Sessions
Welcome & General Plenary
8:30 AM - 9:45 AM Wed
Community Forum - Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families – and How Abolition Can Build A Safer World
10:00 AM - 11:15 AM Wed
Dr. Dorothy Roberts is an author, scholar, sociologist, researcher, and social justice advocate. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds appointments there in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. Her books include Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty where she describes the use of Norplant and other contraceptives in population control, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, as well as six co-edited works on constitutional law and gender. In 2022 she published Torn Apart in which she details a case for abolishing the child welfare system, which she calls the family-policing system, as part of the prison abolition movement. She also has published over 100 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review. Her TED talk on, “The problem with race-based medicine.” has over 1 million views.
Dr. Roberts received her Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. She has been a professor at Rutgers and Northwestern University, a visiting professor at Stanford and Fordham, and a fellow at Harvard University's Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Fulbright Program. She serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women's Health Imperative, on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and on the advisory boards of the Center for Genetics and Society and Family Defense Center. She also serves on a national panel that is overseeing foster care reform in Washington State and on the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (stem cell research). She received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the 2010 Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship.