Events Calendar

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how minds and bodies “misfit.”

Michele Friedner will deliver a lecture titled "Love and Disability Alterworlds in Urban India," with an introduction by Diana Cates. 

Abstract: In urban India, “love” is mobilized to imagine and create secular and religious worlds. Friedner will ask how the concept of “the social” in disability studies and the ways that it is bound up within liberal and secular framings foreclose on the existence of disability otherworlds (or alterworlds). 

Friedner teaches in the department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago and is the author of Valuing Deaf Worlds in Rural India. 

View the complete schedule, as well as speaker bios and resources at https://misfittingsymposium.com/.

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Ida Beam Visiting Professorships Program, the UI Campus Activities Board, and the UI School of Social Work.

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