Introducing the “Did I Stutter?” blog

Earlier this year, Josh St. Pierre and Zach Richter started the very cool website and blog “Did I Stutter?”.  For and about people who stutter, and run by two savvy PWSs, the blog should get some attention from those reading Living Archives / What sorts posts.  With the most recent post, “Eugenics and the Cure for Stuttering”, Josh makes some of the connections here more overt:

Being from Alberta and knowing about our shameful eugenic history colours the search for a stuttering cure for me. As well intentioned as it may seem, a “cure” for stuttering cannot be separated from the idea and practise of eugenics that assumes the world would be a better place without disability, without us. We already screen for Down Syndrome since we have decided some lives are more valuable than others. In 20 years might we screen foetuses for stuttering?

You can read the whole post here .

Chromosome Disorder Outreach

Thanks to Velvet Martin for posting a link to the following video from CDO; her daughter Samantha features.  What do people think of the message here?  Community building around chromosomal disorder?  A humanization of the dehumanized who “look kinda funny”?  A tacit complicity with the medicalization of human variation (via the notion of “disorder”)?  All of the above?  Something else?

Human Kinds: Introduction

Over the next few weeks, we will run videocasts from in invited symposium panel that I organized at the Pacific Division meeting of American Philosophical Association in April, 2009, held in Vancouver. The panel was on human kinds, and topics that we discussed ranged from transhumanism through to disability and sub-normalcy and gay rights and gay marriage. The speakers, in the order in which they spoke, were:

Natasha Vita-More

Gregor Wolbring

Nick Agar

Ed Stein

The talks are relatively short, and we’ll run about 1 per week before linking them all up together. No captioning yet, but we hope to have captioning done by the time the series has run.

The introduction talks a little bit more generally about the panel and the What Sorts Network. You can also watch the videos directly on Youtube, by searching for videos by Rapunzelish. Really.