Greenfield Lecture: Critical Disability Studies with Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Disability Scholar

Oct 3rd, 2013 @ 6:30 pm

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Greenfield Lecture: Critical Disability Studies with Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Disability Scholar
October 3, 2013
6:30 pm
Carl R. Reng Student Union Auditorium

With generous funding support from the A-State College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
This presentation is funded by Drs. Rosalee and Raymond Weiss of Teaneck, New Jersey, in memory of her mother, Corinne Sternheimer Greenfield, through an endowment supporting an annual lecture in the A-State College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson will describe and explore Critical Disability Studies as an interdisciplinary academic field of inquiry in the United States that expands health science perspectives by examining understandings of disability from cultural perspectives such as: civil and human rights, minority identity, diversity, social justice, sociology, historic and community studies, bioethics, and the arts. It seeks to define, defamiliarize, and challenge cultural concepts of the “normal,” “ideal,” “abnormal,” and” grotesque,” among others. Thomson's work within Critical Disability Studies defines disability as bodily variations that are interruptions or departures from a standard script of human form, function, behavior, or perception that in contemporary thought we call normal. Social disadvantages of disability are not caused by a devalued trait itself but rather from disabled people’s interactions with unaccommodating environments.