From Reunion to Revolution: How this Summer Shaped My Dissertation Journey
November 10, 2025
People
Brittany Brathwaite
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Brittany Brathwaite is a reproductive justice activist, cultural organizer, and critical sociomedical scientist with a deep-seated commitment to supporting the leadership, organizing, and healing of Black women, girls, and nonbinary folks. She is the co-founder of Kimbritive, the unapologetic digital health platform revolutionizing sexual and reproductive health for Black women by Black women. Currently, she is a PhD Candidate in the Critical Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center studying Black health and healing geographies, Black girlhoods, digital health humanities and Black feminist place-making. Brittany is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
This past summer, with generous funding from the 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship through housed at The Center for the Humanities, I embarked on three transformative research experiences that fundamentally reshaped not just my research trajectory, but my understanding of what scholarship can and should do in the world. Between exploring and leveraging the Sophia Smith archival collection at Smith College, engaging in conversations with Black feminist health scientists, activists and practitioners like Dr. Karen A. Scott of Birthing Cultural Rigor and Dr. Aisha Mays of the Dream Youth Clinic, and attending the Black Feminist Future Get Free Reunion, I found a renewed energy for my dissertation proposal inspiring one that now seeks to map the revolutionary healthcare spaces that Black women continue to create in response to ongoing health inequities and reproductive injustice.
My time at the Sophia Smith Archives revealed something profound about the connections between space, agency, and Black women’s reproductive lives. This amalgamation of resources provides a necessary lived history of interconnected, socio-historical Black-led movements, including reproductive health and justice rights, Black women’s liberation, and the weaponization of health sciences research. It also features crucial collections, such as the SisterSong and Planned Parenthood archives, which detail a rich genealogy of struggle and activist organizing. Touching the spines and pages of these documents, I began to understand how archival spaces themselves become sites of resistance and memory-keeping.
Walking into the Black Feminist Future Get Free Reunion after this archival immersion, I expected to learn. What I didn’t expect was to witness the living, breathing continuation of the very legacy I had been tracing through historical documents. Get Free was born in the tradition of Black feminist organizing that spans generations. In 1973, the National Black Women’s Organization conference marked a turning point in unapologetic Black feminist movement building. More than 50 years later, Black Feminist Future called Black feminists from across the country to gather once again—this time in New Orleans, for what would become the largest gathering of Black feminists in the U.S to date.
The conversations happening in those New Orleans rooms weren’t just academic discussions; they were acts of resistance, care, and world-building. When panelists shared stories of community doulas supporting birthing people through medical racism, or when speakers traced the lineages of Black midwifery traditions that have persisted despite systemic erasure, I realized I was witnessing the very phenomenon I wanted to study: Black women creating revolutionary healthcare spaces in real time. But perhaps most importantly, I began to understand that traditional academic methodologies weren’t sufficient to capture the full scope and power of this work.
This summer reaffirmed for me that the most transformative research happens not in isolation, but in community. My dissertation will attempt to honor that lesson in every methodology I employ and every story I help preserve—embracing both an intersectional approach and public scholarship that is working to transform the lived realities of Black women, femmes, girls, and gender expansive folks.
