Heather Cassano

Stories from State Hospital Cemeteries: Work-in-Progress Scenes from The Fate of Human Beings

Heather Cassano (Assistant Professor, DMD, UConn)

with a response by Cornelia Dayton (History, UConn)

Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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THE FATE OF HUMAN BEINGS is a feature-length documentary film uncovering the stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses who are buried in unnamed graves in mental institution cemeteries across the United States. Through a multiple narrative approach utilizing archival and present-day material, the film unpacks the ramifications of these cemeteries, seeking to understand our past and present relationships with the “otherness” of those interred. This talk will present work-in-progress scenes from the film and discuss the research behind the project. The selected scenes will include characters from multiple narratives featuring stories of improper burials, activism, and memorialization; all relating to mental institution cemeteries across the country.

Heather Cassano is a documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film/Video at the University of Connecticut. Her films blend an observational style with deeply personal narratives, striving to tell authentic stories through her personal experiences. Heather’s first feature documentary THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD (2018), followed her severely autistic brother Brian as he transitioned from the school system into adulthood. The film screened at numerous festivals internationally, winning three Best Documentary awards and a Jury Prize. Heather is now working on her second feature documentary THE FATE OF HUMAN BEINGS, which uncovers the stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses who are buried in unnamed graves in mental institution cemeteries across the United States.

Cornelia H. Dayton is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Her research and teaching interests include law and society; women, gender, and sexuality; Black lives in the northeast and Atlantic world; Revolutionary-era Boston; marital elopement notices; the poor relief practice of warning newcomers; and New Englanders’ responses to mental health challenges prior to 1840. She is a co-editor of Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, heading into its 10th edition; author of Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789; Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (with Sharon V. Salinger); “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an 18th-Century New England Village” (William and Mary Quarterly); and, most recently, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton,” in The New England Quarterly.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

How Value Laden are Segregation Indices

Kareem Khalifa (Professor of Philosophy, UCLA)

with a response by Heather Cassano (Digital Media & Design, UConn)

Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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Science’s objectivity is often thought to hinge on its impartiality. Roughly stated, impartiality is the requirement that only epistemic considerations, such as empirical evidence and cogent reasoning, should justify the acceptance of a scientific claim. Yet, the social sciences frequently employ thick concepts, i.e., concepts that both describe and evaluate. Examples include well-being, crime, poverty, and—central to our discussion—segregation. Given their inextricable link with values, it’s tempting to think that scientific claims that deploy thick concepts—so-called mixed claims—cannot be accepted impartially. Using the development of segregation indices and the operational definition of hypersegregation as illustrations, we argue that scientists’ use of thick concepts is compatible with impartial justification of mixed claims. This paper is co-authored with Jared Millson (Rhodes College) and Mark Risjord (Emory University).

Kareem Khalifa is a professor of philosophy at UCLA (2022–present). Prior to that, he was at Middlebury College in Vermont (2006–2022). His research interests include general philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology. In addition to authoring over 30 articles, he authored the book, Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge, 2017) and co-edited Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences (Routledge, 2022). He is currently extending his previous work in these areas to social-scientific conceptions of race and segregation. He is currently a Future of Truth Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute. In 2025, he will be the Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science. In 2017, he received the American Council of Learned Societies’ Burkhardt Award, which funded a five-year project, Explanation as Inferential Practice.

Heather Cassano is a documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the Digital Media & Design Department. Cassano’s first documentary film The Limits of My World (2018) followed her severely autistic brother Brian as he transitioned from the school system to adulthood. The film unpacks what it means to be a nonverbal disabled adult in today’s society. The film won several awards and is now being used as a tool for impact by organizations like Autism Canada and the National Council on Severe Autism.