CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now with Chanta Shenell Palmer (LLC)

The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

Register in advance for lunch while supplies last.

Chanta Shenell Palmer, Doctoral Student, Language, Literacy, and Culture
Fall 2026 Graduate Student Fellow

Recursive Care: Black Women’s Wellness in São Paulo and The Bronx

Research on Black women’s health has documented in detail how structural racism produces illness, and far less about how Black women produce wellness for one another. In this talk, Chanta will introduce (Re)fortification, an original framework she is developing to describe care as a recursive process in which an act of care meets an immediate need and also builds the relationships that make future care possible. Drawing on Black feminist thought and on Afro-Brazilian feminist scholars such as Lélia Gonzalez and Sueli Carneiro, she will share her plans to study how Black women in São Paulo, Brazil, and the Bronx, New York, sustain one another through community spaces and everyday relationships. Chanta welcomes the audience to think with her about how care endures in the face of racism and neglect as the project takes shape.

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Join via WebEx: https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=m312acdea02a0196e085fe415e8ee8bc2