Health within Disability: Contradiction, Construct, or neither?

Disability Studies Reading Group

Academic Jeff Bennett of Vanderbilt joins Pittsburgh activist Cori Frazer to lead a discussion. How are individuals with disabilities treated within the healthcare system? How applicable are the labels of ‘disabled’ and ‘healthy’ to the same bodies? And to what extent does the ‘healthy U’ presuppose an ‘ableist U’?

Cori Frazer is an Autistic and queer/nonbinary activist and director of the Pittsburgh Center for Autistic Advocacy. Cori is currently pursuing their master’s degree in social work with an emphasis on community organizing at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and serving as an intern with the Education Rights Network, an education justice project of One Pennsylvania which focuses on dismantling the systemic causes of school-to-prison pipeline and ameliorating its impact on students of color and students with disabilities.

Jeff Bennett is an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University. Jeff is currently completing a book-length project that investigates the rhetoric of diabetes management.  That work, tentatively titled Critical Conditions: The Cultural Politics of Diabetes Management (NYU Press), argues that diabetes’s public character is not simply a product of medical knowledge that stems from epidemiology and endocrinology, but a condition whose meanings are organized by culture, constituted through communicative practices, and distinctly realized in varying public spheres.  He is also launching a research project about the origins and consequences of pre-exiting conditions clauses and their impact on healthcare deliberations.  Jeff’s first book, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance, engaged the federal donor deferral policies that prohibit queer men from giving blood.  His work has also appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and Critical Studies in Media Communication.       

RSVP required by March 12th to jessicabenham@pitt.edu, please include any accommodation requests and dietary restrictions. Lunch provided. 

Funding provided by the Year of Healthy U, along with the Center for Bioethics + Health Law, Department of English, Department of Sociology, Department of Communication, Rhetoric Society of America, Cultural Studies, the Humanities Center, and Students for Disability Advocacy.