Join us at The Bakken Museum for a book club unlike any other. Bring the pages of George Estrichs’s Fables and Futures to life through rare books and historic artifacts presented by our curators. During book club, you’ll engage in conversations about the literature with other book club members and our curators and have the chance to see items usually stored deep in our on-site vaults.
A copy of the book is included in the cost of registration and is available to pick up at The Bakken Museum. We recommend picking up your copy as soon as possible, as we will discuss the text in full during the session.
REGISTRATION: $40 Per Person, $35 for museum members
Bakken Museum Book Club will meet during one session on either Wednesday, April 9 from 4-6 p.m. or Saturday, April 12 from 1-3 p.m. Please select whichever works best for you, as the two book club sessions will feature the same subject matter and artifacts.
ABOUT THE BOOK
How new biomedical technologies—from prenatal testing to gene-editing techniques—require us to imagine who counts as human and what it means to belong.
From next-generation prenatal tests, to virtual children, to the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, new biotechnologies grant us unprecedented power to predict and shape future people. That power implies a question about belonging: which people, which variations, will we welcome? How will we square new biotech advances with the real but fragile gains for people with disabilities—especially when their voices are all but absent from the conversation?
This book explores that conversation, the troubled territory where biotechnology and disability meet. In it, George Estreich—an award-winning poet and memoirist, and the father of a young woman with Down syndrome—delves into popular representations of cutting-edge biotech: websites advertising next-generation prenatal tests, feature articles on “three-parent IVF,” a scientist's memoir of constructing a semisynthetic cell, and more. As Estreich shows, each new application of biotechnology is accompanied by a persuasive story, one that minimizes downsides and promises enormous benefits. In this story, people with disabilities are both invisible and essential: a key promise of new technologies is that disability will be repaired or prevented.
In chapters that blend personal narrative and scholarship, Estreich restores disability to our narratives of technology. He also considers broader themes: the place of people with disabilities in a world built for the able; the echoes of eugenic history in the genomic present; and the equation of intellect and human value. Examining the stories we tell ourselves, the fables already creating our futures, Estreich argues that, given biotech that can select and shape who we are, we need to imagine, as broadly as possible, what it means to belong.