Kenny Fries: Disability Can Save Your Life
Friday, April 16, 2021
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Online Event
When disability is placed at the center of events, where it belongs, it provides the lens through which much of our society's ills can be clearly seen and, thus, changed.
On Friday, April 16, the Bard College Speaker Series on Disability welcomes all OSUN members to join a presentation by writer Kenny Fries, who will read and talk about how societal views of disability, most importantly eugenics, have come to the surface once again as the COVID pandemic confronts us. Fries makes connections between his research on Aktion T4, the Nazi program that mass murdered disabled people, and how it resonates today, as well as the importance of understanding how disability representation affects all of us, disabled and non-disabled alike.
For over two decades, Kenny Fries has looked at how disability provides an understanding of the interconnectedness between individuals and also between different cultures, using the prism of his life as a writer who lives with a congenital physical disability to forge a new understanding of a wide range of values and ideas, from systems of interdependence to intersectionality to Darwinian evolution to disability and the Holocaust.
Fries' works include The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, which received the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights; In the Province of the Gods, recipient of the Creative Capital literature award; and his forthcoming Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, for which he received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship.
This is a live webinar. Please join via Zoom.
Bard is committed to making every effort to provide reasonable accommodations for accessibility needs. There will be live captioning, as well as an ASL interpreter and transcription services offered for this webinar. For other accessibility needs or for more information about this event please contact Disability Speaker Series Coordinator Jaime Alves at [email protected] or 845-758-7112. Sponsored by the Dean of the College and Disability Services.