October 24, 2023 6:30 pm
Town Hall Seattle, Livestream (Hybrid)
Video Archive
How do disabled people use their technologies to draw attention to, rather than hide, their disability? The disabled gaze is an autonomous claiming of identity that rejects typical perceptions of disability as objectifying or exploitative. It offers a way to examines how disabled people, past and present, asserted themselves—through art, for instance—or challenged medical assumptions about their bodies.
What happens when we center the disabled gaze in our creations of the future? In this talk, Dr. Jaipreet Virdi asks us to consider how being disabled changes the ways people view the world and the things they create. Through these perspectives, she invites alternative approaches for remaking crip worlds, one in which disabled people, and the disabled gaze, are centered first and foremost.
The lecture will be accompanied by an ASL interpreter and will include CART captioning.
Watch the replay
About the speaker
Jaipreet Virdi
Associate Professor, Department of History at the University of Delaware
Jaipreet Virdi is a scholar activist and Associate Professor in the Department of History at University of Delaware. Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Psyche, The Wellcome Collection, and the New Internationalist. She is on Twitter as @jaivirdi
Sponsoring Departments: The Graduate School, Disability Studies Program, Department of History, Department of English, Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE)