Lecture Alyson Patsavas: Sites of Intervention: Disability and the (Built) Environment in Imagined Futures

KU Leuven organises Health Humanities lecture series

KU Leuven Health Humanities Lecture Series 2024-2025: Health and the Built Environment

‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’, or so Winston Churchill once said. For better or for worse, our constructed physical space – the so-called built environment – impacts on our behaviours, our social interactions, and our physical and mental health. The speakers of this year’s LCH² lecture series discuss various examples of the relationship between architectural space and human well-being, from across a range of health humanities, including architecture, literary and colonial history, sociology, and disability studies. In doing so, they will touch on themes as varied as the role of the corridor in hospital architecture, the connections between buildings and disabled bodies in science fiction movies, and the architectural evolution of retirement homes. Join online or on campus, at KU Leuven, for a series of inspiring health humanities talks about the built environment.

Programme

  • 13 February 2025 – Pleuntje Jellema: The Roles of Cancer Care Facilities in Users’ Well-being: Foregrounding the Built Environment and Learning Lessons for Design
  • 27 February 2025 – Roger Luckhurst: A History of the Hospital Corridor: Madness and Civilisation
  • 27 March 2025 – Simon De Nys-Ketels: “At least the Belgians built hospitals!”: Myths and Realities of the Belgian ‘Medical Model Colony’
  • 24 April 2025 – Alyson Patsavas: Sites of Intervention: Disability and the (Built) Environment in Imagined Futures
  • 8 May 2025 – Cleo Valentine: Architectural Neuroimmunology: Examining the Impact of Architectural Form on Neurophysiological Activity
  • 22 May 2025 – Karin Bijsterveld: The ‘Return’ of the Retirement Home: Anthropology, Architecture and Policy Analysis in the Historiography of Postwar Housing for Older People in the Netherlands

Sites of Intervention: Disability and the (Built) Environment in Imagined Futures
From Gattaca to Avatar to the recent Mad Max franchise, science fiction and fantasy films have long imagined disabled bodies and minds as the location upon which futures are projected. This talk asks what role the built environment plays in these imagined futures. Specifically, it considers the visual work that built environments perform as foils against which intervened-upon disabled body and mind stand in stark contrast. Through case studies, I read built environments as crucial scene partners in concretizing the body and mind as the primary and future site of intervention. Whether spectacular or sterile, dystopian wasteland or towering testimonies to human advancement, the cinematic built environment helps frame disabled body and mind as continued targets of intervention. Building on disability studies scholarship that asks us to imagine different futures for and with disability, I consider the crucial work performed by counter examples or representations that re-locate, reject, and reimagine the targets of scientific, medicinal, and technological advances.

For more information about the programme or how to register, visit this website.