EVENT DETAILS

Center for Medical Humanities Distinguished Lecture: Karen Nakamura, "Disability and the Promise of Technology"

The Distinguished Lecture in Medical Humanities is an annual event that brings to UCI accomplished scholars, clinicians, and creative artists to share insights and contribute to on-going conversations about health, healing and well-being. Launched in 2015, these stimulating public lectures have addressed topics as varied as the politics of pain and pain management, poetry and the experience of illness, and critical care and the nursing profession. In addition to a lecture that is free to the public, visiting distinguished lectures also add to the educational experience of undergraduates, graduate students, and graduate students in the various health science professions in workshop and seminar settings.

The Center for Medical Humanities is pleased to announce that Karen Nakamura, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Berkeley Disability Lab and the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Disability Studies at UC Berkeley, will deliver this year’s Distinguished Lecture in Medical Humanities. Her talk, “Disability and the Promise of Technology: Eugenics, Prosthetics, and AI in Japan and the United States,” will be delivered on Monday, May 13th, in Humanities Gateway 1030, 4-6:30pm.

Technological utopianism and new eugenics exist at the core of much of the current research in the biomedical and engineering sciences around disability and aging in both Japan and the United States, and indeed is also reflected in social policy as well. There exist huge gulfs between how technologists, bioethicists, and disability activists imagine the emerging role of technologies and disability. Whereas the disability activism of the 1960s-2000s pushed the social model for changing the built and social environment, we are in a period where new futures exist where invalid fetuses are diagnosed, treated, or disposed of before birth; and existing disabled bodies and minds are given physical, neurological, and biochemical prosthetics to appear normate. The backdrop against positive futurities are societal fears and imagined dystopias of the disabled and/or augmented bodymind gone amok. How do we merge these crip futurities into visions of future societies?

Dr. Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches disability in contemporary Japan at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first project was on sign language, identity, and deaf social movements and resulted in a monograph and edited volume. After that, her second project was on schizophrenia and community-based recovery in Japan and this resulted in a book, its translation, and two films.

She is currently running the Berkeley Disability Lab and the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society Disability Studies research cluster while finishing a third project which explores the intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality, which will result in a book titled: Trans/Japan. After that,  she will be working on a project on prosthetic, replacement, and augmentation technologies in contemporary Japan and the USA.