Independent Research Project: “Going and Growing Home: The Postponed Homecomings of Mixed-Race American, Afro-German, and Dutch Indonesian Women.”
Kelsey graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in American Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She earned an M.A. in the Program on the History of Science and Medicine at Yale and is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies en route to her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale. She works at the nexus of critical black studies, histories of science and medicine, science and technology studies, and disability studies. Her current project follows the legacies of nineteenth-century scientific metrics of human development and racial difference, metrics forged in the crucible of racial slavery, in histories of twentieth-century developmental science and biomedicine. She historicizes the production of developmental norms and tools that are often perceived as race-neutral, like pediatric growth charts and developmental screening tests, interrogating the racial premises and parameters of developmental knowledge production and its material effects on black life. Kelsey still looks back fondly on her time in the WGSE, particularly the experience of co-authoring an article on the utility of Rosi Braidotti’s scholarship for making sense of “Nomadic Encounters: Turning Difference Toward Dialogue” with Iveta Jusova and fellow WGSE-r Joy Westerman.