Belonging: On Disability, Technology, and Community

This is the inaugural event in “The Art of Flourishing: A Conversation on Disability and Technology.” The series is presented by The Hastings Center and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Featuring

Haben Girma. The first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma advocates for equal opportunities for people with disabilities. Haben believes disability is an opportunity for innovation. She travels the world teaching the benefits of choosing inclusion, and has received numerous honors for her work. She is the author of the bestselling new book Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law.

Rachel Kolb. Rachel Kolb is a writer and a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Emory University, where her work explores ideas about deafness, language, the senses, and communication in American literature and culture. She graduated from Stanford University and was the first Deaf Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times and The Atlantic, and she gave a TED talk at TEDx Stanford in 2013.

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke. The first signing Deaf woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy, Blankmeyer Burke is an associate professor of philosophy and and faculty administrator of professional development at Gallaudet University. She characterizes her work as “deaf philosophy—the space where philosophy intersects with Deaf studies.”

Erik Parens, senior research scholar at The Hastings Center, director of the Center’s Initiative in Bioethics and the Humanities, and author of Shaping Our Selves: Technology, Flourishing, and a Habit of Thinking, will introduce the event.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, professor of English and bioethics at Emory University and co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities, a new book based on the New York Times’s pioneering series, will moderate the conversation among the panelists.

Joel Michael Reynolds, the Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center and an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and author of Ethics After Ableism: Disability, Pain, and the History of Morality, will facilitate the sustained conversation with the audience.