CFP: Cripples, Idiots, Lepers, and Freaks: Extraordinary Bodies/Extraordinary Minds

Call for Papers

Cripples, Idiots, Lepers, and Freaks:

Extraordinary Bodies / Extraordinary Minds

Thursday, March 22 – Friday, March 23, 2012

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Could disability be, as Susan Wendell writes, “valued for itself, or for the different knowledge, perspective, and experience of life” it gives rise to? This conference seeks to continue—and to expand—conversations about the cultural meanings and possibilities of impairment, as well as the ways that the disabled body becomes a locus for uneasy collaborations and tensions between the social and the scientific. What critical and theoretical perspectives can be brought to bear on human variations that are, or have been, subject to medical authority or understood as requiring
intervention?

Emphasizing an interdisciplinary approach to “disability,” we seek papers from across the humanities (English, art history, music, etc.), social sciences (history, sociology, political science, etc.), and applied fields (law, education, medicine, etc.). We welcome papers on topics ranging
from the aesthetics of illness in medieval literature to the politics of disability in South Park, from the cultural fascination with autistic savants to race, impairment, and spectatorship in freak shows.

Possible paper topics include:

Genre, Aesthetics, and Disability: poetics; visual art, photography, and spectatorship; life writing and illness narratives; metaphors and representations of disability; disability and performance; “outsider art”; impairment and artistic production; comedy and disability

Pedagogy and Disability: teaching disabled authors; writing the body; student embodiments, teacher embodiments; “coming out” and “passing”; disability and composition studies; “special” education

Sexuality, Desire, and Disability: pleasure and the extraordinary body; voyeurism; fetishism; freak shows; sexual practices; queering disability

Epistemology, Subjectivity, and Disability: genius and savantism; the body in pain; affect; “terminal” illnesses; acquired impairments, congenital impairments; stigma and otherness; autistic minds; mental “illness” / mental “health”; trauma, violence, and disability

Intersections of Identity: masculinity and disability; femininity and disability; pregnancy, motherhood, and impairment; race and disability; class and disability; queer identities and disability

History of/and Disability: historicizing disability; historically specific impairments (e.g. hysteria); period-specific studies of disability (e.g. early modern); eugenics; race and/as impairment; evolution and “degeneration”; taxonomy and natural history

Medicine, Science, and Impairment: medicalizations of race, class, sex, body size; addiction and disability; medical and scientific discourse; doctor / patient interactions; concepts and problems of the “cure”; diagnostic manuals and other taxonomies; the human / animal divide

Disability Activism / (Bio)politics: rhetorics of “disability”; activist art; reproductive rights; genetics and eugenics; euthanasia; healthcare; war, disability, and the making of populations; impairment-specific campaigns and organizations

Technology and the Impaired Body: technologies of reproduction; cyborgs; prosthesis; body augmentation / body modification

Please submit 250- to 500-word abstracts to ESAConference2012@gmail.com by December 5, 2011.

* * *

The conference, sponsored by the English Student Association of the CUNY Graduate Center, will feature concurrent graduate panels on the afternoon of Thursday, March 22, and all day on Friday, March 23. It will also include a Thursday evening plenary panel on the present and future of Disability Studies; panel members include CUNY scholars Sarah Chinn (English,
Hunter College), Victoria Pitts-Taylor (sociology, Queens College), Talia Schaffer (English, Queens College and the Graduate Center), and Joseph Straus (music, CUNY Graduate Center). Keynote address on Friday evening TBD. All conference events will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan.

If you have any questions, please email the conference co-chairs, Marissa Brostoff, Andrew Lucchesi, and Emily B. Stanback at ESAConference2012@gmail.com.

Neurodiversity Symposium, 5 August 2011, Syracuse University

Found at http://neurodiversitysymposium.wordpress.com:

On August 5, 2011, Syracuse University will be hosting a regional symposium on neurodiversity and autistic self-advocacy. Neurodiversity is a concept and social movement that advocates for viewing autism as a variation of human wiring, rather than a disease. As such, neurodiversity activists reject the idea that autism should be cured, advocating instead for celebrating autistic forms of communication and self-expression, and for promoting support systems that allow autistic people to live as autistic people.

