Racial Foundations of Public Policy: LGBTQ rights

Racial Foundations of Public Policy is a speaker series that focuses on the historical roots and impact of race in shaping public policy as both a disciplinary field and as a course of action. Through it, we bring in renowned scholar-experts from across the country to be in conversation with Dean Celeste Watkins-Hayes, the founding director of the Center for Racial Justice at the Ford School of Public Policy. The series is open to all members of the University of Michigan community and the wider public.

This event will be presented virtually, with a community watch party available in Weill Hall's Betty Ford Auditorium. 

About the speaker

Bianca D.M. Wilson, Ph.D., is the Rabbi Zacky Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute. Her research focuses primarily on system-involved LGBTQ youth, LGBT poverty, and sexual health among queer women. In addition to multiple peer-reviewed and institution-published reports, she co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies that featured a multidisciplinary collection of work on health and other topics from the perspectives of Black Lesbians in the U.S., Caribbean, and South Africa. Wilson earned a doctorate in Psychology from the Community and Prevention Research program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) with a minor in Statistics, Methods, and Measurement, and received postdoctoral training at the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies and the UCSF Lesbian Health and Research Center through an Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) postdoctoral fellowship

Sponsors

This event is co-sponsored by the Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity.

Faculty Expert

Celeste M. Watkins-Hayes

Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of Public Policy; Director, Center for Racial Justice; Jean E. Fairfax Collegiate Professor of Public Policy; University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor; Professor of Sociology; Research and Community Impact Fellow, Anti-Racism Collaborative

Watkins-Hayes is an internationally-recognized scholar and expert widely credited for her research at the intersection of inequality, public policy, and human service institutions, with a special focus on HIV/AIDS; poverty; and race, class, and gender studies. Dr. Watkins-Hayes has published three books, numerous articles in journals and edited volumes, and pieces in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Chicago Magazine.

• Celeste Watkins-Hayes
• LGBTQ
• LGBT
• LGBT Rights
• race
• race and inequality
• Center for Racial Justice
• racial justice
• Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity