Event Date
"Essential Worker, Expendable Family?"
From, COVID-19 to a lack of access to abortion, public health crises are shining light on the legal arrangements that shape the ability of individuals to live, that make people sick, or die. Families, in their myriad manifestations, are integral to ensuring that the response to public health crises are robust. It is in the family, and within households, for example, that we saw the transmission of COVID and it is families that bear the burden of carework in the context of healthcare. Yet, time and again, public health actors neglect to consider how families matter. The impact of this obfuscation is clear: poor health outcomes, especially for poor families of color. Drawing on insights from political economy and feminist legal theory, this talk will explore why and how the family has been exceptionalized in the response to public health crises.
Aziza Ahmed’s scholarship examines the intersection of law, politics, and science in the fields of constitutional law, criminal law, health law, and family law. She is Professor of Law and N Neal Pike Scholar at Boston University School of Law. Before joining Boston University School of Law, Ahmed was professor of law at University of California, Irvine School of Law. She also taught at Northeastern University School of Law. She has served as visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School, Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, and Law and public affairs fellow at Princeton University.
Prior to teaching, Professor Ahmed was a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health Program on International Health and Human Rights. She came to that position after a women’s law and public policy fellowship with the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS. Professor Ahmed was a member of the Technical Advisory Group on HIV and the Law convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and has been an expert for many institutions, including the American Bar Association and UNDP.
Ahmed is the author of the forthcoming book Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS published by Cambridge University Press, and coeditor of the forthcoming handbook Race, Racism, and the Law, published by Edward Elgar Publishing with Guy-Uriel Charles and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Gender and COVID-19 with Linda McClain.
Professor Ahmed earned a BA from Emory University, a JD from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and an MS in Population and International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.