We are pleased to announce an online lecture by
Alyson Patsavas
(The University of Illinois at Chicago)

Archiving Pain: On Crip Queer Evidence

This lecture is going to be a part of the
American Studies Colloquium Series,
which are running online until regular
operations are resumed!

Thursday, May 7, 2020
at 4:00 p.m

It is still possible to get OZN points for participating
in this event! Check how to do this here.

Where?

Online on our Facebook group!

LIVE STREAM

What?

This talk weaves personal experience, archival research, and a photo-essay together to ask how we might crip and queer evidence of pain. Philosophers, doctors, and pain studies scholars alike lament the absence of objective measurement tools to verify and prove pain’s existence. Arguments of pain’s purported resistance to language (Scarry) and uniquely subjective nature abound to frame personal accounts of pain as flawed, provisional, and suspect. Biomedicine has, in turn, offered an assortment of supplementary diagnostic tools meant to evidence pain—from pain scales to pain tracking apps. Despite the fantasy of certainty that such “biocertifications” (Samuels) offer, experiences of pain remain widely dismissed among women, older adults, and racial and ethnic minorities because of the absence of objective measurement tools. In this talk, I juxtapose material from a history of pain medicine collection with personal accounts of pain to track and interrogate the gaps between two differing archives of pain. In doing so, I outline dominant pain epistemologies and, drawing from critical theory’s interrogations and re-imaginings of archives, theorize what constitutes crip and queer evidence of pain.

Who?

Alyson Patsavas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is also the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her scholarship is situated at intersections of disability studies, feminist theory and queer theory, and focuses on the cultural politics of pain, health and illness as well as representations of disability in film, television, and popular culture.

Her work appears in Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television, The Feminist Wire, Somatechnics, Disability Studies Quarterly, The Czech Sociological Review, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Patsavas is also a writer and producer on the documentary film Code of the Freaks (2020) that examines crip culture’s response to Hollywood representations of disability. She is currently working on a manuscript that interrogates the discursive construction of pain and pain relief as a distinct cultural, economic, and political “problem” to theorize crip, queer interventions into how we come to know and understand pain.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 19: Between The Mundane and the Heroic: Vietnamese Presence in State Socialist Poland

December 16, 2024

We are delighted to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! This talk will examine the depictions of the (North) Vietnamese as freedom fighters within the context of the state socialist public sphere and the everyday life of Vietnamese students in Poland across generations. From idealized wartime reportages to mixed-race couples, the Vietnamese presence was marked by a multifaceted experience of adaptation, challenges, opportunities, and dynamic, interactive bonds with Polish society. This history continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora and Polish-Vietnamese relationships.

Year 2024/2025

December 18: The Trump Transition – What is New and What is Not

December 14, 2024

Leadership Research Groupis inviting all those who would like to put the Trump transition to a presidential scholarship context and better understand the Trump transition decisions, the prospects for the future in domestic and foreign policy areas they bring, and the impact that Trump leadership may have on the political scene in Washington to a talk followed by a Q&A session by Professor Stephen Farnsworth.

Year 2024/2025

December 17: We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice

December 13, 2024

During the workshop “We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice”, Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw,will delve into the history of feminist manifestos and their pivotal role in the women’s movement in the United States. We’ll explore how activists of the second wave of feminism used grassroots publications to raise awareness, voice the demands of emerging women’s groups, and build communication networks between organizations spread across the country. Together, we’ll analyze the literary techniques that make the manifesto genre a powerful tool for inspiring activist mobilization beyond the pages of the text.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 12: Technological Imaginaries and the Universal Ambitions of Silicon Valley

December 12, 2024

Drawing on her new book, Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist imaginaries and the politics of digital technologies (University of California Press), in this talk Ferrari shows how these discourses, which she calls “technological imaginaries”, shape how we experience digital technologies. She discusses how, for the past 30 years, Silicon Valley tech actors have produced and popularized a specific way of thinking about digital technologies, which has become mainstream. This dominant technological imaginary brings together technocratic aspirations and populist justifications. While arising out of the peculiarities of Silicon Valley and of the American 1990s, this dominant imaginary has posited its universality by presenting its tenets as if they were global, unbiased, and equally suitable for everyone, everywhere. She argues that to really curb the socio-political influence of Big Tech companies we also need to understand, critique, and resist the power of their technological imaginary.

News

ASC Library has received funding from the Social Responsibility of Science

December 12, 2024

ASC Library has received funding from the Social Responsibility of Science (SON) program — “Support for Scientific Libraries,” implemented by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.