine, HIV-specialty, hematology-oncology, and pain management. She is a 2023-2024 OpEd Project Fellow. She loves lakes, rivers, and the ocean.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education.

Where: 306 Russell / Online

The next talk in the Institute’s Fall 2023 Speaker series is entitled, Connecting, Curating, and Constructing Mathematical and STEAM Learning through Purposeful Pedagogy, with Teachers College alumna Dr. Dyanne Baptiste Porter.