Events

When twenty-seven-year-old Laura Mauldin moved to New York for graduate school, she fell headlong into love. But just months into the relationship, her partner’s leukemia returned—and in a country without adequate systems for long-term care, Laura found herself quietly and devastatingly transformed from romantic partner to unpaid, full-time caregiver, fighting to keep the woman she loved alive in a system designed to let them both fall through the cracks. 

Now a sociologist and professor of disability studies, Dr. Mauldin turns her private pain into a searing public investigation. To better understand her own experience, she speaks with couples across the country navigating the brutal, lonely fallout of chronic illness and disability. These are heartbreaking stories of love under strain — relationships full of extraordinary intimacy and resilience, but pushed to the edge by an ableist society that would rather look away from its most vulnerable citizens. At the heart of this investigation is a profound series of questions: What if love isn’t enough? What if our most cherished romantic ideals—commitment, sacrifice, “in sickness and in health” — have been weaponized to excuse the state from its responsibilities? And what happens to love when we ask it to do the work of an entire broken system? 

Urgent, unflinching, and full of grace, In Sickness and In Health is a rallying cry for a radical reimagining of care—not as an individual act of devotion, but as a collective responsibility. In connecting the care crisis to the politics of love and intimacy, Mauldin reframes the conversation, urging us to build a world where no one is left to do the work of love alone.

Laura Mauldin is a writer and an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut. In 2024, she was named a New America Fellow, and her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Baffler, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. Laura is also a nationally certified sign language interpreter and maintains the website Disability at Home.org, which highlights the ingenuity of disabled people and caregivers while sharing advice on how to make homes accessible. Her new book, In Sickness and In Health: Love Stories from the Frontlines of America's Caregiving Crisis from Ecco/HarperCollins received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which described it as "an unflinching look at private worlds of pain and a forceful denunciation of America’s for-profit healthcare system.

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OFF-CAMPUS
DECEMBER 12, 2025
Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Lipsey Auditorium
1285 Elmwood Avenue
Buffalo, New York 14222
Auditorium opens at 6:30 pm, film screening at 7:00 pm
The event is free and open to the public.

Join the Communities of Care and the Buffalo AKG for the premiere of Kyla Kegler's recent film project, The Accumulation of Meaning Over Time. The work is funded by grants from the UB Communities of Care and NYSCA. The film screening (approximately 22-minutes) will be followed by a brief discussion of the work between Kegler and Assistant Curator, Special Projects Zack Boehler. 

Kegler's film is a lyrical exploration of how understanding of self deepens with age, and how collective meaning gathers across generations, bodies, and images. It is an ode to the treasure hunt of growing older—to the gradual realization that what moved us as children was not fleeting naïveté, but the first glimmer of lifelong motifs that orient how we move through the world. Drawing from personal narration, Jungian theory, and the history of experimental media art in Buffalo, NY, Kegler's film weaves these threads into a meditation on memory, inheritance, and becoming.

Learn more about the work, The Accumulation of Meaning Over Time.

Bio: Marie Sépulchre, PhD, started her work in Disability Studies by analysing the citizenship claims of disability activists in Sweden. She then examined, from an intersectional perspective, how the right to non-discrimination based on disability is understood and implemented in Sweden and the United States. Dr. Sépulchre’s current projects focus on communities of care, disability rights and justice, and freedom as non-domination. Sépulchre holds a PhD in Sociology from Uppsala University (Sweden). She is an assistant professor at the School of Social Work at Lund University (Sweden) and a visiting scholar in the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo, on the Communities of Care project. Sépulchre is a member of the board of the Nordic Network on Disability Research. Her research has been published in the International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, Disability & Society, Disability & Rehabilitation, Critical Social Policy, Social Inclusion, and Alter – the European Journal of Disability Research. Sépulchre was awarded the Alter Young Author Prize in 2019. Her book Disability and Citizenship Studies (Routledge 2021) unpacks the struggle for citizenship of Swedish disability activists.  Visit: www.sepulchremarie.com.

Efrat Gold — March 2024 
Towards a Pedagogy of the Psychiatrized: Reflections on Process and Method

Informed by the records of late antipsychiatry scholar/activist Dr. Bonnie Burstow (1945-2020), this talk slows down to focus on process, methods, and methodologies in turning records into archives. Until recently, mad people’s history has largely been told through the perspectives of medical experts, claiming authority while dismissing self-representations of madness and obscuring the claims and direct experiences of the psychiatrized. Efforts to include representations of mad and psychiatrized people must grapple with the process of how to do so without falling into the trappings of reproducing the exploitation of this marginalized group. Burstow’s records, spanning from the late 1970s until her death, contain rich histories of mad and psychiatrized people as well as records of their resistance to psychiatric oppression. Many of the histories contained are those of people now deceased, raising questions about the ethics of representation and mobilization of these records. Grounded in the slow process of cataloging, I take up questions of methodology, methods, and ethics in curating a collection of records.