This week's Geo-Politics of Disability lecture at TU

The Institute on Disabilities at Temple University features a new 2008 - 2009 lecture series, The Geo-Politics of Disability. Our lecture in September, by Robert McRuer, was a great success. Our speaker this month will be Sumi Colligan, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

"Conceiving Social Justice: Disability Rights Discourse and Practice in an Israeli Setting": Professor Colligan examines ways in which national ideology, a climate of militarism, the penetration of neoliberalism, and the global circulation of human rights discourses shape and constrain contemporary conceptions, strategies, and struggles.

Date and Time: Wednesday, October 15, 2008, from 12 noon to 1:30 pm
Location: 1810 Conference Room, 1810 Liacouras Walk
On Temple University's Main Campus, Philadelphia, PA

For information and accommodations, contact:
Brian Zimmerman
Tel: 215-204-1356 • brian.zimmerman@temple.edu

Speaker Bio: Sumi E. Colligan is a professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, a four-year public institution in the Berkshires. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley and her doctorate from Princeton University, both in cultural anthropology. She also holds a Masters in Public Health from UC Berkeley. She participated in an NEH Summer Institute on the "New Disability Studies" in 2000 at San Francisco State University and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange) Summer Seminar on "Disability Studies and the Legacy of Eugenics" in Potsdam, Germany in 2004. She served on the Board of the Society for Disability Studies from 2002-05 and remains an active member. She has published several articles on disability, including "Global Inequities and Disability" in The Encyclopedia of Disability, "Why the Intersexed Shouldn't Be Fixed: Insights from Queer Theory and Disability Studies" in Gendering Disability, and "The Ethnographer's Body as Text and Context: Revisiting and Revisioning the Body through Anthropology and Disability Studies" in Disability Studies Quarterly. She is currently serving on the Editorial Board of Disability Studies Quarterly and has just completed co-editing a special issue entitled "The State of Disability in Israel/Palestine" with Liat Ben-Moshe. She is presently engaged in interviewing disability rights activists in Israel in order to explore their understandings of social justice.