The purpose of this event is to raise public awareness of the concepts of neurodiversity and the different facets of the neurodiversity movement, and to increase understanding and dispel myths about what it means to be against curing autism. The symposium will also address the ways in which the concept of neurodiversity can be expanded beyond just autism to include other atypical forms of neurological wiring, such as ADHD, hydrocephalus, and dyslexia, to name a few.

The event will kick off Friday with a keynote by Ari Ne’eman, Founding President of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (http://www.autisticadvocacy.org/) and the Vice Chair of Engagement on the National Council on Disability (http://www.ncd.gov/). Ari’s keynote will address issues such as the history, current state, and future of the neurodiversity/autistic self-advocacy movement, and autistic self-advocacy in politics.

Following the keynote, local activists will lead panels and smaller discussion on more specific topics related to neurodiversity, such as: autistic culture, allies, neurodiverse parents, self-advocacy, popular culture/conceptions of autism, dealing with sensory difficulties while still being anti-cure, and self-empowerment through facilitated communication and other non-verbal forms of communicating.

PLEASE NOTE: This is still a work in progress. Consequently, the content of panels is subject to change somewhat in the next few weeks. The exact time at which they keynote will begin, and when the panels will be held, has not yet been decided conclusively. Any updates will be posted to this page.

Cost: FREE!!!

Registration info: Preliminary registration is now available on this site.

The Neurodiversity Symposium is sponsored by:

• The Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee
• The SU Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies
• The SU Disability Cultural Center Initiative
• The Institute on Communication and Inclusion
• The SU School of Education
• Cultural Foundations of Education, School of Education, Syracuse University
• The Taishoff Center for Inclusive Higher Education
• The Department of Teaching and Leadership

C.P. Steinmetz (LOC)

C.P. Steinmetz (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions. --Charles Proteus Steinmetz

New in the Flickr Commons this week, a fine portrait of Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865-1923), a Prussian-born mathematician. He was just 23 when he finished his doctoral work at Breslau; soon after, he immigrated into the United States. As a dwarf with a hunched back and no money, he was nearly refused entry at Ellis Island; but he was traveling with someone who was able to convince the inspectors that he was actually brilliant and rich scientist. He went to work as an electrical engineer, designing motors and power systems.

Two years after coming to America, Steinmetz patented a means of transmitting alternating current (A/C). It was the first of his 200+ patents in the US., most of them bought by the General Electric Company. Steinmetz, a committed socialist, was also president of the Board of Education in Schenectady NY, and presided over the city council as well. He was an officer in the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. He also studied lightning at a campsite he built on the Mohawk River, and published a book of essays on science and religion. He was even responsible for ensuring that every orphan in Schenectady received a present at Christmas.

From 1902 to 1913, Steinmetz was head of the School of Electrical Engineering at Union College. Today, the annual Steinmetz Symposium at Union College is an undergraduate research expo; there is also a Steinmetz Hall at Union College. A short recording of his speech, with film clips and stills, is on YouTube (with subtitles for his accented English). The IEEE has a Steinmetz Award for advancements in electrical and electronics engineering.

Further reading:

Floyd Miller, The Electrical Genius of Liberty Hall: Charles Proteus Steinmetz (McGraw Hill 1962).

Ronald Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Johns Hopkins University Press 1998).

June 3: The Andrew Heiskell Library (b. 1895)

The New York Public Library is marking the 115th anniversary of the founding of the Talking Book and Braille Service in the US and in New York City. It started in 1895 with 57 braille books, a free circulating library set up by a blind man, Richard Randall Ferry (1839-1906). Ferry had been a prosperous hat manufacturer before becoming blind in 1891; he had the resources and the drive to get something like this started. By the time of Ferry's death (according to his obituary) there were 10,000 volumes.

In 1909, Ferry's assistant on the project, and one of the library's trustees, educator Clara A. Williams, wrote a plea in the New York Times, defending New York Point System against other braille formats. Her letter points to the state of flux such efforts faced just a century ago: "It seems a dreadful thing to me, for those living in New York State, and New York City, to allow any persons to come in from other States with a system of print which can be proved to be inferior, and tell us what we should do in our public schools, &c.... Miss Keller is certainly a wonderful woman, but she would, it seems to me, be biased in favor of any type for which her friends stood and it would be most natural for her to take the stand chosen by her teacher..." There were also concerns about whether the library would include a Bible (when "nearly every reader at the library has been presented with a Bible and has it in his own home").

The collection became part of the NYPL in 1903, and expanded over the years, in size, in format, and services offered. The technological history of recordings in the twentieth century is reflected in how audio books were prepared for blind readers over the years: hard discs, flexible discs, cassettes, and digital files have all taken their turn, in tandem with the devices required to play them.

January 4: James Nack (1809-1879)

Poet James M. Nack was born 4 January 1809, and wrote a poem for New Year's Day for his daughter Eveline:

A New-Year's Greeting to my Daughter (1859)

So it is gone! -- another year!
A drop of time lost in the sea
Of dark and deep eternity,
In which we all must disappear!
Well, since so transient our career,
The blessings that attend the way
More precious grow with every day:
So is it with my EVELINE,
And ever was since she was mine;
Since first she nestled on my breast,
And on its beatings rocked to rest;
And when her little arms at length
To twine around me gathered strength,
And her young eyes replied to mine
With love's intelligence divine;
When first her lips began to frame
Sweet murmurings of a father's name;
Or with more eloquence of love
Those rosy lips to mine were prest--
Oh, closer still I clasped my dove,
And could have died so very blest!
....

Nack, a lifelong New Yorker, was deaf after a serious head injury when he was nine years old. He was among the first successful alumni of the New York Deaf and Dumb Asylum, which he attended from 1818 to 1823. He worked in the office of the Clerk of the City of New York for many years, and frequently contributed poems to the New York Mirror. He published several volumes of verse, starting with The Legend of the Rocks and Other Pieces (1827). Much of his poetry celebrates his happiness in family life--he married in 1838 and was the father of three daughters (including Eveline, above). Nack also did translations from French, German, and Dutch. Several books of Nack's poetry are available in Full view on Google Books (The Romance of the Ring, Earl Rupert, and The Immortal, for three).

For further reading, see:

Christopher Krentz, ed., A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing 1816-1864 (Gallaudet University Press 2000).

John Lee Clark, ed., Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology (Gallaudet University Press 2009).

More Flickr Finds: Wheelchairs at the Bronx Zoo, c1910

So, the photo above (from the Library of Congress uploads to Flickr Commons, from the Bain Collection of news photos taken 1910-1915) depicts Mrs. Field, obviously a well-to-do matron, in what appears to be a wicker wheeled chair, pushed along an outdoor path by an older African-American man in a suit and bowler hat.

Was Mrs. Field a wheelchair user?

Not so fast. Check out this other photo from the same collection:

The woman hurrying past the camera is Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson (of Gibson Girl fame), but look behind her, to the right--chairs like Mrs. Field's, two of them, unoccupied, lined up, with a uniformed attendant nearby. What does the sign say behind Mrs. Gibson? "New York Zoological ...Administrative Building No Admittance" and some smaller print. The Bronx Zoo was called the New York Zoological Park at this time. So, we're at the zoo, and those chairs are apparently available (as a courtesy? as a rental?) for zoo visitors. Much like some zoos and amusement parks have available today.

Hmmm! Were the pathways at the zoo made to accommodate these conveyances? Mrs. Field obviously didn't mind being photographed on wheels during her visit--no stigma? Or, no stigma if it's perceived as a luxury rather than a necessity? Did other zoos and parks have such provisions in the 1910s? When did this trend start? What happened to these chairs? Were any smooth paths reconfigured with steps after the chairs went into disuse--in other words, did a wheelable zoo become less accessible for a time?

Would love to know more about the Bronx Zoo wheelchairs of the 1910s. Anyone?

November 17: Winifred Holt (1870-1945)

[Image description: black-and-white archival photo of two men seated at a table, in French military uniforms; they have their hands on a small checkerboard; one man appears to have his eyelids closed, and the other has fabric patches over both eyes; behind them, a woman in seated, and has her own hand stretched toward the checkerboard]

Co-founder of Lighthouse International (formerly the New York Association for the Blind) Winifred Holt was born on this date in 1870, in New York City, the daughter of publisher Henry Holt. She was a force in early twentieth-century advocacy --she and her organization worked for inclusion of blind children in New York public schools, for summer camps, vocational training programs and social groups run by and for blind people, for rehabilitation of blinded WWI veterans. She also worked for changes in medical protocols to prevent a common cause of blindness in newborns. She encouraged similar "Lighthouses" to operate in other cities around the world. Many of the projects she started continue in some form today.

In the photo above (found here, in the Library of Congress's Bain Collection), Holt is seen teaching newly blind French soldiers to play checkers in a rehabilitation program in France (Holt received the Legion d'Honneur for her wartime work there). Holt trained as a sculptor when she was a young woman; her best known work is a 1907 bas-relief bronze portrait of Helen Keller, online here. She also wrote a biography of blind English MP and postmaster Henry Fawcett.

Talk: How Culture Shapes Autism

NYU Council for the Study of Disability, The Psyences Project and The Department of Anthropology present ...

WHAT IN THE WORLD IS AUTISM? How Culture Shapes An Illness
a lecture with Roy Richard Grinker
Professor of Anthropology, George Washington University, Thursday, April 17, 2008, 3:00-5:00PM
King Juan Carlos Center Screening Room, 53 Washington Square South

How did autism shift from being a rare disorder, occurring in 3 in 10,000 people to an "epidemic," occurring in 1 in 150 people? Is this evidence that scientists are finally counting cases correctly, or is it the result of advances in mental health and education? In this lecture, Roy Richard Grinker, author of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, answers these questions from the perspective of an anthropologist, and as the father of a child with autism. Grinker will discuss the shift in how we view and count autism is part of a set of broader shifts taking place in societies throughout the world.
Co-sponsored by NYU's Center for Religion and Media and NYU's Center for Media, Culture and History.
All events are free and open to the public. Seating is on a first- come, first-served basis.

Public Lecture in New York, April 10, 2008

Meet Mike Dorn and Melania Moscoso of DS,TU at the public lecture in Disability Studies.
Rsemarie Garland-Thomson will be speaking on"The Politics of Picturing Disability" at the City University of New York , Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue , New York City, Room C204/205
Thursday, April 10, 6:30 pm
For more information on this event, contact: Osmin Sullivan - Hewitt, 646-344-7313.

Remembering Herschey Lang (1912-1917)

[Image description: old, damaged photo of a little boy, Herschey Lang, wearing a hat and coat.]

Bella Cohen Spewack (1899?-1990) was a journalist, a publicist, and a writer for stage and screen, best known as the co-writer of the show Kiss Me Kate. But in 1922, while living in Berlin with her new husband, working as a news correspondent, Bella Spewack also wrote a fierce, funny, poignant memoir of her youth, titled Streets. The memoir wasn't published until after her death (it's available from Feminist Press); but because it was written and eventually published, we can remember Bella's little brother Herschey Lang, and have a glimpse of family life in the Lower East Side of the 1910s.

Herschey was born to Fanny and Hoosan Lang, both recent Jewish immigrants from Hungary, when Fanny's daughter Bella Cohen was 13. When he was born, his father brought home to the family's tiny apartment a yellow wood cradle; three cents worth of jelly beans were scattered under his mattress, to ensure a sweet life. Needlework pillowcases and tiny knitted caps were brought as gifts, by neighbors. Then, when he was six months old, Herschey got sick: a rash of sores erupted on his face, arms, and hands. The sores left scars. Hoosan Lang shouted at Fanny, "You wretch! You have brought me trouble! You have borne me a sickly child. And a son, God in heaven, a son!" (pp. 77-79) Hoosan left, while Fanny was pregnant with their second child, Daniel Lang.

Fanny moved herself and her children to a cheaper apartment, using a pushcart to transport their belongings. Bella took care of her little brothers in the streets, while their mother did sewing at home, and tended to their boarders. Herschey learned to walk on the corner of Houston and Goerck Streets, near the Third Street pier. Bella remembered the stares and insults:

Frequently women, and men too, would stop and unashamedly stare at the two in the carriage. Pregnant women looking at Herschey's disfigured face would stick their thumbs in their belts and immediately look away [a superstitious gesture to prevent ugly children].

One woman, whom I had seen frequently on the block, laughed outloud on seeing Hershey. The black salve that I had applied in the morning was still on his face. "Look at the little rat." For a moment, I felt as if the roaring in my ears and the pounding within me would never stop. Then I walked over to the woman and struck out. My outstretched hand landed on her neck.

That woman never again stopped near Herschey's carriage, but when she saw me, with or without him, she would cross to the other side of the street. As her revenge, she tried to spread the rumor that I was crazy, but the street chose not the believe her. (102-103)

When the pier got a little too pungent in the summer heat, Bella took the little ones to a playground, where they could play in sand and take turns on the swings. She also included the boys in her dramatic productions with neighborhood teens: they played a stringed instrument during a scene from Romeo and Juliet, enacted on a tenement fire escape. Fanny and Bella got summer jobs working at a resort in the Catskills, and the boys came along, so they could eat better and get some fresh air. "I was fierce with desire that children play with Herschey," Bella recalled about that time, "for they shunned him and he loved them dearly." (p. 125) Soon, the management noticed how sickly Herschey was, and sent the whole group back to the city.

Herschey Lang died at age 5, after a long illness that included fevers and paralysis and a lot of lost weight at the end. "My mother was mad with the pain of her loss," explains Bella (p. 157). "So it fell to me to arrange for the burial." The last sentences of the memoir present a painful scene: "My mother and I, carrying Danny in my arms, attempted to follow the hearse on foot for we could afford no carriage. But the hearse moved swiftly. Herschey was light."

Herschey Lang didn't live long, but he was loved, dearly loved, by his mother and sister, right to the end. And he was never forgotten.

See also:

Lisa Muir, "Rose Cohen and Bella Spewack: The Ethnic Child Speaks to You Who Never Were There," College Literature (Winter 2002), online here.

How a Blind Man Will Lead a State

Tara Parker-Pope in her column on health discusses David Paterson's blindness: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/

In a few days, New York will have a new governor who also happens to be legally blind.

Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson (Mike Groll/Associated Press)
For people with sight, it’s hard to imagine how a person who is blind copes with day-to-day living, let alone the challenges of running a state. But over the years, in various interviews, Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson has given us glimpses into how he has managed his education and career in politics without sight....

NY Times on David Paterson

The first few paragraphs on an interesting story from today's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/nyregion/12paterson.html?hp

On Tuesday, Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson waited. Around noon, he was driven from his home outside Albany to the Capitol, raising expectations that Gov. Eliot Spitzer would soon resign and that Mr. Paterson was about to become the state’s 55th governor — and the first African-American to hold the post.

Neither happened. Mr. Paterson returned home and waited some more.

With Mr. Spitzer’s political future in grave doubt, Mr. Paterson, 53, a Brooklyn-born and Harlem-bred politician, has become Albany’s man of the moment. Widely considered smart, amiable and disarmingly candid, he is also largely untested.

In 2006, Mr. Paterson surprised the Democratic establishment by giving up the possibility of becoming majority leader if the Democrats captured the State Senate — one of Albany’s muscular three men in the room — to run for lieutenant governor, a largely ceremonial post.

But this week, Mr. Paterson’s political gamble suddenly appeared to be on the brink of paying off, if in an unexpected and unintended way. If Mr. Spitzer resigns, Mr. Paterson would become only the third black governor of any state since Reconstruction.

From the time he refused to learn Braille as a child, Mr. Paterson, who is legally blind, has been defying expectations. Former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo recalled playing basketball against him in a charity game a decade ago.

“David was on the other side,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I said: ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be blind.’ He said, ‘I’m guarding you.’ Just what I wanted: a blind guy to guard me. The second time down the court, he stole the ball.”

Fellow Democrats and Republicans consider him to be more liberal than Mr. Spitzer and also a more deft politician, capable of healing the rancor that has driven Albany into gridlock.

“He’s got a wonderful sense of humor, a very gentle man,” said Betsy Gotbaum, the New York City public advocate. “In that sense, he’s the opposite of Eliot.”

The New Face of Disability in the Arts (New York City, 31 July)

Cool stuff from New York: A Theatre by the Blind production of John Belluso's The Rules of Charity is now playing (May 26-June 24) at the Lion Theatre in New York City. In July (the 11th to the 29th), noted disabled actor Henry Holden will play the "rudely stamp'd" Richard the III--a Shakespeare character who is often portrayed as disabled (hat tip to Troy Wittren for the news of that show). And...

