A Book Talk By Pia Justesen: From the Periphery – Real-Life Stories of Disability

Please join the Department of Disability and Human Development and the Disability Cultural Center for

A Book Talk By Pia Justesen, PhD 
From the Periphery – Real-Life Stories of Disability

Pia Justesen, Ph.D. is a Danish human rights lawyer, professor and writer who moved to the United States in 2014. In Chicago she has taught disability rights at the University of Illinois and worked with the independent living organization Access Living. She has an extensive list of publications on human rights and discrimination issues. Her work focuses specifically on the human rights of racial minorities and persons with disabilities. In Denmark she also worked as a corporate social responsibility advisor and a labor union lawyer. Pia currently splits her time between Chicago and Copenhagen. Find Pia online at http://www.piajustesen.com or on Facebook @storiesfromtheperiphery.

About the book:
The book From the Periphery consists of around 40 first-person narratives of everyday people and activists who describe what it’s like to be treated differently by society because of various visible and invisible disabilities. Race, class, and intersectionality are recurring motifs. The stories are raw and painful, but also surprisingly funny and deeply moving. The oral histories describe anger, independence, bigotry, solidarity and love—in the family, at school and at the workplace. Inspired by the oral historians Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich, From the Periphery will become a classic oral history collection and a landmark work that will increase the understanding of the lived experiences of people with disabilities, their responses to oppression, and their coping strategies. Readers will meet Andre, who felt different as a child because she was blind. Her father insisted that she could ride a bike, but neighborhood kids would still ask, “Can I catch what you have?” Marca Bristo acquired her disability after a diving accident and became invisible as a person. Men would only see her wheelchair and she started doubting her sexuality. Curtis Harris was treated like a piece of meat in school. He has come to accept autism as part of his personality: “You are who you are. . . You reject normalism.”

To be published by Chicago Review Press in October 2019.

ASL interpreter will be provided.

For individuals needing access accommodations, please contact Cheryl Johnson at cherylj@uic.edu