RISA CROMER
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"Doctoring Dobbs" Virtual Gallery is funded!

12/12/2022

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Doctoring Dobbs is project that emerged from playing at the intersections of feminist literary art, advocacy, and anthropology. The seeds of the idea came from participation in Center for Artistic Activism's 6-week course focused on "Reproductive Justice." In Fall 2022, I decided to apply erasure methods (like the example to the left) to the 78-page majority ruling in the US Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. decision, which overturned nearly 50 years of federally protected abortion rights. I posted one-erasure-a-day on Instagram for friends and community. About halfway through the 78-page ruling, I paused to reflect on what I was learning and composed my thoughts in the form of a seed grant.

Today, I learned that I received an Enhancing Research in the Humanities & Arts grant to develop a virtual gallery of my erasure poems that creatively 'amend' each page of Dobbs. I'll launch the gallery on June 24, 2023, the 1-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision. Stay tuned!
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Hutton Lecture Series of the Rhetoric and Composition Program at Purdue University

12/1/2022

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Dr. Natalia Rodriguez (Public Health) and I had the pleasure of presenting insights from our collaboration in the Hutton Lecture Series at Purdue, the results of which were published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2022.

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated health and social inequities for homeless populations who face stigma and marginalization that often disenfranchise them from health and social services and expose them to conditions for heightened risk of infection and adverse outcomes. In January 2021, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) published a report outlining the council’s efforts and national outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on people experiencing homelessness through December 31, 2020.  
​In this talk, we discussed how we interrogated the USICH report’s findings and overall framing. As scholars of public health and anthropology, we draw attention to significant flaws in the report’s evidentiary base, challenge core assumptions in the report’s discursive assumptions, and discuss data negating several key conclusions based on their ongoing community-based participatory research study on homelessness during COVID-19 in Indiana.
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Abortion Unsettled, 2 Late-Breaking Roundtables at the 2022 AAA Meetings in Seattle

11/11/2022

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Putting two late-breaking roundtable sessions together for the AAA meetings was a team effort and huge success. We composed an in-person and a virtual session for discussing abortion. Here's our abstract:  

Critical ethnographies of abortion are well-known for unsettling conventional understandings about what abortion means, what abortion politics do, and how people experience abortion in diverse historical, cultural, political, and geographic contexts. Such perspectives are essential for examining the implications of the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision
in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned nearly 50 years of federally protected abortion rights. The cultural and political history contributing to this reversal of rights, and the responses it provokes, are reverberating around the world and will continue to unfold for years, even generations, to come. At this critical juncture in global history, bringing scholars of abortion into an intergenerational, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary conversation is a crucial task to understand how we got here and where we might be going in this unsettling landscape. 


In response to this urgent issue, we propose two complementary roundtables, one in person and one virtual, designed to engage the widest range of participation from panelists and audience members. Panelists will consider the following questions:  What role have abortion politics played in advancing and entrenching particular “values,” cultural ideologies (of gender, kinship, personhood, etc.), and forms of power? What do ethnographies of reproductive governance, abortion activism, and reproductive health care reveal about politics, culture, and power? What can anthropological research in US states and nations that criminalize or severely constrain abortion tell us about what to anticipate from the Dobbs decision? What role can anthropologists play in responding to this crisis? 

Part I, “Rupture and Continuity after Roe,” brings together intergenerational feminist scholars of abortion to consider changes and continuities in the global abortion landscape. Panelists bring a breadth of research experience in U.S. and non-U.S. contexts to the analysis of abortion in relationship to diverse social and political configurations. The roundtable aims to unsettle binary temporal conceptions of pre-and post-Dobbs abortion governance by underscoring the expansion and contraction of abortion rights over the past few decades. This roundtable will convene virtually.

