ISSUED: 8 February 2022
MEDIA CONTACT: Dana Costa
SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV — Shepherd University’s President’s Lecture series will present “Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness” with Dr. Roy Richard Grinker on Tuesday, February 22, at 6:30 p.m. in the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education auditorium and streamed live on YouTube. The event is free and open to the public.
In this presentation on his new book “Nobody’s Normal,” Grinker argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history that began the moment where society defined mental illnesses and disabilities. But because stigma is not grounded in nature, society has the power to eradicate it and is at the cusp of ending the marginalization of those who have for so long been deemed “abnormal.” Grinker infuses this lecture with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his daughter’s experience with autism, and his own research on neurodiversity.
Grinker is professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. He was born and raised in Chicago where his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father worked as psychoanalysts. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1983 and received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University in 1989.
Grinker is also the author “Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism,” “In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull,” “Korea and its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War,” and “Houses in the Rainforest: Ethnicity and Inequality among Farmers and Foragers in Central Africa.” He is co-editor of “Perspectives on Africa: Culture, History” and “Representation and Companion to the Anthropology of Africa.”
Grinker was a 2008 recipient of the National Alliance on Mental Illness KEN award for outstanding contribution to the understanding of mental illness and the 2010 recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology in the Media award for communication of anthropology to the public through the media.”
To view the lecture online visit Shepherd’s YouTube channel.
— 30 —
