From 3:30-5:00 on May 2, Carrie Sandahl (associate professor of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago) will present “Too Much Information? The Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing the Lived Experience of Disability.”

This presentation explores disability self-disclosure in academic research, social media, and the arts. Sandahl argues that subaltern knowledge of disabled people’s lives is crucial to working toward social change. She contends that we need to understand vital details of disabled peoples’ lived experience in all of its messiness and pleasures. How do we make survival strategies, including legally murky ones, visible and therefore useful? And when are these details just too much information? In a society suspicious of rampant disability fraud, how do we ethically excavate and represent this knowledge without stripping disabled people of their survival strategies and privacy? Sandahl suggests some answers to these questions.

She will be introduced by Catherine Prendergast, who is Professor of English, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and EUI.