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Current Lecture

Vent: Disability Distributive Justice and the History of Ventilator Allocation Protocols.

 

Dr. Mara Mills

 

March 18, 2025, 7 pm

Alumni Hall, Academic Building, University of King's College

headshot of Dr. Mara Mills

Ventilators are one of the signal technologies of the COVID-19 pandemic. Debates about the fair allocation of this scarce resource dominated disability activism, news and social media for much of 2020—especially as hospitals around the world considered rationing protocols that excluded certain disabled people. New York was one of the first states to come up with a plan for allotting ventilators during pandemics; these guidelines, drafted in 2007, became broadly influential as healthcare centres and governments developed Crisis Standards of Care for COVID-19. Drawing on interviews and records from the New York Department of Health archives, my lecture reviews the history of debates among clinicians and ethicists that underpinned the preliminary New York State Ventilator Allocation Guidelines, and the public feedback that informed the revised guidelines of 2015. I’ll also discuss more recent criticisms of the specific exclusion criteria and triage protocols (e.g. SOFA scoring) levied by disability bioethicists and activists during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that “ventilator allocation” is commonly misunderstood to refer solely to discrete devices and the rights of individual users. Moreover, a disability theory of distributive justice, informed by the disability justice movement, is required not only to eliminate ableism at the level of individual diagnosis and treatment, but to ensure broad access to ventilators with regard to class, race and region.

Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and co-founding Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is also a founding editorial board member of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. In addition to her wide-ranging scholarship at the intersection of disability and technology, she has made the Center for Disability Studies a hub for public humanities and disability arts programming. She is recently coeditor of Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023) and a special issue of the journal Osiris on “Disability and the History of Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Upcoming publications include the edited collection How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, February 2025), funded by the National Science Foundation; a coauthored book with media scholar Jonathan Sterne on blind reading practices and time stretching technology; and a collaborative research project with anthropologist Michele Friedner, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, on “The Global Cochlear Implant.”

 

This year’s presentation is part of the 2025 winter term course The Lecture Series: Representations of Disability in Historical, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives. Instructors: D. Glowacka & S. Dodd.

 

About the Lectureship

The Saul Green Memorial Lecture can address the intersection of Judaism, medicine or humanitarianism, all three of which Dr. Green was passionate about in his lifetime. It focuses on complex humanistic and ethical challenges.

Lecturership partners are Shaar Shalom Synagogue and the University of King's College. The Shaar Shalom Congregation is committed to learning, fellowship and community.

The lectureship has been endowed by a gift from the Green family to honour the memory of Dr. Saul Green and to inspire and knit together the congregation and the community of Halifax.

The University of King's College is Canada's oldest chartered university. A small and extraordinarily lively academic community, King's is known nationally and internationally for its highly acclaimed interdisciplinary programs in the humanities and journalism.

 

About Saul Green

To his loyal patients, he was simply known as Dr. Saul, or in many cases, Saulie. He was a dedicated practioner of medicine and surgery in Halifax for 50 years. Saul was a person of grace, compassion, integrity and good humour.

He was born in 1921 in Glace Bay to Russian-born immigrants. Saul graduated from Dalhousie University Medical School in 1945 after which he did a residency in general surgery. A fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada as well as the American College of Surgeons, he was also a founding member of Shaar Shalom and a loyal citizen of Halifax, where he lived until he passed away in 2005.

 

 

Past Lectures

Lecture 2019

Dr. Abraham (Rami) Rudnick
"Imagining Better Health Care: Can Counterfactual ("What if...") Learning by Analogy from the Bible Help?"

 

Lecture 2018


Dr. Sageev Oore
"The Electric Composer: Music, AI and being human"

Lecture 2017


Dr.  Bertha Fuchsman-Small
“Médecins Sans Frontières: Medical Humanitarian Activism and the Tension Between Principle and Pragmatism”

Lecture 2016


Dr George Elliott Clarke
"Race," Mental Health, and the Body Politic: Comments on Shakespeare's Theatricalization of these Interlocking Concerns“

Lecture 2015


Dr. David S. Goldbloom, OC, MD, FRCPC
Creativity and Mental Illness

Lecture 2014


Dr. T.J. “Jock” Murray, OC, ONS, MD, FRCPC, FAAN, MACP, FRCP, MCFP, LLD, DSc, DLitt, DFA, LLD, Professor Emeritus, Dalhousie University
Hippocrates, Maimonides and the Changing Nature of Medical Codes

Lecture 2013


Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC's White Coat Black Art radio program.
Empathy in Health Care

Lecture 2010


The Right Honourable Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, P.C.
The Challenges of Mental Illness in the Justice System

Lecture 2007


Gary Goldsand, Clinical ethicist, Royal Alexandra Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta
Permission and Consent in Jewish Medical Ethics

Inaugural Lecture 2006


Dr. David Novak, The J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto
The ethical issues of physcian-assisted suicide within a Jewish framework.

 

 

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