Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a professor emerita of English and Bioethics at Emory University, will speak on “Building a World that Includes Disability” Wednesday, Jan. 25, at 7:30 p.m. at the Lenhart Ballroom at the Bowen-Thompson Student Union on Bowling Green State University campus.
Her talk will address the questions:
What would our world be like if it fully welcomed is an included people with disabilities? How could we build that world to share and live together?
Why would that be a better world for all of us?
The human variations we think of that disabilities are part of the human condition and have been with us throughout history and across plays. 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 and 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 disability rights movement and the flourishing of disability culture, politics, history, aesthetics, and ethics by in about people living with disabilities.
ASL interpreting will be available at the talk and on the live stream. Close captioning will be available on live stream.
Professor Garland-Thomson is a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, educator, and humanities scholar. She consults on many academic and bioethics projects, gives frequent lectures, presentations, and media interviews, publishes in a range of media, and participates in a wide range of web events. Her 2016 op-ed, “Becoming Disabled,” was the inaugural article in the ongoing weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities.
As a bioethicist, she is a Hastings Center Fellow and Senior Advisor and a Center for Genetics and Society Fellow who publishes frequently in academic journals and an expert consultant in bioethics and disability.
She is currently chief project advisor to The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology, a Hastings Center project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
As a humanist, she is currently a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She is co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities (2019) and the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books.
