Bioethics Panel

FREDERICK, Md.—The Hood College humanities colloquium series will open its spring schedule with a bioethics panel March 6 at 12:30 p.m. in the Whitaker Campus Center.

The panel, originally scheduled for Feb. 4 but postponed due to inclement weather, is co-sponsored by the William J. and Wilma M. Haines Lecture in Bioethics. A light lunch will be served.

Panelists Dina Fiasconaro, filmmaker and assistant professor in the department of film and video at Stevenson University, and Laura Guidry-Grimes, doctoral candidate and teaching associate in the philosophy department at Georgetown University, will address pregnancy and the rights of consumers of mental health services, two areas not often associated with mental illness. Katy Fulfer, Sophia M. Libman NEH Professor of the Humanities at Hood will serve as moderator.

Guidry-Grimes will discuss the parallels between disability rights advocates who over the years have petitioned for and received recognition, respect, acceptance and accommodations, and the push for similar human and and civil rights legislation by those who use or have used psychiatric services.

Fiasconaro will discuss the research documented in her film, Women and Meds: A Filmmaker’s Journey Through Pregnancy and Mental Illness, which focuses on women like herself who struggle to balance their desire to have children with their need to take medications for a variety of mental disorders.

Future spring colloquium events, which this year focuses on the topic Themes From Machiavelli: Power, the Public Good and Mental Illness, will feature a lecture in March by Jean-Vincent Blanchard of Swarthmore College, author of Eminence: Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France; and a panel discussion and film screening in April that focuses on the historical and political significance of Richard III.

For more information about the colloquium series, contact Fulfer at fulfer@hood.edu.