Cure is not what many people with disabilities want or need--that was the message of “Questioning Cure: Disability, Identity, and Healing,” the fourth in a series of Hastings Center events supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which took place on May 11. Three disabled writers and educators discussed the promises and pitfalls of cure with insights from their lives and work. Anand Prahlad, a Curators’ Distinguished Professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Missouri and author of The Secret of a Black Aspie, described the relationship between disability, the trauma of racism, and the dangers of  “cures” that attempt to enforce the norms of whiteness and neurotypicality. “In the end,” Prahlad proposed, “it is society that really needs to be cured.” Ann Millett-Gallant, an art historian and disability studies scholar at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, reflected on how her art practice has enabled her to heal from a traumatic brain injury, “refus[ing] any expectations that I could or should return to an imaginary pre-trauma state of ‘wellness'.” Karen Nakamura, a cultural and visual anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the ways disabled people “hack” spaces that were not built for them rather than giving in to the conformity promised by cure. “Where we go, ramps get built, quiet rooms at conferences get made, visible fire alarms get installed,” Nakamura pointed out. “Disabled people make the world a better place.” Learn more and watch the event, organized by senior research scholar Erik Parens, Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities Liz Bowen, and Hastings Center senior advisors Joel Michael Reynolds and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson.
 

If you are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, must you disclose this information when asked? In an interview with NPR, Hastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger explored the ethical dimensions of this question. She explained that it is clearly unethical to say or imply that you have been vaccinated if you haven’t; this is a lie that puts others at risk of harm. A vaccinated person who claims to be unvaccinated is also deceiving others, a practice that “is disrespectful and corrosive,” but “unlikely to harm others through transmission.” And a vaccinated person may have valid personal reasons for concealing the fact that they are vaccinated if others close to them are opposed to vaccination. Read the NPR article.