Join us on July 10 at noon (MST) for a conversation with Melissa Gira Grant about the policing of pregnant bodies in a post-Dobbs landscape.
Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic; the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso), which was named a Village Voice favorite book of the year; and the co-director of They Won’t Call It Murder, selected for the 2021 DOC NYC Short List. Her forthcoming book, A Woman Is Against the Law (Little, Brown and Company), is about how the law sees women: as objects of protection, as instruments for disciplining white womanhood, all weaponized in the name of protecting law and order, and only against which has the women’s movement succeeded in claiming freedom.
Join us on May 29 at noon (PT) for a conversation with Dr. Chelsea Polis, Principal Research Scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, and Candace Gibson, Director of State Policy at the Guttmacher Institute. They’ll discuss the intersections between FemTech, such as fertility tracking, reproductive justice, and public policy.
Dr. Chelsea Polis is a reproductive health epidemiologist in New York City who works to improve global sexual and reproductive health, including on issues related to contraception, abortion, “FemTech”, infertility, and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. She currently serves as Principal Research Scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. Since 2011, she has held an Associate appointment in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Previously, she served as Senior Scientist for Epidemiology at the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research and Senior Epidemiological Advisor to the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at USAID. In 2023, she received a John Maddox Prize from Sense about Science and Nature for protecting science and public health by challenging misleading claims by a fertility thermometer manufacturer. Dr. Polis holds a PhD in reproductive health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a BA in medical anthropology from Brown University.
Candace Gibson (she/her) is the Director of State Policy at the Guttmacher Institute, which she joined in 2024. She oversees the Institute’s work to advance evidence-based state-level policies to secure sexual and reproductive health and rights. Previously, Ms. Gibson served as the Director of Government Relations at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, where she oversaw the organization’s federal policy and advocacy efforts. As a staff attorney at the National Health Law Program, she created strategies to improve access to and coverage of sexual and reproductive health care for individuals enrolled in Medicaid and in private insurance. Prior to attending law school, Ms. Gibson worked with refugee and immigrant communities to eliminate health inequities at Comunidades Unidas, in Salt Lake City, UT. She has a JD from the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law and received a BA in government and Spanish from Smith College. She was an If/When/How Reproductive Justice Fellow from 2012 to 2014 and was a New Leaders Council Maryland Fellow in 2020. Read her most recent paper here.
Our Moon was long listed for the National Book Award, a national bestseller, and is described as “A riveting feat of science writing that recasts that most familiar of celestial objects into something eerily extraordinary, pivotal to our history, and awesome in the original sense of the word.”—Ed Yong.
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • A NEW YORKER AND SMITHSONIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A smart, irreverent, and accessible guide to thinking more deeply about how religion permeates and shapes the world around us –and why you need to understand the work it’s doing.
Megan Goodwin PhD is an editorial consultant at Religion Dispatches and media & tech consultant for The Crossroads Project. Her research centers on race, religion, gender/sexuality, and politics in what’s now the United States. Her first book, Abusing Religion: Religious Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions is available through Rutgers. Her next project is Cults Inc.: The Business of Bad Religion.
Dr. Morgenstein Fuerst is an associate professor of Religion and the director of the Humanities Center at the University of Vermont. Her formal expertise is in Islam in South Asia, racialization of Muslims, and global histories of imperialism. Her first book, Indian Muslim Minorities & the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, is available through Bloomsbury. She is also co-editor of Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst (Equinox).
Dava Sobel is an acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo’s Daughter. Her new book crafts a luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own.
Sobel is the author of the international bestseller Longitude, the bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, And the Sun Stood Still, and The Glass Universe, and co-author of The Illustrated Longitude. She is the recipient of the Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board, the Bradford Washburn Award, the Kumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. A former New York Times science reporter, and currently editor of the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American, she lives on Long Island.
Join us on November 7 at noon (MST) for a conversation with Dr. Sara Moslener!
She’s the lead of the After Purity Project, co-editor of Evangelical Purity Culture and its Discontents, and the forthcoming (Dec 2025) After Purity: Race, Sex and Religion in White Christian America.
Dr. Moslener is a writer, researcher, and lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion at Central Michigan University where she teaches courses on the history of religious and racial discrimination in the United States. She has been studying evangelical purity culture for over 15 years and has numerous publications including the book Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, which demonstrates how sexual purity campaigns and rhetoric have been used by white Protestants since the 19th century to obtain greater political power and cultural influence.
Join us December 13 at noon AZ time as we welcome Professor Caren Morrison, Professor of Law at the Center for Access to Justice at the University of Georgia. She’ll discuss her research into pregnancy as a modern form of coverture post-Dobbs.
Caren Morrison is a professor of law at Georgia State University College of Law, where she teaches evidence, criminal procedure, law & literature, and women’s legal history. She served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York from 2001 to 2006, where she prosecuted narcotics and organized crime cases, and joined the faculty at GSU in 2009. Her research focuses on police violence, domestic homicide, and the place of women in the common law. Her article, State Abortion Bans: Pregnancy as a New Form of Coverture, was published in the Virginia Law Review Online in December 2022.
From Professor Morrison’s article: “Since Dobbs, some conservative states have made abortion a felony from the moment of conception, threatening doctors with life sentences, all in the name of protecting fetal life. This Essay argues that these bans, rather than protecting life, work to suspend women’s legal existence while they are pregnant. In this way, what these restrictions resemble most is the common law doctrine of coverture.
At common law, coverture meant that a married woman’s legal identity would be “covered” by that of her husband, with the two being deemed one in the eyes of the law—the one being the husband. What is happening now is a new kind of coverture—fetal coverture. But unlike marital coverture, which at least provided some material and legal benefits, fetal coverture just opens up a whole new world of health risks and legal peril. This account explains the absolutism of the new laws, which subsume the legal identity of the woman into that of her fetus.”
Please join us on January 24 at noon AZ time (MST) as we welcome Professor Pat Zavella.
Pat Zavella completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Professor Emerita of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She publishes in the intersection of Chicanx/Latinx studies, anthropology, and feminist studies on poverty, family, sexuality, health, work, transnational migration, and women’s social activism.
Her latest book is The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism (New York University Press, second edition 2024). Zavella received the American Anthropological Association’s Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology Award, the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists Distinguished Career Award, and Scholar of the Year by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies. She serves on the boards of three non-profit organizations—Community Agroecology Network, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. She has two children and three adorable grandchildren and her hobbies are yoga, Pilates, walking, reading, and watching films.
In Original Sin, acclaimed psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden explores how genetics complicates traditional concepts of blame, punishment, and moral responsibility. Integrating cutting-edge DNA research with personal insights, Harden examines the tension between biological constraints and human agency through the lenses of addiction, violence, and antisocial behavior. Rather than using science to absolve wrongdoers or make guilt obsolete, she challenges readers to reckon differently with fairness. Ultimately, this revelatory inquiry urges us to move past ancient nature-versus-nurture debates to imagine a more humane, realistic vision of accountability for ourselves and society.
Dava Sobel is an acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo’s Daughter. Her new book crafts a luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own.
Please join us on January 24 at noon AZ time (MST) as we welcome Professor Pat Zavella.