Project Abstract
This research project draws from historical and sociological accounts of race and disability, and their intersections, beyond the oft-disused (and important) eugenics period to include laws and policies related to chattel slavery, convict leasing, and immigration laws in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The research project weaves together genealogies of race and disability that illuminate the legal and social meanings of race and disability, as well as racism and ableism. By doing so, it offers the first comprehensive account in legal scholarship about how race and disability, and racism and ableism, were co-constructed through law, and in so doing provides a sustained intersectional analysis of race and disability.
Investigator
Jamelia Morgan
Professor Jamelia Morgan is an award-winning and acclaimed scholar and teacher focusing on issues at the intersections of race, gender, disability, and criminal law and punishment. Her scholarship and teaching examine the development of disability as a legal category in American law, disability and policing, overcriminalization and the regulation of physical and social disorder, and the constitutional dimensions of the criminalization of status.
Prof. Morgan received a B.A. in Political Science and a Master of Arts in Sociology from Stanford University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School.
Prior to law school, she served as associate director of the African American Policy Forum, a social justice think tank that works to bridge the gap between scholarly research and public discourse related to affirmative action, structural racism, and gender inequality.
(Photo credit: Randy Belice for Northwestern University)