Workshop 1 (Room 220: In Person Only)
Title: Seeding Sanctuary
Abstract: Join us for an interactive workshop that visualizes and imagine sanctuary past and present. Together, we will map the dual histories of carceral repression and abolitionist resistance. What are interconnected roots of violence and how do we seed new futures otherwise?
Jenna Loyd is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a feminist geographer whose work focuses on racism and state violence. One thread of her research focuses on health and the social production of health inequities. This focus can be seen in Health Rights Are Civil Rights on US-based health activism and more recent research and teaching on how health concepts and practices intersect with international migration governance. A second main thread of research focuses on theorizing the content and scope of the US carceral state, evident with Beyond Walls and Cages and Boats, Borders, and Bases. Much of her work has examined migration detention and deterrence as interrelated parts of the criminal legal system, work which has implications for movements migrant and racial justice.
Annie Menzel is an Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studiesis. She is a political theorist and former midwife, and her work focuses on understanding how white supremacy, colonization, and gender-based oppression shape human reproductive life, health, and care—as well as theorizations and praxes of reproductive justice and freedom. Her research and teaching foreground race, gender, and reproductive politics and practices in North America; Black political thought, especially Black feminisms; feminist political theory and queer theory; abolitionist and anti-colonial theory and praxis; biopolitics; and feminist science and technology studies of reproductive health and medicine.
Her first book, Fatal Denial: Racism and The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality, published in May 2024 by the University of California Press, in their Reproductive Justice Series. She is also at work on a second book project, Birthing Paradox: Race, Colonization, and Radicalism in US Midwifery, which seeks to understand the contradictory and practices in the homebirth midwifery movement since 1970.
She has published work in the Du Bois Review, Contemporary Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Political Theory, Signs, The Boston Review, and Theory and Event.
Rachel Kuo (she/her/hers) writes, teaches, and researches race, feminist politics, social movements, and digital technology. Her monograph Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarites demonstrates how technologies enhance and foreclose possibilities for political organization across uneven racial and class difference. She is a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, where she is co-editing the anthology Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities. She has also co-edited two special issues on Asian American Abolition Feminisms for Frontiers: A Women’s Studies Journal and guest edited for the World Without Cages project with the Asian American Writer’s Workshop.