Fall 2026 SSFs

Maryland State Delegate Lily Qi
District 15, Montgomery County

Hosted by the Institute of Politics.  Co-sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, the Department of Political Science, the Center for Social Science Scholarship, and the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery. 

Del. Qi has represented District 15 in Montgomery County since January 2019. She is the first Chinese-born legislator elected to the State House and chairs the Maryland Legislative Asian-American and Pacific-Islander Caucus.

She is the author of Elected American: From Red China to Blue Maryland (Temple University Press, 2026), a political memoir and autobiography that explores her journey from Shanghai to the Maryland House of Delegates.

Delegate Lily Qi will deliver remarks on the constitutional promise of representation and the participation of immigrant communities in American democracy, followed by a moderated discussion.

Download and share the event flyer (PDF).  RSVP required.

Adam Seth Levine, PhD
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute
Professor of Health Policy and Management
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Johns Hopkins University

Organized by the Center for Social Science Scholarship.  Cosponsored by the Department of Political Science, and Dresher Center for the Humanities, and the Sondheim Scholars Program.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman, PhD
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Chair & Associate Professor of Africana Studies
Associate Professor, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
Davidson College, North Carolina

As poor Black women’s wage labor and fertility remained foundational sites of political and economic governance and surveillance, women have devised resistance practices that we have come to understand as deviant and unhealthy. Dr. Harper-Shipman’s talk invites us to explore deviant and unhealthy practices of poor Black women within a liberatory framework for collective reproductive and material freedom for all people. It will examine how poor Black women in North Carolina and Senegal craft alternate routes and ends to reproductive freedom, and how we can expand these practices as anti-capitalist and anti-fascist world-making efforts.

T.D. Harper-Shipman is the Chair of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Davidson College in North Carolina. She is a community organizer and activist whose activism spans social justice issues related to stopping the Charlotte’s Cop City and support for Palestine. Her scholarly work explores political economy at the intersections of race and gender. Dr. Harper-Shipman has authored two books: Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics (Stanford University Press, July 2026) and Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (Routledge, 2019); and published in leading scholarly journals, including Third World Quarterly, Journal of Asian and African Studies, International Studies Review, and Philosophy and Global Affairs. She has also contributed to public-facing intellectual forums such as Africa Is a Country, The Global African Worker, and Pambazuka. She serves on the editorial board of Third World Quarterly and is a former forum editor with the Miami Institute of Social Sciences.

Organized by the Department of Africana Studies. Cosponsored by the Center for Social Science Scholarship, the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Dean’s Office, and the Dresher Center for the Humanities.