Alberta Eugenics Awareness Week (AEAW) 2013 ~ Oct 16 – Oct 22, 2013

Please join us in Edmonton at the University of Alberta for a series of events throughout Wednesday October 16 to Tuesday October 22, 2013 that mark:

Alberta Eugenics Awareness Week (AEAW) 2013 ~ Oct 16 – Oct 22, 2013

Wednesday Oct 16 – Rob Wilson, University of Alberta, Standpoint Eugenics.  Brown-bag lunch co-sponsored with the Dept. of Educational Policy Studies.  Noon-1:30pm, 7-102 Education North.

Thursday Oct 17 – Eugenics and Indigenous Perspectives.  Discussion panel co-sponsored with the Faculty of Native Studies.  Panelists: Tracy Bear, Joanne Faulkner, Jerry Kachur, Noon-1:00pm, 2-06 Pembina Hall.

Friday Oct 18 – 1) Persons’ Day Panel: Feminism, Motherhood and Eugenics: Historical Perspectives. Panelists: Wendy Kline, University of Cincinnati, Erika Dyck, University of Saskatchewan, and Molly Ladd-Taylor, York University. Noon – 1:00 pm, Henderson Hall, Rutherford South. Wheelchair accessible. 2) Wendy Kline, University of Cincinnati, “The Little Manual that Started a Revolution: How Midwifery Became a Hippie Practice”, 3:30 – 5.00pm, Assiniboia 2-02A, co-sponsored with the Departments of History and Classics, and Women’s and Gender Studies. 3) FIXED: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement. A documentary by Regan Brashear www.fixedthemovie.com, co-sponsored with the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine and the John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre. Telus Centre 150.  Doors at 6:30 pm, film at 7:00 pm. Q&A with Dr. Gregor Wolbring (who is featured in the film) following the film. Wheelchair accessible and closed captioned.

Saturday Oct 19 – Team Meeting, Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada.  2-02A Assiniboia Hall (9:00 am – 4:30 pm) Lunch provided; please RSVP to moyra@ualberta.ca by Noon Oct 16^th.

Monday Oct 21 – 1) Joanne Faulkner, University of New South Wales, The Politics of Childhood and Community Identity.  Noon – 1:00 pm in 7-152 Education North.  Co-sponsored by the Departments of Educational Policy Studies and Human Ecology.  2) World Premiere “Surviving Eugenics in the 21st Century: Our Stories Told” 7:00 pm – 9:15 pm Metro Cinema at the Garneau, 8712 – 109 Street NW, Edmonton. Trailer: http://youtu.be/QoM12GAJm8I; closed captioned and ASL interpretation; wheelchair access through the alley entrance.  Please sign up in advance at Facebook to help us with numbers!

Tuesday Oct 22 – 1) Joanne Faulkner, University of New South Wales, The Coming Postcolonial Community: Political Ontology of Aboriginal Childhood in Bringing Them Home.  4.00 – 5.30pm in Assiniboia 2-02a.  Co-sponsored with the Departments of Philosophy and Sociology.  2) Difference and Diversity: An Evening of Performances.  Featuring CRIPSiE (formerly iDance), a reading by Leilani Muir, the art work of Nick Supina III, and much more.  Education North 4-104. Doors at 6:30 pm, performances at 7:00 pm.  Please sign up in advance via Facebook to help us with numbers!

ASL Interpretation can be arranged for events, please contact moyra@ualberta.ca prior to the event.

All Events are FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

All events are at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

FIXED:The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement

How do technologies that claim they will change our bodies and minds challenge our views of disability and normalcy? How might this affect what it means to be human in the twenty-first century?

These are the questions tackled in FIXED: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement. It’s a haunting, subtle, urgent documentary that takes a close look at the drive to be “better than human” and the radical technological innovations that some are advocating we embrace. Producer/director Regan Brashear has working on labor, race, youth, LGBTQ, and disability issues for over twenty years through documentary film, union organizing, community forums, and grassroots activism. She is co-founder of Making Change Media, which produces videos for non-profits and labor unions, as well as independent long-form documentaries such as FIXED.

