This event is free but ticketed. Reserve your seats today online at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.
There is a growing buzz around the potential for science and technology to create significant "human enhancement" applications, such as bionic limbs, improved memory or cognition, or the ability to choose specific characteristics for our offspring. The possibilities stir the imagination and excitement of many, while for others the rhetoric and current research into human enhancement signals alarms of a new eugenics. And yet, for most non-scientists, this sounds like the realm of science fiction, a world awash in mystery and misunderstanding.
Fixed features disability studies scholar Dominika Bednarska, disability justice educator Patty Berne, exoskeleton test pilot Fernanda Castelo; bionics engineer Hugh Herr; NPR radio host John Hockenberry; biochemist and ability studies scholar Gregor Wolbring; robot scientist Rodney Brooks; futurist Jamais Cascio; bioethicist and policy advocate Marcy Darnovsky; brain computer interface study participant Tim Hemmes; philosophy professor Cressida Heyes; transhumanist James Hughes; reproductive rights advocate Sujatha Jesudason; and disability lawyer Silvia Yee. With cameo performances by some of the world’s leading integrated dance companies, featuring disabled and non-disabled dancers and artists, including the Anjali Dance Company, Antoine Hunter (of Sins Invalid and Urban Jazz Dance Company), AXIS Dance Company, Candoco, Dancing Wheels, GIMP, Kounterclockwise, Lisa Bufano, Marc Brew, Remix Dance Company, and Sue Austin/Freewheeling. Through a dynamic mix of verité, dance, archival and interview footage, Fixed challenges notions of normal, the body and what it means fundamentally to be human in the 21st century.
Filmmaker
Award-winnning Producer/Director Regan Brashear will be in attendance at the April 22 event. Originally from Virginia, Brashear has been working on labor, race, youth, LGBT, and disability issues for over twenty years through documentary film, union organizing, teen theater, community forums, and grassroots activism. Now based in Oakland, CA, Brashear is a co-founder of Making Change Media, a non-fiction film production company which produces short and long form social issue films. Previously, Brashear served as a producer and community engagement coordinator at Open Eye Pictures, a production company in Sausalito, CA, doing project development for the place-based, memory-mapping iOS app, Tributopia; community engagement for the Academy Award-shortlisted film, Under Our Skin and as co-producer for The Grove, a film about the National AIDS Memorial Grove. Both films aired across the country on PBS stations in 2011. Brashear has a BA in American Studies (Highest Honors, Phi Beta Kappa) and a MA in Social Documentation (Documentary Film) from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her interest in disability studies, which eventually led to the making of Fixed, started in 1997, after a car accident which began an ongoing journey with fibromyalgia and chronic pain. She finished editing Fixed as a visiting filmmaker at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University.
Website: http://www.fixedthemovie.com
This event is free but ticketed. Reserve your seats today online at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.
Sponsored by NDnano, Nano Impacts Intellectual Community, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, John J. Reilly Center, College of Science, College of Engineering, and Disabilities Studies.