27.10.2022Guest Lecture by Prof. Melinda C. Hall on "Transhumanism in Conflict with Disability Justice”

The “Human Reproduction Reloaded | H2R” project at the University of Zurich has the pleasure to invite you to the talk “Transhumanism in Conflict with Disability Justice” by Prof. Melinda C. Hall from Stetson University, USA. 

The talk will be take place online on 27 October 2022 from 16:15 – 17:30 (CET / Swiss time). To receive the Zoom details, please register your attendance using the form below. 

Dr. Melinda Hall will discuss the primary arguments in her book, The Bioethics of Enhancement. She draws out the conflict between transhumanist thinking and disability justice projects. She argues that transhumanist arguments in support of radical human enhancement are inimical to disability justice projects. Transhumanist thinkers, the strongest promoters of human enhancement, and fellow travelers who claim enhancement is a moral obligation, make arguments that rely on the denigration of disabled embodiment and lives. These arguments link disability with risk. The promotion of human enhancement is therefore open to significant disability critique despite transhumanism’s claims to allyship with disability justice activism. In this talk, Dr. Hall will lay out such a disability critique of enhancement and further support her claims by drawing from Foucault’s notion of the biopolitical. She will point toward an alternative vision of enhancement, which poses a disability-inclusive future, accepts the risks of embodiment, and lays groundwork for a counter discourse of enhancement. 

Melinda C. Hall (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University) is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Stetson University. She is also Director of Stetson’s Gender Studies program and co-director of the Community Education Project, Stetson’s higher education in prison program. She specializes in bioethics, Continental philosophy, and the philosophy of disability. Hall is the author of The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics (Lexington Books 2016). Her current book projects focus on the ethics and politics of risk and on claiming a disability history of philosophy. Hall is also the author of articles published in the Disability Studies Quarterly, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Philosophy Compass, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, among other venues.