Regan will be interviewed by Gina Maranto, Director of Ecosystem Science and Policy at the University of Miami’s Leonard and Jayne Abess Center, and author of Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings.  Please join us on Thursday October 3 at 11 am PT/ Noon MST / 2 pm ET for Talking Biopolitics a live web-based interview and conversation with Regan Brashnear, Gina Maranto, and you.

Registration is required! You can register here: registration. You can read more about the film and Regan and Gina here

The Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada is hosting the Alberta Premiere of FIXED: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement with co-sponsors the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine and the John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre, University of Alberta, on Friday October 18, 2013 at the Telus Centre 150, University of Alberta. Doors at 6:30 pm, film at 7:00 pm. Dr. Gregor Wolbring will join us after the film for questions and answers via SKYPE. Admission is FREE and this event is open to the public! Plan to attend!

Let’s make a baby: Pushing the boundaries of conception – CBC Radio One

CBC Radio One is exploring the ethical ramifications of cutting-edge reproductive technologies, such as three parent in-vitro fertilization and post-menopausal pregnancy. From June 25, 2013 through August 29, 2013 on CBC Radio One, Tuesday at 7:30 pm and Thursday at 9:30 pm. All ten episodes are available online here: http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2013/08/06/lets-make-a-baby-pushing-the-boundaries-of-conception/

Hope is NOT a Plan

Canadians with disabilities are about one and a half times as likely to be victims of violence as other Canadians. People with disabilities in Canada have civil rights on paper but not in practice. Canadian citizens, everyday, have their civil rights ruthlessly violated by their government.  This has to be stopped, because Hope is Not a Plan!

Facing Uncertainty: Who is Destined for Alzheimer’s Disease?

A talk by Margaret Lock, McGill University with Respondent: Alex Choby, University of Alberta. Thursday 24 March 2011 at 3.30pm at ETLC E1 003 (right behind Assiniboia Hall on the University of Alberta campus far North West end. Nearest parking is Windsor parkade) with a reception to follow. A SSHRC Gold Medal Winner Margaret Lock is a Professor Emeritus in Social Studies in Medicine, and is affliated with the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and the Department of Athropology at McGill University. The abstract of the talk:

American Society for Bioethics and Humanities: Call for Proposals

American Society for Bioethics and Humanities
Call for Proposals
ASBH 13th Annual Meeting
October 13-16, 2011
Minneapolis, MN
The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities‘ 13th Annual Meeting is scheduled for
October 13-16, 2011, in Minneapolis, MN at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis. Sleeping rooms at
the Hyatt can be secured at the ASBH group rate of $199 beginning in August. Reservations will
be taken on a first-come, first-served basis.

Tony Judt on motor neuron disease

There’s a very interesting video of distinguished historian Tony Judt talking about motor neuron disease, life, and euthanasia up about a week or so ago at The Guardian website. The article is entitled “One of the worst diseases on the Earth”, taking a line from the interview itself. It isn’t embeddable right now (so far as I can tell), but the link to it is right here.

Thoughts about “Twice Lost”

This morning CBC’s morning radio show The Current aired a documentary called “Twice Lost”. There are a lot of questions that it raises–about relationships, diseases, families, suicide, and reconciliation. You can listen to the whole documentary by clicking here and then selecting Part 2.  It runs about 20 minutes, and is worth listening to in full. But here are the basics and some questions, if you don’t want to (or can’t) listen to the podcast. Warning: spoiler below. One question, up front: what difference should it make to family understanding of a shared past (or a shared future) to discover that a close relative has a previously undisclosed disease, disability, or condition?

Human Kinds symposium, Vancouver, April 11th

The What Sorts Network has organized an invited symposium session on Human Kinds at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in a few weeks time. Details below; please spread the word. The meeting is being held at the Westin Bayshore, 1601 Bayshore Drive, Vancouver V6G 2V4 Canada, April 8-12, and our session will be on the Saturday morning before Easter Sunday, April 11th. Those who want to attend just this single session can register on site just for this session ($10); registration for the whole conference is $60.

Philosophers will note that, unusually for an APA symposium, we have managed to stage this one with only 1 out of 4 speakers likely being recognized by the APA cogniscenti as a bona fide philosopher: Nick Agar. Congratulations Nick! And, now I think of it, kudos to the rest of you as well. Impostors all.

