In-person Symposium: Bodies, Vulnerabilities, Empowerment

LIMITED PLACES, to register please email Amanda Lubit (amanda.lubit@dcu.ie), with the subject heading AUDIENCE REGISTRATION - BODIES, VULNERABILITIES, EMPOWERMENT,  and indicating your name, affiliation, and whether you wish to participate in the morning, the afternoon, or the whole day. 

The objective of this symposium is to employ creative ethnography, poetry, and other modes of artistic exploration to explore how inequalities related to intersectionalities of gender, sexuality, race, religion, class, age, and/or disability are

• embodied and experienced
• embedded in wider societal structures
• politicised and resisted

Keynote Speakers:

Keynote 1:  Bebe Ashley

Harbour Doubts: Bodies, Vulnerabilities and Empowerment 

Primarily focusing on Bebe Ashley’s latest poetry collection Harbour Doubts, this keynote will feature poems which chart a desire, and ultimate failure, to become a sign language interpreter. Harbour Doubts is a collection that tangles with the burning desire to communicate in the isolation of a late capitalist, post-pandemic world where the world feels bigger than the speaker can handle. It's also a love letter to the delights of linguistics and language, a three-dimensional exploration of words and the body. This presentation will also be used as an opportunity to demonstrate work in which access for multiple types of bodies is advocated for at the genesis of work, including poetry films with audio description and 3D-printed Braille poems. 

Bebe Ashley lives in Northern Ireland. Her debut collection Gold Light Shining (Banshee Press) was selected for Read Mór in 2022. In 2023, Bebe received the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment (Text) for work which was later published in her second poetry collection Harbour Doubts. In 2024, Bebe received a Creative Practitioner Bursary from Belfast City Council, and in 2025, received the British Council Fellowship for Bundanon, Australia. www.bebe-ashley.com 

Keynote 2:  Karen Nakamura

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together: Disabled humans and superhuman AI in the twenty-first century

The title of this work draws from a quote from Desmond Tutu, but rather than envisioning a joint humanity, this piece looks at the future-now humanity in which the division between disabled people and artificial intelligences is being blurred.  On one side we have AI protheses helping and/or coercing humans be more human, and on the other digital fleshsuits to help AI blend in amongst us. In Japan, robots powered not by AI but by disabled “pilots” serve customers in a café.  Autistic children are learning from AI robots how to maintain eye gaze in order to appear more normal. AI are learning from human artists how to paint hands and evade detection as AI artists. More than 51% of the traffic on the internet is now AI driven – now that humans are the minority, what becomes of the human-non-human divide and what paths forward can disabled people show us.

Karen Nakamura is a disabled cultural and visual anthropologist at the University of California Berkeley, and Director of the Berkeley Disability Lab. Her first book was titled Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (2006). Her next project resulted in two ethnographic films and a monograph titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). While finishing a book on the intersections of transsexuality and disability politics in postwar Japan, Nakamura is currently collaborating on research involving the impact of artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML) on disability communities.

Image credit: Maruška Svašek