On behalf of the Dean of the Faculty of Philology, Professor Piotr Stalmaszczyk, we are pleased to invite you to attend the lecture entitled: "Picturing People with Disabilities" by Professor Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University, USA)Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Disability Studies Initiative at Emory University. Her her fields of study are disability studies, American literature and culture, bioethics, and women's studies. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities, broadly understood, to bring forward disability access, equity, and identity to communities inside and outside of the academy. She is the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books. Her current book project is Habitable Worlds: Disability, Technology, and Eugenics."Picturing People with Disabilities"Abstract: One of the theoretical principles of cultural criticism is that representation structures reality. This lecture presents some recent portraits of people with disabilities, asserting that the visual genre of portraiture offers an opportunity to re-narrate disability, to make disability legible in new ways. The fundamental cultural work of portraits is to enact recognition by rendering distinctive, legible characteristics. Portraits provide cultural literacy by rendering subjects into public figures and teaching us how to value them. These portraits enact what I call visual activism by staging an encounter between viewer and a subject that has previously been an illegible form of human embodiment, one that is seldom seen through this aesthetic mediation. This reenactment of disability depends upon the concept of recognition that is fundamental to portraiture. The paper uses political theory of recognition - for example, Nancy Fraser, bell hooks, and Charles Taylor - to argue for the progressive cultural work of these portraits. This potential for what hooks terms "the look of recognition that affirms subjectivity" is precisely the relationship that these portraits invite. These portraits ask viewers to recognize the distinctiveness of disability not as diminishment, but rather as testimonies to our shared humanness.To provide access, Professor Garland-Thomson will provide detailed visual description of all images presented, which will be an organic part of the analytical reading of these images that the presentation undertakes.