Faye Ginsburg

Professor of Anthropology, New York University

"Screening Disabilities: Visual Fields, Public Culture, and the Atypical Mind in the 21st Century"

This talk analyzes the visual fields that place, circulate, and reposition young people with a range of diagnoses involving atypical cognition. Drawing on current multi-sited fieldwork in NYC, this work examines the "transference of meanings" across several critical visual and discursive fields: the use of fMRI scans in neuroscientific labs studying cognition; the creation of targeted media in the educational world to represent the needs of non-normative learners; the emergence of independent film and activist documentary projects that generate models for a new social landscape on and off-screen via advocacy campaigns for inclusion; and d.i.y/social media that use irreverent humor  and parody to upend social hierarchies and suggest alternative regimes of value. Children and young adults labeled with cognitive diagnoses are becoming increasingly visible through the proliferation and circulation of media representations - from laboratories to the internet --- that embrace a cultural model valorizing "all kinds of minds."  Yet, this process is inherently ambiguous, creating  "looking relations" that reflect the doubled trajectories of modernity as the expansion of democratizing visual representations of neurodiversity are entangled with forms that inevitably categorize, stratify and regulate cognitive difference.

Reception 5-6pm

Talk 6-8

Please see the attached flyer for details