Invisible Within the Invisible | Keeshea Turner Roberts | TEDxWidener University

Описание: Who is left out of movements meant to advance justice? In this powerful talk, law professor and former public interest attorney Keeshea Turner Roberts examines what it means to be invisible within already marginalized communities. Through storytelling and scholarship, she explores how intersecting identities—such as race, gender identity, immigration status, disability, poverty, and sexual orientation—can render people unseen even within legal systems and advocacy efforts designed to protect them. Turner Roberts challenges audiences to rethink inclusion and consider what it would mean to design systems that truly account for the complexity of real people’s lives.
Drawing on more than two decades of experience, Turner Roberts highlights communities living at the margins of the margins, including transgender people within communities of color, Afro-Latinx immigrants in detention, poor people with disabilities, and queer youth entangled in the criminal legal system. Her talk examines how well-intentioned laws, institutions, and justice movements can unintentionally reproduce exclusion—and how an intersectional approach is not optional, but essential to meaningful change.
Keeshea Turner Roberts is an Assistant Professor of Law at Widener University Delaware Law School, where she teaches Family Law, Civil Procedure, and Poverty Law. A distinguished expert in family law and civil justice, her scholarship explores the relationship between law, structural inequality, and access to justice, including research on civil protection orders, restorative justice models, and the erasure of gender-fluid and transgender people within traditional domestic violence paradigms. Her work draws from lived experience, years of client advocacy in family and poverty law, and her teaching in both clinical and doctrinal settings.
Turner Roberts began her legal career as a public benefits and family law litigator with the Neighborhood Legal Services Program, where she rose to manage a neighborhood office. She later served as co-director of the Civil Protection Order Project, a first-of-its-kind initiative providing legal representation to respondents in domestic violence cases. In 2021, the Association of American Law Schools named her a Bellow Scholar in recognition of her groundbreaking research on the benefits of legal counsel in civil protection order proceedings. Prior to joining Delaware Law School, she taught at Howard University School of Law and lectured at law schools throughout the Washington, D.C. area. She is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia. Keeshea Turner Roberts is an Assistant Professor of Law at Delaware Law School, where she teaches Family Law, Civil Procedure, and Poverty Law. A distinguished expert in family law and civil justice, she has over two decades of experience.
Keeshea began her legal career as a public benefits and family law litigator at the Neighborhood Legal Services Program, rising to manage a neighborhood office. She also served as co-director of the Civil Protection Order Project (CPOP)—a first-of-its-kind program providing legal services to respondents in domestic violence cases.
In 2021, the Association of American Law Schools named her a Bellow Scholar for her groundbreaking research on the benefits of legal counsel for respondents in civil protection cases. Her research also explores the relationship between law, structural inequality, and access to justice. Additionally, she writes on the African American experience, including anti-racism and Critical Race Theory.
Prior to Delaware Law, she taught at Howard University School of Law and lectured at law schools throughout the D.C. area. She is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx