- Royce Fellowship
Award Year
My research project examines the relationship between family abolition and the abolition of the foster care-industrial complex with a focus on the Bronx in so-called “New York City,” or the ancestral homelands of the Lenape people. While working with The Bronx Defenders’ Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Program, which supports the primarily low-income, Black and brown prospective parents targeted by the child welfare system, I will explore how the notion of family has been defined by the state for the purpose of policing marginalized communities and enforcing a settler colonial futurity.
RL Wheeler is an Ethnic Studies and Literary Arts concentrator who works at the rupture points of genre and discipline. They seek to inhabit the crossroads of political organizing, interdisciplinary poetics, and scholarship as a way to centralize dreaming radically and building more liberatory communities of care.