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Curry School hosts "Culture in Disability" lecture

Artiles discusses race, cultural framings, research

<p>Grimes said the Curry School decided to recruit Artiles to deliver this year’s lecture due to his expertise and status as a Curry alumnus.</p>

Grimes said the Curry School decided to recruit Artiles to deliver this year’s lecture due to his expertise and status as a Curry alumnus.

Roughly 45 students and faculty attended Dr. Alfredo Artiles’s lecture Monday titled “Culture in Disability in the Global Era: Interdisciplinary Notes for New Research Programs.” The Curry School hosted Artiles as part of the Walter N. Ridley Distinguished Speaker Series.

This year’s lecture marked the 10th year of the speaker series, which was established in 2005 as part of a diversity initiative through the University. Curry Prof. Patrice Preston Grimes, the associate dean of African-American Affairs, said the lecture series was named in honor of Ridley because he was the University’s first black graduate in 1953.

“The Ridley lecture was a way in which people at that time wanted to keep the issue of diversity and leveraging difference in the forefront,” Grimes said.

Artiles’s lecture discussed race as well as the critique of culture in disability research, cultural framings and implications for future research. He said the multiple ways researchers typically define culture vary because the term itself can be vague.

“I consider culture as the social menu in which the lives of people are embedded,” Artiles said. “We’ve been grappling with the term since its conception, since the beginning of anthropology.”

He also explained the impact of culture in the classroom, as students use their peers’ cultures to help shape their own identities. He said when students have multiple cultures with which they identify, they often compile all of them to develop their own self-conception.

“We know learning is mediated by social context,” Artiles said. “[For example], Filipino students sometimes adopt African-American English when interacting with peers.”

Artiles said while students always maintain the culture of their upbringing in some way, they still mix and match ideas to continue making their own identity.

“We learn to use our culture, but we are not images of our grandparents,” he said. “We are producing our culture.”

Artiles separated the cultural nature of human development into three dimensions: individual, institutional and interpersonal. He said the individual and institutional dimensions are integral, but the interpersonal dimension is where students actually learn and develop.

“The individual and institutional layers of culture certainly afford, but also constrain what can be achieved, reproduced, challenged, or innovated in everyday practices,” Artiles said. “The interpersonal dimension of culture is the canvas upon which this work gets done.”

Grimes said the Curry School decided to recruit Artiles to deliver this year’s lecture due to his expertise and status as a Curry alumnus.

“Part of it was just looking at our own pool of scholars and researchers we have launched,” Grimes said. “He’s been a noted scholar in the field for the last 20 years, especially in special education and the intersection of race and class with disability.”

First-year Curry Ph.D. student Hannah Mathews said the lecture was interesting because of Artiles’s discussion of identity and its connections to culture and community.

“A big part of what he spoke about was the idea of identity and what that means,” Mathews said. “People are hesitant to address who they are in the context of a community and don't see the connection of understanding themselves to understand other people.”

Curry Prof. Antoinette Thomas said the lecture was important for more than just Curry students because its themes transcended across disciplines.

“The notion basically is how these are really complex issues and we need to look at the cross-section of other disciplines to be informed on how we’re going to provide interventions and move forward,” Thomas said.

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