RISA CROMER
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'The Embryo Matchmaker'

8/4/2023

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I spoke with journalist Sara Harrison about my research on embryo adoption practices and politics, which is featured in her recent essay in The Cut. Check it out! 
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On the Art and Ethics of Erasing Abortion Law

6/30/2023

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My reflections on the art and ethics of erasing abortion law is the 'editor's pick' on Bioethics Today! Many thanks to Dr. Alyssa Burgart for her enthusiasm about the Doctoring Dobbs project. You can check out my essay here and follow Dr. Burgart on her 'Curious Bioethics' substack. 
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'Adoption Uncovered' Podcast Interview with Charlyn Spiering

6/29/2023

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I had the pleasure of talking with Charlyn Spiering, creator of the Adoption Uncovered podcast about my research on the ins and outs of embryo adoption. You can check out our conversation here - thanks for listening!
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Being Wary of White Saviorism in Post-Roe Politics

6/24/2023

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On the one year anniversary of the Dobbs ruling, I offer some reflections on the importance of being wary of white saviorism in  post-Roe politics. The essay is featured by NYU Press's "From the Square" blog on a topic explored at length in my forthcoming book, Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics. 

Check it out here!
https://www.fromthesquare.org/being-wary-of-white-saviorism-in-post-roe-politics/ 
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Doctoring Dobbs launched!

6/24/2023

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On the one year anniversary of the Dobbs ruling, I am excited to launch my gallery of erasure poems on abortion law.  

Check it out here: www.doctoringdobbs.com

​Follow us: https://twitter.com/DoctoringDobbs

Thanks for engaging and sharing!

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New publication!

5/19/2023

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I'm happy to share news that the open access article, "Deploying fetal death: “Fetal burial” laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana," that was co-authored with Sophie Bjork-James is published in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review's May 2023 issue. You can read the article in full here, or take a peek at the abstract below.

Fun fact: I snapped the picture featured on the cover of the issue! On a trip from the Red River Gorge in summer 2020, I visited the 
Frankfort Cemetery out of intrigue about the "Kentucky Memorial for the Unborn" housed there. I followed signs from the  "Daniel Boone" memorial to the cemetery's edge, where I found the 'Memorial for the Unborn.' This image depicts the confluence of antiabortion politics and white settler violence, an issue taken up in our article on fetal burial bills in Indiana.

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Abstract: While abortion foes in the United States rhetorically promote “life,” discursive invocations of death are foundational to antiabortion advocacy. Pro-life strategists have made gains mandating the mourning of aborted fetuses through fetal burial bills, which require abortion providers to cremate or bury fetal tissue from abortion procedures. Fetal burial bills are inextricably tied to biopolitical regimes that make and manage grievable life. Drawing on cultural anthropology, feminist social science, critical race theory, and long-term research on white evangelicalism, this article examines government documents (e.g., Indiana statutes, court rulings, health reports, legislative activity, and state prosecutions) to provide a discursive critique of Indiana's fetal burial law. Constructions of aborted fetuses as grievable human life and the formations of personhood they promote undergird what anthropologist Leith Mullings called the necropolitics of reproduction—a framework explaining how reproduction is constitutive of political regimes that use systemic violence to determine who (or what) lives and dies. Legal conceptions of fetal personhood that hyper-value fetal subjects entwine with systemic racism, Christian ideology, and anti-environmentalism to diminish the Black and Brown bodies and environments on which their futures depend. This case is a bellwether for broader dynamics in anti-abortion policy and activism in the post-Roe era.
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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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  • home
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    • Conceiving Christian America
    • Reproductive Righteousness
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