Unwell is a gothic horror podcast set in a small town in Ohio, created by HartLife NFP. A podcast with conspiracies, ghosts, and unusual families of blood and choice, Unwell demonstrates how the horror genre can be a tool for explore issues of identity, health, disability, time, and nostalgia. Unwell was named the Best Podcast or Online Audio Drama in the 2021 BBC Audio Drama Awards, and has won four 2020 Audio Verse awards, including Production, Writing for a Production, Director of a Production (Jeffrey Nils Gardner), and Supporting Actor in a Production (Marsha Harman as Dot).

Join members of The White Vault, as well as some podcasters from the University of Pittsburgh, to discuss the technical side of podcasting. Topics will include creating immersive soundscapes, overcoming common technical pitfalls, issues of audio accessibility, and more. Please bring your own questions and issues, too. Students interested in taking part in the Horror Studies Working Group Podcasting Competition are especially encouraged to take part.

The White Vault is a found footage horror fiction podcast created by K.A. Statz that features an international cast and crew, with special ties to the University of Pittsburgh. Noted for its diverse cast, immersive soundscape, and multi-lingual approach to storytelling, The White Vault has won the 2018 HEAR Now: Audio Fiction and Arts Festival, and it has been a 2019 & 2020 Webby Award Honoree for Best Original Music / Sound Design in Podcasting.

Over several years, Queer Horror Week has become a critical component of the Horror Studies Working Group's annual programming, featuring the work of queer creators and artists, and providing opportunities to discuss how horror can provide a creative outlet, a tool of self-expression, and a basis for groundbreaking theory around queerness, identity, and genre studies.

The revolutionary prospect of socialism inspired homosexual emancipation and the growth of toleration toward same-sex relations in the first quarter of the twentieth century in many countries, including the UK, US, Hungary, and USSR. However, the development of LGBTQ+ rights within socialism was never linear and even.

In this talk, Dr. Sarrett will discuss her research on parental and professional experiences of autism in Kerala, India and Atlanta, Georgia. This work demonstrates how Westernization influences the ways non-Western cultures integrate concepts of autism into their cultural concepts of illness, family, and normality. She will discuss this work in the context of global bioethics, global disability studies, and the unidirectional nature of psychiatric influence. Register on the Zoom link!

Content warnings have become an important feature of pedagogical practice. In this talk and discussion, I reflect on my experiences as a junior scholar trying to promote ethnographic research on topics that are triggering. I focus on “shopping” a book manuscript on sexual violence as a process beset by competing imperatives to engage ethically, to support the mental health of others, to adhere to disciplinary conventions around “thick description,” and to market the book as attracting a wide readership. Register on the Zoom link!

The first psychiatric hospitals in the world were established as early as the 8th century during the Islamic Renaissance. Despite the emergence of a highly sophisticated and interdisciplinary system of understanding the human psyche in early Islamic history, most students of modern psychology are unfamiliar with this rich history. This lecture will provide a historical and contemporary review of the Islamic intellectual heritage as it pertains to modern behavioral science and how mental illness was historically perceived and treated in the Muslim world.

Abstract: Dr. Aronson recounts that “in this informal talk, I will focus on a few of the many ethical and moral dilemmas that I’ve faced working at the intersection of social science-oriented research and human rights practice for the past fifteen-plus years.

Abstract: There has been much recent attention paid to the relationship between Buddhism and medicine, especially in regard to numerous studies of the application of mindfulness as an efficacious therapy for everything from depression to schizophrenia. Despite the many comprehensive surveys of Buddhist medical literature across Asia, there remains a paucity of studies on the history of the institutional connections between Buddhist monasteries and the care for the “insane” from the premodern period to the present.