By Olaoluwapo Onitiri
LEXINGTON, Ky. – In October 2021, The University of Kentucky announced the top 10 finalists for the fourth annual 5-minute Fast Track competition. Run by the Office of Undergraduate Research, the 5-Minute Fast cultivates students’ presentation and research communication skills and challenges them to describe their research within five minutes.
Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), reveals how eighteenth-century race science contributed to emerging sciences of sex in the colonial Atlantic world. Other publications include Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell UP, 2021) and an award-winning special issue of American Quarterly, “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas.” Dr. LaFleur is currently at work on a new project, tentatively titled A Queer History of Sexual Violence (under contract with The University of Chicago Press), which examines the role of cultural and legal responses to sexual violence in the development of modern understandings of sexuality. Her works-in-progress discussion will be drawn from this project.
By Dr. Kelly Hill and Mallory Profeta
LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 16, 2022) — A multidisciplinary team at the University of Kentucky has joined forces to improve medical and mental health services for the LGBTQ+ community.
“We’ve seen an increase in patients who are transgender or gender nonconforming admitted to the UK HealthCare inpatient adolescent behavioral health unit,” said UK HealthCare child and adolescent psychiatrist Kelly Hill.
By Melody Ryan and Craig Borie
LEXINGTON, Ky (March 11, 2022) — COVID-19 brought to the forefront the challenges of mental health around the world. During the Feb. 26, 2022 Global Mental Health Hack-A-Thon, University of Kentucky students and the Kentucky community proposed solutions to this global health challenge.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 14, 2022) — The University of Kentucky chapter of Alpha Lambda Delta National Honor Society inducted 232 new members during the Spring 2022 semester. The chapter’s induction ceremony was held in the Gatton Student Center Ballroom on Thursday, March 3.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 14, 2022) — From laughable to just downright bizarre.
2021-2022 A&S Distinguished Professor Lecture
Patricia Ehrkamp
Professor and Chair, Department of Geography
Geographic studies of migration have resoundingly demonstrated that the pathways for people on the move are not simple linear trajectories, but routinely involve circuitous routes that may be repeated and often involve a great deal of waiting, on paperwork, at border crossings, in detention, and sometimes in refugee camps. While refugee resettlement offers a hope for durable refuge for some, the naturalization process itself can become another moment of great uncertainty. This lecture is based on collaborative research in four resettlement sites in the US conducted 2016-2019 and funded by the US National Science Foundation (co-PIs Dr. Jenna Loyd at UW-Madison and Dr. Anna Secor at Durham University).
My talk explores the potentially contentious role of the medical waiver form (Medical Certification for Disability Exceptions (N-648)) in citizenship applications. Based on this collaborative work, I argue that medical certification requests deliberated during the naturalization process echo the medico-legal process of initial asylum-seeking, folding structures of scrutiny at time of entry into a similarly distrustful process years later. At both moments, legal terms of credibility can clash with medical knowledge about mental and physical functioning or impairments as certified by medical practitioners. Yet the denial of a citizenship application can prolong the time that one does not have access to benefits like Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which can negatively affect housing, food, transportation, and other daily needs. Thus, the denial of a medical waiver turns a process for making legal disability accommodations into a situation that sustains disabling living conditions while extending the horizon of citizenship. This analysis highlights how thinking critical refugee studies together with feminist disability studies provides avenues of further extending feminist understanding of geopolitical processes and space-times.
The event will be held in person and virtually. To register for the virtual event, click here.
