Interdisciplinary Seminar Series 2017/2018

Oct. 4, 2017

Dr. Mitra presented her newly launched book on disability and wellbeing in lower-income countries. 

Dr. Sophie Mitra is an Associate Professor of Economics at Fordham University. She is a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association and has been published in many peer-reviewed journals including the American Economic Review, Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine and World Development. 

Writing Disability: a reading and conversation with Liz Bowen, Sarit Frishman, Jesse Rice-Evans

Nov. 2, 2017

Three activist-writers exchanged on the possibilities, challenges, and politics of writing with and about disabilities.

Speakers: 
Liz Bowen is a Ph.D. candidate in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she is working on a dissertation project that traces disability and animality as intertwined sites of literary experimentation in the long twentieth century. 

Sarit Frishman is a Sick and Disabled,  Queer,  Trans Femme of Color,  a former survival Sex Worker, a community support organizer for Sex Workers, a harm reduction outreach worker and organizer, and a poet / writer with a background in spoken word. 

Jesse Rice-Evans is a doctoral student in rhetoric and writing studies (English) at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her work centers activist disability rhetorics on Twitter, embodiment rhetorics, and femme semiotics. 

“Theological Overtures Toward Disability Justice”

May 2, 2018.

Mary Jo Iozzio, a Fordham MA and Ph.D. alumna, is Professor of Moral Theology at Boston College. Active in American Academy of Religion, Catholic Theological Society of America, Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church, and Society of Christian Ethics, she lectures, teaches, and writes on Catholic Social Thought, virtue, and liberation ethics at the intersections of disability, gender, and racial justice. In addition to many publications and presentations, she has edited the Journal of Religion, Disability & Health, Journal of Moral Theology, and Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics; she is completing a manuscript on a theological ethics in the key of disability. 

This seminar explored the distorted memes that segregate individuals and whole groups for their deviance from the main; considered the diversity that exemplifies creation and the imago Dei; and offered theo-ethical imperatives that value Disability Justice across the commons.

This seminar was organized in collaboration with the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.