What does it mean to talk and write about the experiences of our bodies? How do the stories told about us mediate the narratives we construct? What are the stakes for disabled writers sharing their first-person perspectives with the world? In this dialogue with two scholars and memoirists of disability, we will explore how intellectual and aesthetic engagement with non-normative embodied life speaks to questions that matter — now more than ever.

Featuring: Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz), Jan Grue (University of Oslo), Megan Moodie (UC Santa Cruz).

Doors open 5:30pm – Event begins 6:00pm
Tickets: $15

Free student tickets are available. Please email thi@ucsc.edu to reserve a student spot.
A ucsc.edu email and student ID number will be required.

Jan Grue is the author of a wide-ranging body of work in fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and academic literature, and a professor at the University of Oslo. I Live a Life Like Yours was published in 2018 in Norway, where it won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and was nominated to the Nordic Council Literature Prize, the first Norwegian nonfiction book to be so honored in fifty years.

Pranav Anand is Professor of Linguistics and Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. His research investigates how context mediates the interpretation of language, and has explored the interpretation of subjectivity, persuasive tactics, bias, evidence, belief, time, and narrative structure.

Megan Moodie is a cultural anthropologist, writer, performer, and disability studies scholar whose work spans multiple genres. As a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she specializes in teaching experimental research methods that bring together social sciences and the arts. Her work on disability, motherhood, and artistic practice has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Catamaran, Hip Mama, MUTHA Magazine, and Sapiens. In 2019, her essay “Birthright,” which appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review (Volume 26), was named a Notable Essay of the Year by Best American Essays.

Questions That Matter is a public humanities series developed by The Humanities Institute and the community of Santa Cruz. It brings together, in conversation, two or more UC Santa Cruz scholars with community residents and students to explore questions that matter to all of us.