2022 Lecture

2021-2022 Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability

Speaker: Roy Richard Grinker
"Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness"

Monday, April 4, 2022

Access the recording here 

The Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability is organized by the Disability Studies Program and the Research Consortium on Disability. It is sponsored by the Conference of Arts & Science Deans and the Office of Research.

In this presentation on his new book Nobody’s Normal (W.W. Norton), Roy R. Grinker argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illnesses and disabilities. But because stigma is not grounded in nature we have the power to eradicate it. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker argues that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of those who have for so long been deemed "abnormal." Grinker infuses this lecture with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and his own research on neurodiversity.

Roy Richard Grinker is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Grinker was born and raised in Chicago where his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father worked as psychoanalysts. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1983 and received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University in 1989.

He is the author of Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (NY: W.W. Norton, January 2021), Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (NY: Basic Books), In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull (Chicago: University of Chicago), Korea and its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (NY: St. Martin’s), and Houses in the Rainforest: Ethnicity and Inequality among Farmers and Foragers in Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California). He is co-editor of Perspectives on Africa: Culture, History, and Representation (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell) and Companion to the Anthropology of Africa (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell). Grinker was a 2008 recipient of the National Alliance on Mental Illness KEN award for “outstanding contribution to the understanding of mental illness” and the 2010 recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology in the Media award for “communication of anthropology to the general public through the media.”