“Anti-Racist Feminist Organizing in a Transnational World," is a three-part speaker series that focuses on various ways anti-racist feminist methods of organizing are taking shape in an increasingly connected, transnational world. Specifically, speakers will discuss the various ways their work and research highlights shared struggles, but also distinct ways anti-racist feminist practices can be deployed in different societies, organizations and contexts towards gender and race justice.

In this session, Laura Briggs will focus on what it means to build anti-racist organizations in a transnational feminist vein and how to think about embedding such practices in everyday life and experience.

Laura Briggs is an expert on migration, U.S. and international child welfare policy, and on transnational and transracial adoption. She received her Ph.D. in American studies from Brown University. Her research studies the relationship between reproductive politics, neoliberalism, and the longue durée of U.S. empire and imperialism. Briggs has also been at the forefront of rethinking the field and frameworks of transnational feminisms. Briggs recent book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020), examines the 400-year-old history of the United States’ use of taking children from marginalized communities as a tactic of terror—from the taking of Black and Native children during America’s founding, as a punishment for the rebellion of the Civil Rights Movement and Red Power, during the war on drugs, and in the context of Donald Trump’s policy of family separation for Central American migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border. Briggs’ other books include How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (University of California Press, 2016), Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption (Duke University Press, 2012), winner of the James A. Rawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2002), and International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children (New York University Press, 2009), co-edited with Diana Marre. Her writing and research have also appeared in American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, The Scholar and the Feminist Online, Radical History Review, and American Indian Quarterly. Briggs is also a public intellectual whose work has been featured in court cases, podcasts, and journalism, including on National Public Radio, Slate, PBS, New Republic, Indian Country Today, the Washington Post, and Ms. Magazine.