BREHA Pillars
Advocacy
BREHA elevates the stories, voices, activism, and knowledge of Afro-diasporic women by foregrounding their everyday responses and movement-building against reproductive injustices.
We employ intersectional ethnography, public writing, storytelling and workshops to drive sociopolitical action and to address the simultaneous elisions and pathologization of Black women, girls queer, and trans people in global, mainstream discourse and health action.
From Massachusetts to Jamaica, and across the African diaspora, the collective is invested in employing multiple innovative approaches to reduce health inequities, enhance health outcomes and inspire structural change. Our initiatives and approaches grow up and out of the belief that community power emerges first from local voices. We listen, assist, and employ our resources in service of community goals, always through a lens of reproductive justice and equity.
Student Research
We invest in collaborative student-faculty relationships to generate new knowledge production and pedagogy, including developing student undergraduates research and community engagement experiences. Undergraduates can expect to develop their skills as writers, researchers, community collaborators, and public speakers through engagement with scholars, activists, practitioners, organizers, and other actors who apply frontline community-based scholarship to their work around movement-building, community interventions, and public policy. BREHA offers multiple options for engagement that create alignment between the vision of the research collective and students' personal, political, and professional interests and investments.
Engaged Research:
As we connect reproductive justice theory and practice, our collective supports the creation of knowledge production and research-informed political action that remain accessible to community members both inside and outside traditional research communities.
Our work combats deficit ideologies in traditional research on Black communities that emphasize pathology, and instead, foregrounds asset-based perspectives that prioritize the cultural wealth, complex agency, and selfhood of Black people throughout the African diaspora.
Our collective approach to interdisciplinary research is rooted in Black and Caribbean feminist methodological and epistemological frameworks as well as in transnational feminisms, African diaspora studies, reproductive justice theory, and Black queer studies. Dissemination will be expansive and take the form of public lectures, speakers, Brown Bag lunches, symposia, a community of practice, and research graphics.
Community Collaborations:
BREHA is invested in building relationships with local and transnational RJ political actors and organizations.
It aims to cultivate the capacity of these grassroots networks to enact their visions of justice while leveraging our resources, capital, and knowledge to support the practical needs and strategic interests of people and communities on the ground serving different needs of the movement. It thus engages in a variety of modes of CBL: long-term partnerships, course projects, public scholarship, study trips, and guest speakers.
We are deeply invested in building mutually beneficial and equity-based relationships with local and transnational RJ political actors and organizations because we understand that community engagement experiences ground and make material our inquiries on reproductive autonomy, bodily integrity, and community care. The tenets of active listening, cultural humility, equity, and coalition-building guide our entrance into and prolonged engagements with our collaborators.
BREHA Lab
The Mission
The Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity & Health Activism (BREHA) Lab foregrounds the experiences, labor, and political activism of Black women and girls across the African diaspora in our shared and divergent struggles for reproductive justice.
We advance research-informed actions that enhance the capacity of our communities to combat a range of reproductive injustices such as HIV/AIDS stigma, reproductive coercion, medical experimentation, obstetric racism, and varied forms of state, institutional and scientific violence. Using engaged research, community-based partnerships, and multimedia advocacy, we elevate and support the intellectual and on-the-ground political work of Black women and girls as they mobilize communities, provide care, and inspire collective action.
Our Goals
A. Conduct culturally responsive and ethical research on the health outcomes, reproductive lives, and lived experiences of HIV/AIDS among Black girls and women with the primary aim of eliminating health inequities as well as elevating their activism and leadership.
B. Equitably translate and disseminate research findings into informed reproductive justice-centered programming, interventions, and advocacy that educate our communities as well as respond to urgent ethical, political, and social concerns.
C. Cultivate sustainable community partnerships with actors and leaders that meet identified community needs and support movement-building in the realm of reproductive justice and health equity in the U.S., Jamaica, and the broader African diaspora.
D. Develop an infrastructure of student support and engagement in order to facilitate collaborative learning, development, informed activism and advocacy, and critical reflection, while identifying supportive ways to get involved with meaningful RJ opportunities.