We regret that Susan Schweik of the University of California-Berkeley has had to cancel her attendance at the conference and will no longer be speaking.

Thursday, April 4


4:00 – 4:15 p.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Welcome by Patricia Zebrowski (Communication Sciences and Disorders) and Douglas Baynton (History), faculty Symposium co-organizers
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4:15 – 5:30 p.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Keynote by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (English), Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor, in collaboration with the 2019 Craft, Critique, and Culture Conference organized by the Graduate Students of the UI Department of English: “Family Misfits in the Frankenstein Ballet”
Introduction by Douglas Baynton (History), faculty Symposium co-organizer

The balletic adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel presents a drama of a parent’s refusal to accord full moral personhood to an unexpected and unfamiliar child who enters a family in an unorthodox way.

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This event will be videotaped.
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5:30 – 7:00 p.m. | MERGE/Iowa City CoLab (Ped Mall, 136 S. Dubuque St.)
Reception
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Friday, April 5


8:30 a.m. | MERGE/Iowa City CoLab (Ped Mall, 136 S. Dubuque St.)
Coffee

8:45 a.m. | MERGE/Iowa City CoLab (Ped Mall, 136 S. Dubuque St.)
Welcome by Teresa Mangum (Director, UI, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies) and Jen Knights (Marketing and Community Engagement Specialist, UI School of Social Work), with thanks to the School of Social Work for co-sponsorship
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9:00 – 10:15 a.m. | MERGE/Iowa City CoLab (Ped Mall, 136 S. Dubuque St.)
Interactive Session: Teaching Disability Studies
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Patricia Bahr (Iowa Center for Assistive Technology Education and Research) will share assignments from her course, Universal Design for Learning and Accessibility for Online Instruction. The course explores universal design for learning, assistive technology, and accessibility, providing students with a reading or writing disability simulation.

Erin Barnes (Rehabilitation and Counselor Education) will share an assignment from her course, Counseling for Related Professions, that has undergraduates complete person-centered plans for homeless clients, many of whom experience psychiatric and/or chronic health conditions.

Krista Davidson (Communication Sciences and Disorders) will share an assignment from her course, Augmentative and Alternative Communication, that asks students to design and create an augmentative communication aid for a client.

Jennifer DiVita (Communication Sciences and Disorders) will share her experience teaching Practicum in Speech-Language Pathology, in which graduate students under DiVita’s supervision provide speech therapy services to individuals with pediatric speech and language disorders. The course emphasizes collaboration with team care members.

Naomi Greyser (GWSS, American Studies, English) and Isabella Brauhn (College of Public Health) will share an assignment that pairs popular culture (the program Speechless, video activism from the Health Equity Institute) with critical disability studies scholarship (Shildrick, Kochhar-Lindgren, Clare) to engage students in studying agency and embodied experience. They look forward to exploring some of the benefits and risks of introducing compassionate humor into the classroom through disability activists’ comedy and self-representations, humor that can aid in teaching potentially challenging topics such as objectification (ugly laws, pity porn, the stare), disenfranchisement (institutionalization, autism speaks), and excision from publics and categories of the human.

Jennifer Janechek (Rhetoric) will share an assignment she designed for two diversity-focused literature and rhetoric courses that introduce students to disability studies as a lens through which to analyze arguments and literary texts; the assignment encourages students to understand the importance of using inclusive language.

John Manak (Biology and Pediatrics) will discuss his practice of bringing into his classroom individuals with genetic disorders in order to generate discussions about living with such a disorder and ultimately teach understanding and acceptance.

Meredith Saletta (Communication Sciences and Disorders) will discuss her General Education course, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Both traditional students and UI REACH students participate in the course.


10:15 – 10:30 a.m.
Break


10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | MERGE/Iowa City CoLab (Ped Mall, 136 S. Dubuque St.)
Margaret Price (English): “Working in Intolerable Space(Times): An Empirical Study of Academic Ableism”
Introduction by Naomi Greyser (GWSS, American Studies, English)
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Price will describe findings from her ten years of research in academic settings and argue for a new understanding of access based upon the concept of “crip spacetime.”


