The University of Oregon will host a Disability Studies forum and lunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 22, in the Knight Library browsing room.

The event will feature prominent guest scholars in disability studies and presentations by faculty and graduate students from the UO. Space is limited; please RSVP and send disability accommodation requests to Elizabeth Magee.

The event will prompt discussion between UO faculty and graduate-student researchers about disability studies. It will also provide mentorship to graduate students working in the field and will raise awareness throughout the university.

Guest speakers include professor Ann Fox and professor Mel Chen.

Fox works at Davidson College, North Carolina, as an associate professor of English. She is currently writing a book called, “Fabulous Invalids: Disability on the American Stage from Melodrama to Midcentury.” Chen is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC-Berkeley. She is the author of “Animacies, Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect.”

The event will also feature presentations and conversations with UO faculty and graduate students including Frances Bronet, Michael Hames-Garcia, Laurie Gutmann Kahn and Veronica Vold.

Topics include the relationships between disability studies and theater, animal studies, literature and mass media, environmental justice and toxic discourse, history, medical humanities, the sociology of caregiving, theories of pain and affect, critical and special education, feminism, philosophies of the body and more.

-By Sarah MacKenzie, UO Office of Strategic Communications intern