About the Conference
Conference Organizers
Kristin Lindgren, klindgre@haverford.edu
Debora Sherman, dsherman@haverford.edu
Program Manager: James Weissinger, jweissin@haverford.edu
About the Conference
This conference will foster dialogue around five pressing issues: the development of legal and human rights instruments to protect the rights of people with disabilities; the inclusion of disability perspectives in bioethical dilemmas; the power of visual representations to shape our understanding of disability; the capacity of war to disproportionately affect people with disabilities and to produce, in turn, more disability; and the importance of addressing disability in poverty reduction and economic development initiatives. Bringing together scholars, policy makers, artists and activists, the conference will seek productive intersections between these areas of human endeavor and explore how issues of national and global importance are reshaped by sustained attention to disability.
Disability studies is a broadly interdisciplinary field that encompasses the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences; it provides a critical framework for examining disability as a lived experience and a category of analysis. Emphasizing the ways in which disability is constructed in specific social, cultural and political contexts, disability studies scholars explore how these contexts shape the experience and representation of what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “extraordinary bodies.” Disability studies is affiliated with the disability rights movement, which has built on the work of other civil rights movements to protect and advance the rights of people with disabilities. The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) has been a leading force in this movement since 1979 and was instrumental in the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. In the wake of this legislation, DREDF has worked with international disability advocates and organizations to promote rights-based disability laws and policies in other countries and to protect the rights of people with disabilities through global human rights instruments such as the proposed UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
About the College
For more information about the college, please see Haverford's “About the College” page.
