Scholar's Lecture 2023

Critical Reflections on Intersectional Racisms and Cumulative Threats to Black Women Being, and Becoming in America

Thursday, April 20, 2023 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Johnson Center, Georges (3rd Floor)

Turning attention to Black women's sense of control over their life is vital to releasing racial oppression's influence relative to waiting for policies and laws to permit them to be free. As a health communication scientist, a sense of control in life reverberates across contexts, including health and how it is communicated. Instead of assessments that pathologize limitations on Black women’s self-determination, this presentation explores the influence of intersectional racisms (i.e., historical, spatial, appropriated) on Black women's capacity to control their destiny through critical textual analysis. Conceptualizing the intersectional nature of racisms while noting how these distinctions work separately and collectively to undermine Black women’s power to thrive aids in identifying racism-specific factors that intersect at the individual level to influence self-determination and inform ways of communicating health to Black women.


Biography:
As joint faculty in the Department of Communication and Women and Gender and African/African American Studies Programs, Dr. Jennifer R. Warren (Akila Ka Ma'at) is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University and Director of the Communicating Equity and Healing Justice Research Lab. Through her 25 years of identity-related research with Black women, Dr. Warren is concerned with racism's impacts on Black women's sense of control in life, which has implications across contexts, including health and how it is communicated. Drawing upon interdisciplinary social science, Dr. Warren focuses on equity and healing justice through intersectional investigations of racism, contributory mechanisms, and health risks/outcomes for Black women to identify racism-specific adaptive coping among Black women to inform clinical, public, and community health communication efforts. Dr. Warren's healing justice approach stresses the role of Black women in healing Black women from the trauma of racism, which starts with the individual Black woman who does not even realize she is bound by the chains of White supremacy. Dr. Warren regularly partners with community-based nonprofits to translate her work into practice and health systems to help identify the communication and reification of intersectional racial oppressions among Black women for anti-racist quality improvements.