Black History Month Events
In honor of Black History Month, Harvard Medical School and Tuskegee University have partnered on a series of events examining the history of racism in health care, its impact on Black individuals and the Black community, and gathering solutions for a healthier future from experts and thought leaders in history, health policy and law, social justice, and public health and medicine. The events are held in February and the recordings are uploaded to the Center's YouTube channel. This series is co-sponsored by the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, the Harvard Medical School Office for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Partnership, and the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University.
2025 Black History Month Event
Thursday, February 13, 2025 at 5-6pm ET | Watch on YouTube
'The Carceral Hospital: Race, Birth, and Imagining a Different World of Health' by Mali Collins, PhD, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at American University in Washington DC, and Birth and Postpartum Doula at the Womb Room.
Along with various social determinants, the hospital as an institution must also be examined for its role in poor Black infant and maternal health outcomes worldwide. With the US and the African diaspora as her dual focus, Collins argues hospitals must be held accountable for their demand for the literal and financial incarceration of Black mothers who cannot afford safe and attentive healthcare in our present day. With a reproductive justice orientation to bioethical practice, Collins invites audience members to imagine a future where hospital-accrued debt is no longer a factor in poor Black maternal health outcomes.
About Mali Collins, PhD
Mali Collins’ research areas include Black motherhood studies, Black archival studies, 20th and 21st century literature and art, medical humanities, digital technology, and reproductive health and justice. She is a practicing birth, postpartum, and pregnancy termination doula, and a trained Perinatal and Infant Loss advocate with The Womb Room in Baltimore, MD. Prior to joining the CRGC, she was an Assistant Professor of African American Literature in the English department at Howard University. Dr. Collins was also an NEH NextGeneration PhD Fellow with the African American Public Humanities Initiative at the University of Delaware. She has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships from Imagining America Institute, the National Endowment of Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. Her dissertation project won the Ida B. Wells Award from the Coordinating Council on Women and History and its third chapter won the Women of Color Caucus Graduate Essay Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. She was most recently a Errin J. Vuley Fellow with the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, GA.
Dr. Collins is currently preparing her book manuscript, Scrap Theory: Reproductive Injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination (under contract, OSU Press 2024) which creates new methodologies to investigate contemporary formations of Black maternal dispossession within the confines of radical documentation and archiving. Dr. Collins has published and has forthcoming work in the peer-reviewed journals: American Quarterly, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Society, and Culture, National Political Science Review, Frontiers, and The Black Scholar. She has published on popular mediums such as The Feminist Wire, b*tch! Magazine, TheRoot.com, AfroPunk.com, has forthcoming articles on TruthOut.com and The Hastings Center’s online journal. Her creative poems and short stories have been published in SALT: Contemporary Art + Feminism, The HAUNT Journal of Art, and an autobiographical book chapter will be published by Demeter Press in 2022. She is on the founding editorial committee for a new journal on Black Studies and Bioethics.