What I Am Thinking About Now: Nic Ramos, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Slavery and Justice

CSREA, 96 Waterman Street, Providence RI 02912

Please join us on Wednesday, April 25, at 12pm-1pm for a "What I Am Thinking About Now" presentation by Nic Ramos, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Slavery and Justice, titledĀ "Emergent Poverty: Working Poverty and the Racial and Reproductive Politics of Emergency Medicine and Mother/Baby Clinics in Los Angeles County's Health Safety Net, 1965-1981"

Shortly after the 1965 Watts Riots and the passage of Medicare/Medicaid, the County of Los Angeles moved to expand its public hospital infrastructure to include clinics and Emergency Medical Systems (EMS) by piloting these new services in King-Drew Medical Center, a new public hospital opened in 1972 to service the predominantly black and brown neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. Tracing the expansion and contraction of public hospital care to include these services over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, this talk demonstrates how black physician architects from the National Medical Association sought, at first, to combat black and brown poverty by using the new health infrastructure to shape and mold the sexuality and reproductive economy of black and brown families. Thinking with and through scholarly observations of working poverty and surplus labor in the 1970s, I argue emergency medicine and mother/baby clinics, however, helped the City and County of Los Angeles manage poverty by making crime, undocumented immigration, and welfare services productive for a new service-based global economy.

RSVP: [email protected]

"What I Am Thinking About Now" is an on-going informal workshop/seminar series to which faculty and graduate students are invited to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress. All are invited to attend and participate.