Bodies Politic Talk: Art, Culture, Ethics, and Disabilty

Disability is a concept, social identity, community, and shared human experience represented in history, literature, visual art, music, dance, architecture, design, and popular culture. Images show and shape the way we think about disability and people with disabilities and how we understand variation in human bodies. New ways of seeing and representing disability have appeared in U.S. public culture because of the civil and human rights movement, its laws, attitudes, and social changes. This talk explores these issues by bringing forward the history, culture, politics, aesthetics, and ethics of disability and people living with disabilities.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is a professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University. She works in disability culture, bioethics, and health humanities. She is a Hastings Center Senior Advisor and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities and author of Staring: How We Look and several other books.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Bodies Politic series and Idee Levitan Endowment