Talking Biopolitics with Regan Brashear interviewed by Gina Maranto

October 3
[Video]


Please join documentary filmmaker Regan Brashear and the Center for Genetics and Society for Talking Biopolitics 2013. In this live web-based interview and conversation, Regan will talk with Gina Maranto – and with you – about her experiences filming and promoting FIXED: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement, and about her thoughts on the new biopolitics.

About the Film

Poster of film

A haunting, subtle, urgent documentary, FIXED questions commonly held beliefs about disability and normalcy by exploring technologies that claim they will change our bodies and mind forever. Told primarily through the perspectives of five people with disabilities – a scientist, journalist, disability justice educator, bionics engineer and exoskeleton test pilot – FIXED takes a close look at the implications of emerging human enhancement technologies for the future of humanity.

About the Filmmaker

Regan Brashear has a BA in American Studies (Highest Honors, Phi Beta Kappa) and a MA in Social Documentation (Documentary Film) from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Originally from Virginia, producer/director Regan Brashear has been working on labor, race, youth, LGBTQ, and disability issues for over twenty years through documentary film, union organizing, community forums, and grassroots activism. Now based in Oakland, California, Brashear is a co-founder of Making Change Media which produces videos for non-profits and labor unions, as well as independent long-form documentaries such as FIXED.

Photo of Regan Brashear

Previously, Brashear served as a producer and community engagement coordinator at Open Eye Pictures, a production company in Sausalito, CA, doing project development for the place-based, memory-mapping iOS app Tributopia; community engagement for the Academy Award-shortlisted film Under Our Skin; and co-producer for The Grove, a film about the National AIDS Memorial Grove. Both films aired across the country on PBS stations in 2011.

About the Interviewer

Gina Maranto is Director of Ecosystem Science and Policy and coordinator of the Environmental Science and Policy program at the University of Miami's Leonard and Jayne Abess Center. She is a prize-winning science writer whose articles, opinion pieces, and reviews have appeared in Discover, The Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American, The New York Times, and other publications. Her cover piece for Discover on climate change won the National Association of Science Writers Award for best magazine piece of 1986 and limned the major issues that remain of interest today with regard to that subject.

She is author of Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings (1996), a history of attempts to alter birth outcomes and a critique of assisted reproductive technologies.