With: Moya Bailey, Ruha Benjamin and Whitney Peoples

Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Lacks and the tremendous impact of her cells on medical research, discovery, and innovation. The book has won numerous awards, generated wealth for Skloot, and is now an HBO movie starring Oprah Winfrey.This roundtable explores this text to answer the conference theme’s primary question of “how do we make Black lives matter in our own feminist research and praxis?” By critically interrogating Skloot’s methodological and ethical choices in telling Lacks’s story, critics in this session unpack how contemporary and historical narratives of Black lives are constructed.