Groundbreaking disability lecture series isn’t over yet

A popular lecture series that began in January will soon conclude. Called “Representations of Disability in Historical, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives,” this original series of public talks at the University of King’s College has brought together leading disability scholars, researchers, writers and artists to examine how ideas of “disability” and “normality” are represented in art, science, philosophy and activism. It began in January, and there is one talk left.

Next Tuesday, Mar 18, New York University professor Mara Mills will close out the series with her lecture on the allocation of a life-saving technology strongly associated with the COVID-19 pandemic: the ventilator. She will discuss how the distribution of this technology highlighted the need for a disability theory of distributive justice.

“Debates about the fair allocation of this scarce resource dominated disability activism, news and social media for much of 2020—especially as hospitals around the world considered rationing protocols that excluded certain disabled people,” writes Mills in her lecture’s abstract.

Mills, a professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU and co-founding director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies, will trace the historical underpinnings of crisis standards of care that informed how ventilators were allocated in this moment. “New York was one of the first states to come up with a plan for allotting ventilators during pandemics,” she writes.

These guidelines, which were drafted in 2007 and revised in 2015, became “broadly influential as healthcare centres and governments developed Crisis Standards of Care” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mills will examine debates between clinicians and ethicists over the establishment of these guidelines at the time, bring in recent criticisms of “exclusion criteria” from disability bioethicists and activists during the pandemic, and explain why a disability theory of distributive justice is needed going forward to eliminate ableism in diagnosis and treatment, and to knock down barriers of access to ventilators across class, race and religion. Her talk, “Vent: Disability Distributive Justice and the History of Ventilator Allocation Protocols,” will be available to watch live on Youtube here:

Mills’ talk is also the Dr. Saul Green Memorial Lecture, an annual lecture on Judaism and medicine named after Saul Green, a Dalhousie Medical School alum and founding member of Shaar Shalom Synagogue.

Mills is the fifth presenter in the bi-weekly series, which officially wraps up on April 1 with a celebratory art show showcasing the talents of artists with intellectual disabilities within the Atlantic L’Arche Communities. There will be at least 15 artists sharing their works and talents, including paintings, a dance performance and a puppet show.

“We really want to stress this celebratory aspect as we begin to understand disability in a very different way,” series co-organizer and King’s professor, Dorota Glowacka, told The Coast in January.

The lecture series’ goal has been to “challenge stereotypes, highlight marginalized voices and rethink what it means to live, work and create with disabilities,” Michelle Mahoney told The Coast in January. Mahoney was hired as King’s first accessibility officer in January 2023. “Having this series is wonderful because students are being exposed to people with disabilities. And guess what? We’re all people—some people just have more needs than others,” she said.

Mahoney’s office helped facilitate the series in partnership with King’s faculty members and series co-organizers, Glowacka and Susan Dodd. The series has been a cross-university production, from the Contemporary Studies; History of Science and Technology; and Early Modern Studies programs.

Glowacka says that before last year, disability studies in Nova Scotia’s universities were conducted in the medical and kinesiology departments. This series has helped to change that. It was created to bring conversations of disability into the humanities, coinciding with a course that began at Dalhousie University last fall: “The Philosophy of Disability” course, taught by Dal PhD student Clarisse Paron in 2024, will return in January 2026. The lecture series, which was years in the making, is furthering the awareness that these conversations are needed in all spaces. “It’s opening up doors everywhere,” Glowacka told The Coast in January. She said the demand to talk about these things is already there, visible through the attention the series received.

“People want to talk about this,” said Glowacka. “Once you open that crack in the door, there’s a lot of desire to do so, and we just need to facilitate it.”

The public lecture series, which ran as part of a course taught by Glowacka and Dodd, is meant to open up conversations while recognizing that “there’s still so much stigma and so many taboos around different dimensions of accessibility and disability.” Glowacka was part of the cross-university team which created King’s first Accessibility Plan in 2022. This is particularly important in light of the province’s Accessibility Act, created in 2017, which outlines a path for reaching an accessible Nova Scotia by 2030.

As a faculty representative on the committee that drafted King’s accessibility plan, Glowacka said it was obvious that if a plan to remove barriers were to be robust, it would need to look at many things. That would mean addressing and removing barriers to “physical accessibility, but other forms of more systemic barriers inherent in all aspects of King’s life, like student admissions and scholarships.” Any plan to address and remove these would have to also “be implemented into the curriculum,” she said. This was the genesis of the lecture series.

Now, the first three lectures are available to watch back.

January 21: Kenny Fries’ lecture, “Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust.”

February 4: Elizabeth Bearden’s lecture, “Crip Touches Across Time or Getting in Touch with Disability in the Renaissance.”

February 25: Nicole Ineese-Nash’s lecture, “Decolonizing Disability: Indigenous Perspectives on Children with Disabilities and the Colonial Construction of Disability.”

The fourth lecture featured a screening of the award-winning film Our Hearts Aren’t Disabled, followed by a Q&A with Halifax-based director and artist Josh Dunn. For anyone in Ontario this weekend, Dunn’s film will be screened at Brock University on Sunday, Mar 16, followed by a talk with Dunn.