Women, Climate, and Insecurity - An International Conference
Thursday - Friday, April 28-29, 2022
For more information:
See the presentations on our channel: HRI & HKC, @hrihkc8261.
"'I had a good name before': Asylum Stories & Patients' Rights
in New York State"
Monday, March 28, 2022, 6:00-7:30 p.m.
In the early 2000s, walking the overgrown cemetery of Willard Asylum, with its anonymous, numbered markers, one would have never known that more than 5,000 patients were interred on the grounds of the institution, which is now abandoned. In a sense, though, this process of loss of memorialization is echoed in the complaint of a Willard patient — "I had a good name before, but it is sullied now, incomplete, and forgotten." Between familial shame, a focus on the illness rather than the person, and, in some cases, abuses, mental health patients are often made voiceless, especially when they become synonymous with their illness, and their larger personal stories disappear. Michel Foucault remarks that in an effort to verbalize the pathological, the 19th century gave birth to the asylum as a place where silence, surveillance, and all-powerful doctors completely alienated and invisibilized patients. What would it mean then to give voice to those patients—to give them back a (good) name? This panel examines how psychiatry dehumanized patients and offers a re-consideration of the history of mental illness in the context of patients’ lives and rights in New York State.
Dr Peter Stastny, a patients rights advocate and psychiatrist, is the author of the seminal The Lives They Left Behind, which looks at the content of abandoned suitcases found at Willard Asylum in 1995 and attempts to reconstruct and thus re-humanize some of the patients of the institution.
Actress, director, writer, and educator Elizabeth Mozer is an associate professor in the Theater Department of ºÚÁÏÊÓƵ and the author of a one-woman play The Asylum Project and of the play Castle on the Hill, both based on stories of Binghamton Asylum patients.
Organized and introduced by Dr. AC Sieffert, Romance Languages & Literatures
Video recording of event
Sponsored by the Human Rights Institute; Citizenship, Rights, and Cultural Belonging TAE; the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures; and the Department of Theatre
Technologies of Human Rights Representation -Keynote Address & Book Launch
Friday, March 25, 2022, 1:00-2:00 p.m. EST
Keynote speaker: James Dawes, DeWitt Wallace Professor of English, Macalester College
"Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Human Rights"
Join us in person or on Zoom for this hybrid event. The in-person location is the TAE Conference Room (AA-340) and will coincide with TAE's Open House event.
Video recording of event
Sponsored by the Citizenship, Rights, and Cultural Belonging TAE and the Human Rights Institute
Alternatives to Academic Publishing: A Conversation About Decolonizing Knowledge Production
Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at 3:30 p.m.
Featured Speaker: Bhakti Shringarpure
Bhakti Shringarpure is Associate Professor of English & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Faculty for Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and the Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity & Politics program; Affiliate faculty for the Digital Humanities and Media Studies program and the Asian and Asian-American Studies Institute, University of Connecticut.
She is also the founding Editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine, founder of the Radical Books Collective, and Series Editor of Decolonize That! Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas, OR Books (New York).
Video recording available
Passion (in)to Work: Feminist Approaches to Women and Employment
Soulful Reckonings: Work, Opportunity, and Preparation for 21st Century Women
Wednesday, November 3, 2021 at 7:00 p.m.
A conversation with Elizabeth Swanson on translating feminist and critical race theory commitments to the workplace...and being prepared to act.
Elizabeth Swanson is Professor of English and Mandell Family Foundation Senior Term Chair in Literature and Human Rights at Babson College. Author of Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights (2007), Dr. Swanson has co-edited four volumes on human rights and authored numerous essays and book chapters. She has served on an NGO board and as a Commissioner for the Barnstable County Human Rights Commission. She is a founding partner of Jane’s Way, LLC, a training and consulting group that helps organizations elevate diversity, equity, and belonging.
Video recording available
(Co-sponsored by Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Department of Public Administration, Human Development)
Approaches to Reproductive Healthcare and Reproductive Justice
Friday, November 5, 2021 at 2:00 p.m.
A roundtable webinar featuring representatives of Upstream, USA working on reproductive healthcare from policy, education and training, assessment, and community partner perspectives.
Jill Sergison, Director of Policy & Strategy (Jill is also a still practicing CNM)
Michela Garrison, Director of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning
Katresa Jones, Program Implementation Advisor
Catherine Read, State Director of Partnerships (North Carolina)
Video recording available here
(Co-sponsored by Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Department of Public Administration, Human Development)