Katie Fitzpatrick is a lecturer in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media (JWAM) and the Chair of the Coordinated Arts Program (CAP). In JWAM and CAP, she teaches courses focused on research and writing. In her teaching and her pedagogical research, Dr. Fitzpatrick is focused on enhancing the first-year student experience and on enriching feedback interactions between students and faculty. She is also passionate about research ethics, public-facing research, reproductive justice, and feminist cultural analysis.

Dr. Fitzpatrick’s own writing has been published in scholarly and public-facing venues, including Post45, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nation Magazine, Public Books, and elsewhere. She is a former Humanities Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Booksand is currently researching the work of student editors at UBC, through a SoTL-seed funded project entitled “Between Peer and Expert: The Student Journal Editor and the Culture of Undergraduate Writing.” She holds a PhD in American literature from Brown University.

The recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) decision has drawn attention to the battle for abortion access in the United States. But, for many activists around the world, that battle is only one part of a larger effort to secure autonomy for families and pregnant people. As feminists of colour have long argued, reproductive justice includes the right to end a pregnancy, but also the right to “have children…and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities” (sistersong.net, n.d.). Unfortunately, these rights are often distributed unequally on the basis of race, class, sexuality, and ability (Davis, 1981; Luna and Luker, 2013; Silliman, 2004).

This course will explore fights for reproductive justice through international research in disciplines like history, sociology, and public health. Sample topics may include: the geopolitics of commercial surrogacy, the economics of parental leave, access to reproductive technology for queer and trans people, and structural racism in maternal healthcare and child welfare systems. While learning about these issues, students will also learn how to conduct scholarly research and write in a variety of scholarly genres. At the end of the course, students will work with secondary and primary sources to produce a research paper on a topic of their own choosing related to reproductive (in)justice anywhere in the world.