Terence Keel is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles where he works in the Department of African American Studies and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. His teaching, research, and community engagement are concerned with abolishing discrimination within our society. For the last decade, Terence has become an outspoken critic of how racism haunts science, public policy, art, and even our religious beliefs. He is the author of Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (Stanford University Press), winner of the 2021 Iris Book Award, sponsored by the Center for Religion & the Human at Indiana University Bloomington, as well as the 2018 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, sponsored by the American Library Association. Terence is the co-editor of the forthcoming book, Critical Approaches to Science and Religion.

In 2020, he founded the Lab for BioCritical Studies—an interdisciplinary space committed to studying how discrimination, inequality, and resilience are embodied in human and nonhuman life. Terence is also the Advisor for Structural Competency and Innovation for the UCLA Simulation Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine. His guidance helps healthcare providers, students and trainees understand how symptoms, clinical problems, diseases and attitudes towards patients and health systems are influenced by upstream social determinants of health, such as economic or social conditions affecting health status.

He has received several awards and honors including the 2018 Harold J. Plous Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara as well as named a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion.

Drawing on the collaborative work of his Lab for BioCritical Studies, Terence is writing a third book titled Society after Nihilism: The Medicolegal Erasure of Accountability at the End of American Life. In this book, he identifies troubling forms of discrimination that haunt public record laws, autopsy science, and unarmed death while under the custody of law enforcement.

Terence is an alum of Xavier of Louisiana, earned his Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and holds a PhD from Harvard University under the Committee on the Study of Religion, the Department of the History of Science, and the Department of African and African American Studies.

Topics:

  • Racism haunts nearly every aspect of our society—but it doesn’t have to. Scientists since the 1950s have proven that humans cannot be classified into biological races. Did you know that sickle cell anemia can be found in Spain, Malta, and Greece among people who do not have African ancestry? Or that race has nothing to do with why some of us can enjoy milk and ice cream? Or that living near a freeway can tell us more about your chances for having asthma than your so-called racial identity? Drawing on the last 70 years of scientific research and discovery, Terence explains all you need to know about why race is an illusion, why you are nearly identical to people who look different than you, and how understanding science can help us become anti-racist.

  • Humans are not created by nature; we are made in the image of the societies we design. This is what director of the CDC meant when she recently declared that structural racism is a public health issue. If we continue to live in a world where practices like police profiling, residential segregation, and industrial contamination unequally impact where people of color live then we should expect the consequences of these racist practices to appear in our bodies. In this talk, Terence explains why our ability to live with dignity and health is not a matter of chance or fate, but is a result of planning and design. With rising health disparities in the U.S. and a healthcare system on the verge of collapse, the possibility of anyone living well is becoming increasingly unlikely. Reflecting on cutting edge research within the field of public health, this talk gives you tools to understand how humans embody the society we inherit and how we can literally create health through more equitable designs.

  • Is it possible that our religious beliefs are responsible for the racism and discrimination troubling our society today? There is ample evidence to suggest this might be true: from Christian merchants who purchased Black people during the transatlantic slave trade, to the persecution of European Jews during the Holocaust, and the recent support of white evangelicals of the rioters who stormed the Capitol. In this talk Terence takes an unflinching look at the religious past of Europe and America to help explain the sources of present-day social and political discrimination. He explains that while our religious beliefs have clearly divided us there are resources within the traditions of American thought—from the work of Frederick Douglass to Octavia Butler—that can help us design better beliefs about the world and others within it.

Twitter: @TerenceKeel

Instagram: @terencedouglaskeel