This month sees the return of the UNSW Diversity Fest, held over the week of 25 – 29 October. Organised by the Division of Equity Diversity & Inclusion, Diversity Fest is becoming established as a university tradition. This year it offers over 50 free events and activities addressing an enormous range of topics including age diversity, cultural and linguistic diversity, gender diversity, Indigenous knowledge, LGBTIQ+ inclusion, mental health and neurodiversity. There are a number of disability-relevant activities including training sessions on disability confident communications, a panel discussion on disability from current UNSW students, and a session on Auslan for beginners.
Diversity Fest Thursday 28 October is a big day for the UNSW Disability Innovation Institute. From 10am-12pm Academic Lead Professor Terry Cumming will guide a workshop on co-production, part of an EDI-funded project aiming to bring together students and lecturers to create a more inclusive and accessible environment for learning. You can find out more here. And at 2pm I will be giving a webinar on the relationship between disability and bioethics. For many years that relationship has been frankly very tense, and sometimes even hostile, but in this webinar I hope to show how disability inclusion is crucial to bioethics and how people with disability can contribute their voices. You can learn more about the event and register here.
And in another contribution to Diversity Fest, the Institute is finalising production of a 'launch video' for our Associates Program, in which core Institute members and Associates talk about their work and what they hope for the Program. The video will be available on our website later this week. In the meantime, you can find out more about the program at that same link.
Earlier this month the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities held its 23rd annual conference, and I was privileged to be invited to give one of the three keynotes. Although held fully online, the sessions were organised to fit the time zones of the USA; hence my keynote was delivered at the unearthly hour of 5am. Although focusing on disability and bioethics in general (some of which can be heard at the Institute's Diversity Week webinar on 28 October) I was also able to report on work being carried out by Dr Georgia Van Toorn and myself, within the framework of the Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision Making and Society, that looks at the impact of AI technologies on people with disability.