Questions That Matter: Disability in Medicine and Memoir
On April 6, 2025, author Jan Grue in conversation with Pranav Anand Professor of Linguistics at UCSC and Megan Moodie Professor of Anthropology at UCSC, considered questions like: 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? This dialogue explored how intellectual and aesthetic engagement with non-normative embodied life speaks to questions that matter — now more than ever.
Watch a recording of the event here:
Event photos:
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 UCSC 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. The series is a part of a strategic initiative of The Humanities Institute to champion the role and value of the humanities in contemporary life. At the University of California Santa Cruz, we understand that the humanities are a crucial element of any first-rate liberal arts education. Indeed, what distinguishes the best universities in the United States is the fact that the humanities are an integral part of their core curriculum, along with the arts and sciences