12:00 – 2:00 p.m.
Lunch on your own


2:00 – 3:15 p.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Michele Friedner (Comparative Human Development): “Love and Disability Alterworlds in Urban India”
Introduction by Diana Cates (Religious Studies)
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In urban India, “love” is mobilized to imagine and create secular and religious worlds. Michele Friedner will ask how the concept of “the social” in disability studies and the ways that it is bound up within liberal and secular framings foreclose on the existence of disability otherworlds (or alterworlds).


3:15 – 3:30 p.m.
Break


3:30 – 4:45 p.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Early Career Scholars Roundtable: The Future of Critical Disability Studies
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Moderator: Patricia Zebrowski (Communication Sciences and Disorders)

This roundtable will feature:

Lauren Bruno: “Increasing Access to Information and Promoting Independence for Students with Intellectual Disability in Postsecondary Education”
Kristen Chmielewski: “Limits Will Be Placed on the Physical Imperfections Permitted in a Teacher”
Kaydee Ecker: “Early Disability Studies Career Scholar: Musings of an Undergraduate Disability Activist Hyperfocused on Metaphor”
Hope Gerlach: “Stuttering and the Psychosocial Consequences of Managing a Concealable Stigmatized Identity”
Corey Hickner-Johnson
: “Beyond the Attic: Mental Disability, Neurodiversity, and Intersectionality in Contemporary Women’s Writing—An Overview”
Jennifer Janechek: “New Ontologies of Sound in Sensation Fiction: Deafness and Infrasound in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek”
Lydia Maunz-Breese: “Grieving Bodies, Vulnerable Bodies: Relationships Between Bereavement and Debility”
Andrew Tubbs: “Sounding the Disabled Musical Body: Musical Metaphors of Disability on Stage and Screen”


4:45 – 5:10 p.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Combined Efforts Men’s Choir Performance
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8:00 p.m. | IMU Hawkeye Room
Feature performance (and follow-up Q&A) by comedian Nina G.
Opening acts by UI graduate students Andrew Tubbs and Alex Lange
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Saturday, April 6



9:30 – 9:45 a.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Coffee

9:45 – 11:00 a.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Frank Durham (Journalism and Mass Communication) interviews comedian Nina G.
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11:00 – 11:15 a.m.
Break


11:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Sami Schalk (Gender and Women’s Studies): “504 and Beyond: Disability Politics and the Black Panther Party”
Introduction by Christopher-Rasheem McMillan (GWSS and Dance)
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This event will be videotaped.

How did the Black Panther Party engage with disability politics in their activism and revolutionary agenda? Sami Schalk will explore their involvement in the 1977 504 sit-in and use their work to make larger arguments about how black activists articulate and enact disability politics differently than the mainstream, white disability rights movement.

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12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Lunch on your own


1:30 – 2:30 p.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A 
Panel: Technology + Arts + Design: Retrofitting Worlds and Bodies
Moderator: Teresa Mangum (Obermann Center; Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and English)
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Activities and inventions at the intersection of arts, design, and technology can enrich the experience of the world around us. This conversational panel features artists and scholars whose work at the intersection engages deeply with people negotiating with learning and social abilities related to success and quality of life.

Mary Adamek (School of Music, UI) will discuss the role of music in the UI REACH program. REACH  (Realizing Educational and Career Hopes) is a two-year certificate program in the UI College of Education for students with multiple intellectual, cognitive, and learning disabilities. An essential part of the program, music provides college-aged students with disabilities transition skills.

Eileen Wynne Ball (Program for the Advancement of Learning, Curry College) will share her ideas about digital storytelling and college students with learning disabilities.

Elizabeth Delsandro (Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison) will discuss how hands-on visual arts projects that intersect with science can motivate children with autism spectrum disorders to participate, explore, learn, play, communicate, and socially interact with peers.

Juan Pablo Hourcade
(Computer Science, UI) will discuss research with children diagnosed with autism and the ways in which human-centered approaches to technology design can maximize inclusion.


2:45 – 3:00 p.m.
Break


3:00 – 4:15 p.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Joseph Straus (Music), Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor: “Cultural Representations of Idiocy in a Modernist (Eugenic) Era”
Introduction by Marian Wilson Kimber (Music)
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Modernist literature and music construct the figure of the “Eugenic Idiot”—a feared source of violence—but also find in “idiocy” a crucial artistic resource, one that enables the sorts of artistic innovations that centrally define artistic modernism.


4:15 – 4:45 p.m. | Iowa City Public Library, Room A
Closing Roundtable Reflections
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