Part II, “Working Across Landscapes of Advocacy and Care,” highlights critical ethnographies and policy analyses of abortion across multiple landscapes of activism, rights, and care. Drawing on interdisciplinary expertise in US and non-US contexts, panelists will discuss how their clinical experiences in reproductive healthcare and their research on abortion policies, access for marginalized peoples, and activist movements can inform anthropological contributions to advocacy efforts, locally and globally. This roundtable will convene in person.
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Critical Conversations: Abortion, Anthropology of Tomorrow Salon, Purdue University

10/7/2022

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During Summer 2022, the US Supreme Court delivered many landmark decisions with near- and long-term implications for our lives. Among them, the Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health Organization ruling received significant attention and continues to do so. In response to the ruling, Indiana lawmakers convened in a special summer session to outlaw abortion with very few exceptions. That statute, which was the first abortion ban passed and signed into law following Dobbs, took effect on September 15th though is enjoined as a federal court decides whether it violates the Indiana State Constitution.
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This event brought members of the Purdue community together to learn how anthropologists of abortion are responding and to discuss how politics of reproduction intersect with our roles as students, researchers, teachers, mentors, employees, and members of diverse communities.
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New Publication: "After Roe" - A Collection of 19 Essays from Anthropologists on Abortion Politics

10/3/2022

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Soon after the US Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in its June 24, 2022 Dobb's decision, a group of anthropologists of abortion collaborated on a response. These online essays are featured in Cultural Anthropology's "Hot Spots" series. I participated in the editing, co-authoring the Introduction, and contributed an original essay to the series on "The ART of Antiabortion Activism." Read the entire collection here, and share widely!

 
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New Publication: "Saving: Towards a Feminist Reckoning" in Feminist Anthropology

4/29/2022

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This paper is included in a special issue of Feminist Anthropology on "Keywords: A Feminist Vocabulary." 

Abstract: Lila Abu-Lughod suggested saving as a keyword twenty years ago by imploring feminist anthropologists to “be wary” of saving discourses and actions, especially when they appear in a sympathetic form. Heeding this call in a sustained way remains a crucial task. Being wary of saving in a systematic way investigates what gives it broad-reaching appeal and power; how and where saving rhetoric is wielded by diverse agents; and why and how particular life-forms are deemed worthy of protection while many others are not. Being wary of saving supports reflexive considerations of how saving discourses operate within anthropology broadly, and feminist anthropology specifically, toward clarifying what an otherwise world “beyond” or “without” saving could look like.
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For the musically inclined, there's an accompanying PLAYLIST to listen to while perusing the special issue. So fun! 
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The Reproductive Righteousness Project: Winter 2022 Writing Seminar

1/31/2022

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We're excited to kickstart our winter writing seminar with this powerful group. This project brings feminist scholars with wide-ranging expertise to collaboratively theorize across national cases toward an analysis of reproductive politics in expressions of what we have been calling “reproductive righteousness.” This seminar allows us to test how our hypothesis about the centrality of reproductive politics within right-wing movements manifests in particular examples of moral border-making, familiar dogmas, redemptive orders, etcetera. Rather than birds-eye-view analyses of what’s happening in a given national context, we are keen to examine particular and localized ways reproduction is centered in right-wing nationalism, e.g., in political rhetoric of particular leaders, political imagery, cultural narratives, social movement strategies, law and policies, among others. The details, we believe, will provide the bases for our co-thinking and co-theorizing. Thus, we hope in our work together to consider the particularities and similarities, across diverse regions, towards a coherent theorization of reproductive politics in right-wing extremism today. 
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The Reproductive Righteousness Project got a grant!

11/22/2021

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We received a Global Synergy Research Grant from Purdue University's College of Liberal Arts for our "Reproductive Righteousness and Far-Right Extremism: Global Feminist Perspectives" proposal, which will allow us to develop two exciting activities: 1) co-editing a special journal issue of in Women's Studies International Forum, and 2) creating an online hub for our project activities. Watch this space for more to come!
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The Reproductive Righteousness Project is publishing!

11/3/2021

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We are thrilled to have received news that Women's Studies International Forum accepted our proposal for a special on "Reproductive Righteousness and the New Right: Global Feminist Perspectives," which we envision featuring the scholarly works of project participants across the globe. We can't wait to get started!
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The Reproductive Righteousness Project: An International Symposium

7/1/2021

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Following our virtual keynote event launching The Reproductive Righteousness Project, organizers of the project hosted a symposium at which over a dozen feminist scholars presented papers on right-wing movements around the world.  Check out the amazing lineup of presenters and discussants. 
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  • home
  • about
  • c.v.
  • research
    • Conceiving Christian America
    • Reproductive Righteousness
    • Doctoring Dobbs
  • teaching
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