2025
Tuesday, April 15, 2025 Campus Center, Multipurpose Room 8:30 am – 9:50 am EDT/GMT-4 Our book, Disability Worlds, chronicles our immersion in NYC’s wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. Disability consciousness, we show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions, from genetic testing to the reimagining of kinship, and the perils of what some call “the disability cliff”, while highlighting the remarkable world-changing creativity of neurodiversity activists and disabled artists. In today’s talk, we will focus on a chapter entitled, “Living Otherwise” that tracks the histories and everyday practices of disability arts activists. We explored projects created by people with diverse bodyminds across a dizzying array of genres, producing new culturalimaginaries centered on disability experiences and aesthetics, reframing the very concept of artistry itself. The disability art world ranges from community theater and poetry readings in neighborhood libraries todisability arts boot camps at cultural institutions such as the Whitney Museum and the Gibney Performing Arts Center, dance at Lincoln Center, The Shed, the High Line, Broadway performances, and more. Our research preceded and coincided with the pandemic when many activities shifted online, creating unexpected challenges and opportunities in the disability arts world. Overall, we show how participation inthe arts offers new opportunities, resources, and models for “living otherwise.” Faye Ginsburg is David Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies and the Center for Media, Culture & History. She is author of Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community, coauthor of Disability Worlds (2024) and co-editor of How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (2025), along with other books. Rayna Rapp is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, and the author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, coauthor of Disability Worlds, and co-editor of How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (2025), along with other books. |
Wednesday, April 9, 2025 Promoting Legal Protections to Uphold the Ban on FGM in The Gambia (Hilina Degefa) and Training and Supporting Local Human Rights Defenders in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Trinidad and Tobago (Marian Da Silva) Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Please join us for an evening with Hilina Berhanu Degefa and Marian Alejandra Da Silva Parra, our 2024–25 Lester Fellows in Human Rights. Degefa, an expert on women’s rights from Ethiopia, will discuss her work to combat proposals to legalize female genital mutilation in the Gambia. Da Silva Parra, a human rights lawyer from Venezuela, will discuss her project to train and support local human rights defenders in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Trinidad and Tobago. The fellowships honor the memory and legacy of Anthony Lester QC (Lord Lester of Herne Hill), one of Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyers. |
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Memory-Studies Talk Series: Elise Giuliano
Olin Humanities, Room 303 12:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 This talk discusses Dr Giuliano's current research about discourse among ethnic minority populations in Russia’s regions and how to think about the subjectivity and identity of ethnic minorities in multi-ethnic states. Following the end of communist rule in eastern Europe in 1989, most of the new nation-states dedicated themselves to reconstructing a history that viewed Soviet domination following WWII as a departure from their nation’s natural democratic path. Leaders in the post-Soviet states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 took a more differentiated approach, especially with regard to the recent Soviet past. In Ukraine, especially since Russia’s invasion in 2022, public memory about Soviet history has become more urgent and politicized. This talk will consider what varied interpretations of critical historical episodes mean for the attempt to define a coherent nation-state and discuss how citizens’ lived experiences and personal family histories interact with attempts by political authorities to define a common public memory. Download: Giuliano.pdf |
Tuesday, April 1, 2025 RKC 103 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 The big consequences for the West of losing "small wars" (like Algeria, Vietnam, or Afghanistan) are due to the constitutive role of "the Orient" in Western identities. This talk will discuss how these identities are committed, in diverse ways, to notions of Western vitality, strength and dominance over non-European peoples. There is no more obvious sign of Western weakness and "Oriental" strength than defeat in war or failure to obtain victory. Unsurprisingly then, such setbacks become sites of political and cultural disruption and production at all levels of Western society. |