Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Gerald O’Brien, PhD, professor in the Department of Social Work within the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), will present the annual William and Margaret Going Endowed Professorship public lecture at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 12 in the Morris University Center’s Maple/Dogwood Room.
O’Brien will present “Eugenics, Genetic Innovations and the Minority Group Model of Disability.” Following the lecture, he will be joined by panelists Cathy Contarino, IMPACT Center for Independent Living executive director, Dominic Dorsey, SIUE ACCESS Office director, Alison Reiheld, PhD, associate professor in the SIUE Department of Philosophy, and Duff Wrobbel, PhD, professor and chair of the SIUE Department of Applied Communication Studies.
In February 2019, O’Brien received the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professorship Award in CAS, which honors faculty who fundamentally connect their scholarship to their teaching and transform students’ lives. O’Brien’s scholarly work centers on historical eugenics and contemporary bioethics, and brings a disability perspective to the issues. O’Brien’s research also considers the relationship of pejorative metaphor themes to social injustice movements.
O’Brien’s latest research objective is to expand his knowledge of the various ways that historical eugenics relates to both new genetic technological innovations, as well as the relevant policy issues which will likely be developed in the wake of the completion of the Human Genome Project.
“This is an extremely important issue as we consider the various ways in which the findings of the Human Genome Project and related bioethical research will be implemented,” O’Brien explained. “This issue is particularly important to many in the disability community, since the polices that will be implemented in the future related to genetic research will arise in part from our collective view of disability and its presumptive place in the world. This will in turn be impacted in no small degree by the metaphors and other rhetoric that is invoked to frame both disability and biogenetic technology.”
Sign language interpreters will be present during the lecture, which is free and open to the public.
Photo: Gerald O’Brien, PhD, professor in the SIUE Department of Social Work.