Bio:

Dr. Gibson is a visiting assistant professor at Freie Universität Berlin’s John F. Kennedy Institute researching the history of grand midwifery as spiritual practice. She is currently the European Journal of American Studies (EJAS) editor for history, political science, and international relations. Their research focuses on the significance of mattering beyond the scope of empiricism, and is an invitation to commune otherwise.

Abstract:

Denise Ferreira da Silva writes in her 2014 essay "Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World," "When Blackness returns the Necessity of Time to the Subject, it recalls that the World and its Categories thrive in the contingency of Existence shared by the Subject of Whiteness and its Racial Others" (Ferreira da Silva 2014, 89). Grand midwives lived, this talk argues, in otherwise worlds (King, Navarro, and Smith 2020) replete with sacred reciprocity and a holographic epistemology (Aluli Meyer 2013) that invited engagements with time and matter beyond the force of necessity. What cosmological understandings did these practices enable for enslaved birthing people? How does an emphasis on restoration of the total value of land and labor expropriated from Indigenous and enslaved people (Ferreira da Silva 2022) invite different reflections on the significance of "matter imagined as contingency and possibility" (Ferreira da Silva 2014, 92)?