Rethinking Rehabilitation Task Force

I am pleased to announce that I am in the process of organizing the “Rethinking Rehabilitation Task Force,” which will bring together a group of clients/families, scholars familiar with disability from a variety of disciplines, and rehabilitation practitioners in the New York City area to pose questions about how the social model of disability impacts research into, and the practice of, rehabilitation. The project will be supported in part by the School of Professional Studies at the City University of New York.

I am in the process of putting the team together and working on a new draft of the project description. Several members of the “What Sorts” team based here in NYC have already expressed a willingness to participate, and have been wonderfully helpful.

I will post more news of the project as it develops. I am also open to ideas and feedback, as things move along. Stay tuned . . .

Go See “Out from Under”

Today (or I guess technically yesterday) I took a great tour of the exhibition Out from Under with one of the curators of the exhibit, Catherine Frazee. It was a wowser, and I was appropriately wowed. The exhibition, at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, consists of 13 remembered objects, each chosen by a participant in a seminar run by several of the curators, and each telling us a small part of the history of disability. Included is the watch depicted here, which belonged to Mae Brown, the first deaf-blind Canadian to graduate with a university degree. (Small prizes for those who know in what year she graduated.) The exhibit has some affinities with the book that Sherry Turkle from MIT recently published, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With,

Neuroethics Rising

Neuroethics is an emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry that draws on ethics, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, psychiatry, law, bioengineering, and good, old-fashioned neurology in whatever mixture those involved in a particular endeavour deem appropriate (for them, at least). The Canadian, CIHR-funded Neuroethics Net (in place since 2003), for example, has a focus on pediatric uses of fMRI and other imaging technologies, for example. A cruise through a couple of blogs, like Brain Ethics or Neuroethics and Law will give you a broader sense of what some include under the heading “neuroethics”.

Like nearly all hyphenated things neuro- — neurophilosophy, neuroeconomics, neurobiopsychoecoevodevomicronanoeverythingism, to take just three examples — there’s not just hyphenation but hyper-nation in them there starry-eyed neuroethical enthusiasms. But since this train has already left the station