From the Theatre Resources Unlimited website (links added here):

Tuesday evening, July 31st, 7:30pm
Beyond Handicaps and Handouts:
The New Face of Disability In The Arts

Co-produced with Stephanie Barton-Farcas, artistic director of Nicu's Spoon. Confirmed panelists: Christine Bruno, Disability Advocate, Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts; Lawrence Carter-Long, Director of the Disabled Network of NYC; Professor Thomas Donnarumma, Iona College Dept. of Performing Arts; Henry Holden, Disabled International Activist, Actor and Speaker; Anita Hollander, East coast SAG/AFTRA rep. for disabled artists; June Rachelson-Ospa, Writer, Producer, Director; Ike Shambelan, Artistic Director, Theatre by The Blind.

We'll discuss what accommodations are needed to hire the disabled, and how the costs are surprisingly nominal and outweigh the benefit of working with some extraordinary talent. Plus the added dimension that can be brought to a work through non-traditional casting.

The Spoon Theater, 38 W. 38th Street, 5th floor

Disability History Image: Newspaper vendor, 1896

Alice Austen (1866-1952) was a prolific amateur photographer of New York's Gilded Age. She made thousands of photographs, images of ships and automobiles, bootblacks and policemen, beachgoers and organ grinders, cyclists and postmen. The image above (click it to enlarge) is an Alice Austen photograph found in the New York Public Library's online galleries. It shows a woman selling newspapers on the streets of New York. She's bundled up, in a hat and coat and a long blanket covering her legs and feet; and she's in a wheelchair with very thin rear wheels, much like an old-style bicycle. Notice that the legs of the table in front of her have been raised up on bricks to fit her chair under it. In the background, there's a horse-drawn trolley, and behind that a bank building. Is she reading, or sleeping, with her cheek resting in her hand? According to the website, this photo was taken in 1896.

Much later in her life, photographer Alice Austen herself used a wheelchair, after arthritis affected her mobility. The image at right is Austen at the Staten Island Farm Colony, a public poorhouse where she lived, 1950-1951; the man in the photograph, Oliver Jensen (1914-2005), was a Life magazine staffer and small-press editor who helped rediscover Austen's glass-plate negatives in the Staten Island Historical Society. He published some of her photos and sold others to major magazines to raise money to get her out of the poorhouse and into a private nursing home for the last months of her life.

"Hogging the swing"

It's hard to know exactly what's up in this ugly story, but I'm suspecting it's a junior version of the "people with placards hog all the good wide parking places," or even closer, "why should that woman in the wheelchair get to use the nice big stall in the ladies' room?" For readers unfamiliar with accessible playground equipment, the Jenn Swing is pictured here. It's true that accessible playgrounds are often the most popular playgrounds around --in Los Angeles, the 2-acre Shane's Inspiration space at Griffith Park is counted as the single most popular playground in the city, for example. They're often the newest, safest, most creative parks available. But where two ten-year-old boys can threaten the mother of a three-year-old for "hogging" a therapeutic swing (when other swings are empty), and the nannies nearby are on the boys' side, that's a park that I'd avoid for reasons other than inaccessibility. It's not enough to build these playgrounds--there has to be some community education to make them function as they should. Or, in the case of the West 70th St. park, a whole LOT of community education.

"Art Beyond Sight"

This is a bit ahead of the game, but it sounds worth planning for: There will be a conference jointly organized by Art Education for the Blind, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum Access Consortium, called "Art Beyond Sight: Multi-Modal Approaches to Learning," that sounds more interesting than the jargon in the second half of the title. It's scheduled for Friday October 14 and Saturday October 15; the Friday events happen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and feature among the presenters Rebecca McGinnis and Deborah Jaffe (the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Hannah Goodwin (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Georgina Kleege (University of California at Berkeley and author of Sight Unseen), Dr. Alvaro Pascuale-Leone (Harvard Medical Center), and David Rose (Harvard Medical School of Education and CAST). The Saturday morning events take place at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and feature two panel discussions chaired by Paula Terry (Director, Office of AccessAbility, National Endowment for the Arts), and Francesca Rosenberg (Museum of Modern Art). Saturday afternoon events will be more panel discussions, held at the American Folk Art Museum. There will also be dinner and breakfast gatherings for discussion. If you email these folks (try editor-at-large@artbeyondsight.org ) with "October conference" in the subject line, they'll send you registration information and other details.