KU LEUVEN HEALTH HUMANITIES LECTURE SERIES:
Health and the Built Environment
'We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’, or so Winston Churchill once said. For better or for worse, our constructed physical space – the so-called built environment – impacts on our behaviours, our social interactions, and our physical and mental health. The speakers of this year’s LCH² lecture series discuss various examples of the relationship between architectural space and human well-being, from across a range of health humanities, including architecture, literary and colonial history, sociology, and disability studies. In doing so, they will touch on themes as varied as the role of the corridor in hospital architecture, the connections between buildings and disabled bodies in science fiction movies, and the architectural evolution of retirement homes. Join us online and on campus, at KU Leuven, for a series of inspiring health humanities talks about the built environment.
Sites of Intervention: Disability and the (Built) Environment in Imagined Futures
From Gattaca to Avatar to the recent Mad Max franchise, science fiction and fantasy films have long imagined disabled bodies and minds as the location upon which futures are projected. This talk asks what role the built environment plays in these imagined futures. Specifically, it considers the visual work that built environments perform as foils against which intervened-upon disabled body and mind stand in stark contrast. Through case studies, I read built environments as crucial scene partners in concretizing the body and mind as the primary and future site of intervention. Whether spectacular or sterile, dystopian wasteland or towering testimonies to human advancement, the cinematic built environment helps frame disabled body and mind as continued targets of intervention. Building on disability studies scholarship that asks us to imagine different futures for and with disability, I consider the crucial work performed by counter examples or representations that re-locate, reject, and reimagine the targets of scientific, medicinal, and technological advances.
Alyson Patsavas
Alyson Patsavas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Her scholarship focuses on cultural discourses of pain, chronic illness, trauma, and disability. Patsavas is a writer and producer on the documentary film Code of the Freaks (2020). She co-edited “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry,” found in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Her book, Pain in Relation: On Cripistemology, Chronicity, and Crip Evidence, is forthcoming from Michigan University Press.
