Join us for the Dr. Saul Green Memorial Lecture on March 18, 2025 in Alumni Hall.
Special guest lecturer Dr. Mara Mills will deliver the lecture entitled “Vent: Disability Distributive Justice and the History of Ventilator Allocation Protocols.”
Abstract:
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.
The Dr. Saul Green Memorial Lecture is presented by the University of King’s College in partnership with the Shaar Shalom Synagogue. The lecture is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a short question and answer period. More details to come.
