Date: 2008-08-08 09:30 Subject: I Got In! Security: Public Location: Home Mood: giddy Music: BBC 6 Music Tags: academics

OK, so it's "just" the College of General Studies (at the University of Pennsylvania), but this is the big first step to finally starting my graduate studies. While I'll be checking out the Department of History and Sociology of Science this fall, I'll be taking:

BIOE 590 - Beyond Quality of Life: Examining Disability in Bioethics
The received view of bioethics and disability studies posits tension between the two fields of inquiry resulting from different orientations towards people with disabilities. Bioethicists are viewed as starting from a medical/pathological definition of disability; disability studies scholars typically begin with the assumption that disability is socially constructed. Although bioethics and disability studies are both relatively new fields of scholarship that emphasize interdisciplinarity, they seldom are brought into conversation with one other. By doing so in this course, we can ask about the effects these differences have on such foundational questions as how authority is addressed in each field: Who counts as an expert? Whose voices are included in the discussion? What issues are worthy of examination?

Most notably, bioethics discussions about disability have largely focused on quality of life analyses, especially regarding decisions about the beginning and the end of life; whereas, disability studies scholarship has traditionally taken a more comprehensive look at ethical issues affecting the lived experiences of people with disabilities. We will examine these differing centers of concern by asking the following questions: How are these differences shaped by varying conceptions of what counts as bioethics? Or by how disability is defined? What are the capacities of the philosophical framework of bioethics and of institutional structures that focus on acute medical care to accommodate ethical matters pertaining to disability? What are the capacities of other frameworks (narrative ethics, care ethics, rehabilitation ethics, everyday bioethics, the humanities, or the social sciences) to make such ethical accommodations? What contributions can placing disability and bioethics in dialog make to each discipline, to their relationships to the medical profession, to public policy, social justice, and concepts of the common good?

Aah, so good to feel like a proper nerdlinger again.

Date: 2008-07-31 11:13 Subject: [MOG] I Got the Admissions Fever Security: Public Location: Home Mood: nervous Music: Super Furry Animals Tags: academics, mog, music

Cue the week-long heart attack.

I just applied to the University of Pennsylvania's College of General Studies -- which is generally what one does when one wants to take only a course or three. See, there is a larger academic plan in play: the Department of History and Sociology of Science. While those conversations will be going on throughout the fall, I'll be taking a bioethics course. If all goes well, I'll apply to the graduate program in December.

You know there's a Nervous Nelly under all of this cool reserve. It's been about 10 years since I graduated from Lehigh and I haven't even glimpsed at the GREs. And I'm applying to an Ivy-League school? Oh, for the love of geez, Nicole, what you you think you're getting into?

...if you're lucky.

This morning, I'm running to the more beefy model of my music security blankets: British pop-rock, or whatever the hell is the acceptable phrase these days. Started with Blur's "Crazy Beat," and now iTunes is randomly popping up tunes from Super Furry Animals, Bloc Party, Supergrass, and even Coldplay. (Try as you might, you just can't deny.) You know, what college kids used to listen to.