Dame Anne Begg, the first full-time wheelchair user in the Commons, will give the tenth Annual Disability Lecture at St John's College.
In 2003, 58 people gathered to listen to Professor Usha Goswami deliver a lecture entitled ‘A Cross-Language Approach to Developmental Dyslexia’. This was the first in a series of annual disability lectures held with the support of St John’s College.
Since then, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Sir Bert Massie and Baroness Jane Campbell have all spoken at the lecture, which today attracts audiences of up to 250 people.
The lectures exist to celebrate disability and to promote disability equality and discussion across the collegiate University. With a majority of speakers who describe themselves as disabled people, they have played a significant role in raising the profile of disability issues and promoting a range of perspectives including positive images and ideas.
The 10th Annual Disability Lecture – ‘Two steps forward, one step back: challenges to disabled people in 2013’ – will be given by Labour MP Dame Anne Begg on 18 April. Dame Anne has been the MP for Aberdeen South since 1997 and was the first full-time wheelchair user elected to the House of Commons. She is Chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee.
Dame Anne will talk about her experience of being disabled and the discrimination she has faced, and compare her experiences now with 30 years ago when she first started to use a wheelchair. She will also focus on the difficulty disabled people have in finding work, the positive images of disability portrayed in the Paralympics, and how she believes this contrasts with the government’s use of language to describe people on benefits payments.
The lecture, which will start at 5.30pm, will be at the Fisher Building, St John’s and is open to all. The venue is fully accessible to disabled people and a BSL interpreter will be present. The lecture is organised jointly between the University’s Disability Resource Centre (DRC), the Equality and Diversity section and St John’s.
For further details please phone John Harding, Head of the Disability Resource Centre, on 01223 332301 or email john.harding@admin.cam.ac.uk.