Katie Fitzpatrick
Research / Teaching Area
About
| Dr. Fitzpatrick received her BA from UBC, where she studied in the English Honours program. She went on to pursue her Masters and PhD in English at Brown University. Since graduating from Brown in 2017, she has taught writing and literature in the US and at UBC. She is particularly passionate about first-year instruction.
Dr. Fitzpatrick’s academic research has appeared in Post-45: Peer Reviewed and Twentieth-Century Literature. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The Nation, The Chronicle Review, The Point Magazine, Aeon, and Public Books. She is a former Humanities Editor and current Editor at Large with the Los Angeles Review of Books. |
Teaching
WRDS 150: Reproductive Justice
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.