Events

The Center for Digital Accessibility is celebrating the 13th annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) this April and May, focusing on digital equality for the one billion people in the world living with a disability.

Join us and our Ivy+ peer institutions during GAAD to share information about strengthening digital inclusion. Topics include accessibility practices in the design process, do-it-yourself accessibility testing, lightning talks on implementing institutional best practices to enable progress, and a Q&A session on emerging digital accessibility topics for higher education institutions. Learn how you can take action to create a more accessible digital experience. Hosted by: Stanford University

This virtual meeting will include Zoom’s automated closed captions.

CHD Colloquium - Neil Gong, Assistant Professor, Sociology, UC San Diego

Title: “Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles”

Abstract: This talk compares public safety net and elite private psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles to show how inequality shapes the very meanings of mental illness, recovery, client choice, and personhood. In Downtown LA, the crises of homelessness and criminalization mean public providers define recovery as getting a client housed, not in jail, and not triggering emergency calls. Given insufficient treatment capacity, providers eschew discipline for a “tolerant containment” model that accepts medication refusal and drug use so long as deviant behavior remains indoors. For elite private providers serving wealthy families, on the other hand, recovery means normalization and generating a respectable identity. Far from accepting madness and addiction, providers use a “concerted constraint” model to therapeutically discipline wayward adult children. Turning theoretical expectation on its head, the ethnography shows how “freedom” becomes an inferior good and disciplinary power a form of privilege.

Bio: Neil Gong is assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego. He uses diverse empirical cases to study power and social control in modernity, with a particular focus on understanding American liberalism and libertarianism. To this end, he has investigated civil liberties dilemmas in psychiatric care and the maintenance of social order in a “no rules” fight club. He is author of Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics (UChicago 2024) and co-editor (with Corey Abramson) of Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (Oxford University Press 2020). Neil’s public writings appear in such venues as the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Kevin J. McMahon (the John R. Reitemeyer Professor of Political Science at Trinity College) will discuss A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People. He will be joined in conversation by Alison L. LaCroix (the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at UChicago).

In A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other, McMahon provides “A data-rich examination of the US Supreme Court’s unprecedented detachment from the democratic processes that buttress its legitimacy.”

The book delineates the current standing of the Supreme Court in comparison to its historical standing, showing the court’s tenuous relationship with the democratic processes that help establish its authority.McMahon makes the point that previous Supreme Courts were more in line with “the promise of democracy” than today’s is.

Come learn more about McMahon’s arguments, and the developments that have led to McMahon’s modern take on today’s Supreme Court.

Our amazing speakers will be introduced by David Lebow, associated director of Law, Letters, and Society.

Please RSVP, lunch will be provided for registrants. 

Brian Phelan - DePaul University

Speaker: Christina Brown, UChicago Topic: TBA

Collin Raymond, Cornell University Topic: TBA

Thomas Talhelm, PhD Associate Professor, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

At our recent event on the Kalven Report, Cathy Cohen called for the creation of “a document that delineates our values.” That report and subsequent “Chicago Principles” statement (2014) valorize freedom of inquiry and expression but crucially fail to recognize that some have more power—and thus freedom to speak—than others and that free speech can come at the cost of inclusion. Institutional neutrality and a commitment to openness alone are not sufficient to maintain a space in which all students and faculty enjoy “a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation.”

In the face of unprecedented challenges to higher education, what kind of practices and atmospheres should we as a community be cultivating to both protect free inquiry and minimize harm? Can the classroom or the university environment be both safe and uncomfortable as part of the process of learning? Are diversity and equity as essential as free speech in the production of knowledge? How might these goals be compatible, and how might they be in tension? What kinds of commitments should we be affirming and struggling to enact? And what forms of governance, infrastructure, or other initiatives would serve such efforts?

Please join us for a conversation with Anton Ford, Gabriel Lear, and Gina Samuels as they discuss how we might define the values that shape our work and identify those that we need to incorporate into campus culture more fully.

“The Serial Killer: Making Sense of War and Defeat in Occupied Japan (1945-1952)”

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

Tuesday, April 30 · 5 - 6:30pm CDT

Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122 1100 E. 57th St. Chicago, IL 60637

Part of the CEAS Lecture Series, this event is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library and features the University of Southern California’s Benjamin Uchiyama. While much has been written about the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to one of the most notorious criminals who captivated Japanese public attention during that period. In August 1946, ex-soldier Kodaira Yoshio was arrested and charged for the murder of seven young women during the last months of the war and the first year of the occupation. Subsequent public debates attempted to explain his crimes in connection to Kodaira’s wartime experience in China, thus underscoring the importance for Japan to fully extirpate its wartime past. Another stream of thought, however, located the crimes in the context of the chaos and breakdown in social order still afflicting Japanese society in the wake of defeat. These debates, coming so soon after Japan’s surrender, helped lay the first building block of postwar Japanese memories of the war and understandings of defeat. Professor Uchiyama is Associate Profess of History and author of Japan’s Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2019) which received the 2021 John Whitney Hall Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.