Click here to join the webinar on Zoom Hearing aids have always been designed to be concealed. From nineteenth-century ear trumpets obscured in fans, hats, or vases, to early twentieth-century vacuum tubes built within purses… Read More »‘Invisible yet potent helps’: Technologies Between Deafness and Hearing
This video explores earwax in early modern medicine, arguing that it allows us to observe how diversity in hearing was rooted in the aural fluid of earwax. Scholarship has demonstrated how the senses were perceived… Read More »Earwax: Rendering Deafness Visible in Early Modern Europe
The obscurity of vision is almost always imbued with social, cultural, and medical meaning. ‘The Invisibility of Epidemic Disease’ is a presentation which encourages scholars to consider the significance of what cannot be seen in… Read More »Invisibility and Epidemic Disease: Visual Obscurity during Outbreaks of Plague
Heart transplantation has been a medical reality for more than half a century. Yet cultural narratives surrounding heart transplantation, particularly in fiction film and in contemporary visual art, continue to be dominated by science-fiction/horror, superstition,… Read More »Heart transplantation as entertainment: challenging attitudes and stereotypes in fiction film and visual art
Our position panel explores how the theoretical commitments of disability history can lead to areas of invisibility within wider medical humanities. We explore these invisibilities through diverse historically-grounded case studies that illuminate how particular disability… Read More »Mapping methodological invisibilities between medical humanities and disability history
This panel will showcase the work of the 5-year ‘Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures’ research project, based at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, Exeter and Dundee. It will explore issues that surround the visibility of… Read More »Technologies and (In)Visibility in Disability Futures
This paper presents some of the thinking from my recent monograph, Critical Disability Studies and the Disabled Child: Unsettling Distinctions (2020). I analyse the performativity of the ‘diagnostic speech act’ within the family of a… Read More »Futures of Anxious Surveillance: Diagnostic Speech and the Child’s Unseen Impairment
We are going to unwrap historical narratives that set the bar for understanding disability politics, medical standards and the normative body. Of course systems like BMI have come with a lot of criticism but the… Read More »The Myth of ‘Healthy Bodies’: An Archival & Data-Based Examination
Capturing life on a deprived East London estate, the Netflix series Top Boy deftly weaves multiple storylines to reveal the impact of austerity, systemic racism, and hostile immigration policies. Top Boy’s creator, Ronan Bennett, describes… Read More »“I don’t care!”: Masculinity, Disability and Care in Top Boy
Mythology can be seen as a reflection of the history, national identity and cultural consciousness of a people, nation and region. In ancient Greece, gods, goddesses and heroes moulded the perception of the citizens. Some… Read More »The Visible Invisibility of Disability in Greek Mythology