Please join us in congratulating the 6th annual Northeastern University Humanities Center Resident Fellowship Program. This fellowship provides a focused period of time for fellows to pursue research, to collaborate around a common theme, and to share their work with the Northeastern community. The theme for the 2018-19 academic year is “Cultures of Ability.”
2018-2010 Cultures of Ability: What are the shifting material and immaterial conditions that determine whether persons are perceived to be able or competent, or alternatively, disabled or incompetent? Designed and natural environments and cultural and aesthetic forms have profound effects on our perceptions and experiences of ability. Contexts for, and consequences of, judgments about ability may be social, cultural, economic, educational, historical, and/or political. Alert to President Joseph Aoun’s call, in Robot Proof, to think about how human productivity and flourishing are defined in a technologically networked era, the Humanities Center aims to create an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose projects consider how the category of “ability” (as well as its cognates, such as competence, aptitude, and health; its antonyms, such as disability, incompetence, and sickness; and the terms with which it often travels, such as commitment, will, and effort) shapes identities, cultures, representations, and lived experience.
Meryl Alper: “Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age”
Communications Studies Program
College of Arts, Media, and Design
Moya Bailey: “Creating a Black Feminist Disability Framework”
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies Program
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Linda Blum: “Managing Precarious Normality in an Age of Inequality”
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Elizabeth Britt: “The Ability to Change: Batterer Intervention as Rhetorical Education”
Department of English
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Laura Frader: “Addressing Gendered Cultures of Ability: European Community Equality Policies 1957-1980”
Department of History
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Denise Garcia: “Artificial Intelligence and the Earth’s Global Commons” Department of Political Science
International Affairs Program
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Adam Hosein: “Anti-Discrimination Norms, Conceptions of Ability and Social Change” Department of Philosophy and Religion
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Philip Thai: “Risky Businesses – Insurance and the Emergency of Financial Capitalism in Modern China” Department of History
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Bridget Keown – GRADUATE FELLOW: “’She is lost to time and place’: Women, War Trauma, and the First World War”
Department of History
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Rachel Lee – GRADUATE FELLOW: “The Neoliberal Turn in Health Care: Adoption and Resistance in Community Health Centers”
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