Well, not really impostors, just very smart folks who mask their philosophical savvy in other cloth. So who are these other folks, you might ask? Click on their names to find out more details, but in summary: Natasha Vita-More is a renowned transhumanist trailblazer in art, media, and culture; Gregor Wolbring is a disability activist, trained in biochemistry and specializing in future technologies and human life; and Ed Stein is a leading scholar on gay rights, sexuality, and the law, having moved into law after finishing his Ph.D. in Philosophy at MIT.  The session should be a blast.

If you’re going to this meeting, come along, and let others know who might be interested. Room information can be gained when you register on site for either the conference or the session.

VIII-F.	Invited Symposium: Human Kinds
				9:00-Noon
					Chair:	Robert A. Wilson (University of Alberta)
					Speakers:	Natasha Vita-More (University of Plymouth)
						“Design Issues Concerning Extreme Life Extension”
						Gregor Wolbring (University of Calgary)
						“Human Beings—Sentient Beings: Species Typical, Sub-typical, and Beyond Typical”
						Nicholas Agar (Victoria University of Wellington)
						“Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say ‘No'”
						Edward Stein (Yeshiva University)
						“The Categories of Sexual Orientation in Law, Science, and Society”

Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

First session of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (23 – 27 February 2009) Conference Room AH
Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is the body of independent experts which monitors implementation of the Convention by the States Parties.

All States parties are obliged to submit regular reports to the Committee on how the rights are being implemented. States must report initially within two years of accepting the Convention and thereafter every four years. The Committee examines each report and shall make such suggestions and general recommendations on the report as it may consider appropriate and shall forward these to the State Party concerned.

The Optional Protocol to the Convention gives the Committee competence to examine individual complaints with regard to alleged violations of the Convention by States parties to the Protocol.

The Committee shall meet in Geneva and normally hold two sessions per year.
Program here

Main page here

Call for papers: Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis

Edited by Sheila L. Cavanagh, Rachel Hurst and Angela Failler
Deadline for submissions: 15 February 2009
Email:  psychoanalysisandskin@gmail.com

The editors of Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis invite contributions for an interdisciplinary collection on the cultural politics and psychoanalysis of skin. We welcome papers that unhinge skin from the biological sciences to examine its layers of significance by way of social and psychoanalytic critique. Skin is the first and enduring medium through which we encounter the world. It delimits interiority and exteriority and, consequently, our relationships to self and others. Skin is laden with unconscious meanings and those we attach to it with respect to gender, sexuality, ‘race’ and racialization, religion, nationality, class, and dis/ability. Moreover, as both “screen” and “container,” skin functions to simultaneously reveal and hide the ways we negotiate identity, body and culture. Perhaps due to these complexities, skin remains an under-theorized yet productive site of inquiry.    

Women and Botox

Botox has been a hot topic in the news for the last few years as one of a string of new less-invasive cosmetic surgery routines. For those unfamiliar with the procedure, it involves injecting a strain of botulin toxin (hence the name Bo-tox) into facial muscles in order to paralyze them, decreasing the user’s ability to wrinkle their face, but also their ability to make certain expressions, particularly the microgestures essential to meaning.

There is evidence that women are the main targets of the Botox revolution. Part of this may be a systemic preference for younger people. A recent Wallstreet Journal article details the pressure women feel to look physically younger for the advancement of their careers.

John Mark Stallings

Book Cover Another Season

John Mark Stallings: 11 June 1962 – 2 August 2008

Johnny Stallings died yesterday in Paris, Texas.

The Power of Language new column from me out

Most people exhibit numerous biases some without even realizing that they have them and others they use for certain ends. What is needed is a tool that facilitates the identification of biases so that people can become more aware of them. The column highlights such a tool

read here

The Politics of Ableism

a new paper out by Gregor Wolbring
Development 51: 252-258; doi:10.1057/dev.2008.17
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/development/journal/v51/n2/index.html
Technorati Tags: Wolbring, Ableism, Disability, Impairment, Transhumanized version of ableism, Politics, Policies,