Join AER on January 12, 2022 for the opening session in our new series: "Question the Authorities!" Our first interview will be with Dr. Kim Nielsen. The author of The Radical Lives of Helen Keller and The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller, Dr. Kim Nielsen teaches courses on disability history, eugenics, and disability rights at the University of Toledo. Nielsen also is author of the widely used A Disability History of the United States, co-editor of the award winning Oxford Handbook of Disability History, and author of additional books and numerous journal articles. In addition, she has received two Fulbright appointments, numerous scholarly prizes, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
The discussion will be lead by Mark Richert, and will include questions on her work as well as questions from the audience.
Participants will:
- Gain a more sophisticated and complete understanding of the richness of Helen Keller's decades-long career as an activist and the relationship of this career to Keller's personal identity
- Learn about Keller's relationship with leading organizations in the vision loss community and how she and they worked together to cultivate an image of Keller and of people with disabilities generally which may have implications in our own time
- Leave with lessons about how consumers and professionals can both build on and constructively depart from the approaches and perspectives of Keller and her circle of promoters in order to further professionalize services to people with disabilities and to achieve a measure of justice in the 21st century for people both with and without disabilities.