Hawkeye Reporter

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: Building a World that Includes Disability

Sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar

• Date: Wednesday, April 13, 2022
• Time: 7:00 pm
• Location: Jenson - Noble Recital Hall

What would our world be like if it fully welcomed and included people with disabilities? How could we build that world to share and live in together? Why would that be a better world for all of us? The human variations we think of as disabilities are part of the human condition and have been with us throughout history and across place. From Beethoven to Chuck Close, from Oedipus to William Faulkner, from FDR to Joe Biden, disability is everywhere once we know how to look for it. This presentation finds disability in culture, history, and the arts and shows how people with disabilities and what they make and do in the world demonstrates resourcefulness, resilience, and dignity. To do so, the presentation traces the history of the disability rights movement and the flourishing of disability culture, politics, history, aesthetics, and ethics by and about people living with disabilities.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor Emerita of English and Bioethics, Emory University. Her 2016 editorial, “Becoming Disabled,” was the inaugural article in the ongoing weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities.

Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities to bring forward disability access, inclusion, and identity to a broad range of institutions and communities.

She is co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities, and the author of Staring: How We Look, and Embracing Our Humanity: A Bioethics of Disability and Health, among others.

Open to the public. All are welcome.

Questions? Contact Marie Drews: drewsmar@luther.edu

Original source can be found here.