Disability Studies

Krpic, T. 2012. Book review of Schillmeier, Michael W. J.: Rethinking Disability: Bodies, Senses, and Things. New York, London: Routledge, 2010. Body & Society 18 (2): 156-161.

by Tomaž Krpič

Performative Acts of Autism

by Jessica Nina Lester

Co-Authored with Trena M. Paulus

Relatively little research has aimed to understand autism from an emic perspective. The majority of studies examining... more Relatively little research has aimed to understand autism from an emic perspective. The majority of studies examining the organization of the talk of individuals with autism presume that autism organizes discourse rather than examine ways in which talk itself constructs the notion of autism. This study explored the meanings of autism performed in and through the talk of the parents of children with autism and their therapists. Drawing from a larger ethnographic study, we report on findings generated from interview data with parents and therapists. Situating this study within a discursive psychology framework, we attend to the ways in which ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’ are performed, drawing upon critical notions of disability, poststructural understandings of discourse, and conversation analysis. We point to the importance of situating the construction of an ‘ordered’ or ‘disordered’ body in relationship to the exclusionary practices and policies that individuals with autism and those close to them experience daily.

“‘I began to see’: Biblical Models of Disability in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre” in The Madwoman and Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability. Edited by David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas and Elizabeth J. Donaldson. Forthcoming with Ohio State University Press. Preface by Lennard J. Davis

by Essaka Joshua

Shorter version isforthcoming in Special Issue, Brontë Studies 37 (2012). Conference paper version of item 10. Publication date: November 2012.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is undeniably one of the most widely read and widely written about novels in the... more Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is undeniably one of the most widely read and widely written about novels in the English language. Its enduring interest, from both a popular and a scholarly viewpoint, has resulted in countless studies of the text from a variety of perspectives. Indeed, as its meaning and context shift depending on cultural and historical variables, the novel continues to demand frequent reinterpretation and new scholarship. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability is a breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre, the first to examine Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from a disability studies perspective, offering fresh insight into Brontë’s classic nineteenth-century novel from a vantage that is of growing importance both academically and culturally. Grounded in Victorian studies, the book also draws on theory and criticism in disability and cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies.

“The Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris.” Disability Studies Quarterly 31:3 (2011): 1–16.

by Essaka Joshua

Winner of the 2011 Tyler Rigg Award for Disability Studies Scholarship in Literature and Literary Analysis.

Buildings often employ visual and spatial rhetorics that both persuade us of their function and determine personal... more Buildings often employ visual and spatial rhetorics that both persuade us of their function and determine personal functionality. Architectural language is a defining feature of disability in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and a universally accessible language. In emphasizing the synecdochic relationship between gothic buildings and the disabled body, Hugo demonstrates that he is not only a pioneer in urban and architectural semantics, but that he also understands the complex symbolic relationship between architecture and the disabled body. Defining beauty as atypicality, through the gothic aesthetic, Hugo presents Notre Dame Cathedral as a uniquely drifting symbol (with its multiple meanings, its transitional status and its cultural miscegenation) with a revelatory function: it expresses disability as normative.

Teaching to Trouble

by Beth Ferri

Ferri, B.A. (2006). Teaching to Trouble: Why Teach Disability Studies in Education. S. Danforth & S. Gabel (Eds.).  Vital Questions in Disability Studies in Education.  (pp. 289-306).  New York: Peter Lang Publishers.

Disability and Age Expectations in Romano-British Child Burials

by William Southwell-Wright

In M. Carroll and E-J Graham (eds.). Infant Health and Death in Roman Italy and Beyond. Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series (forthcoming 2013).

Realising UNCRPD: Learning from Inclusive Practices, Case Studies in Education and Employment

by Arun Kumar

Disability, Usability, Universal Design

by Jay Dolmage

Disabled upon Arrival: The Rhetorical Construction of Disability and Race at Ellis Island

by Jay Dolmage

I will examine Ellis Island in the early 20th century as a “special rhetorical space,” a heterotopia for the invention... more I will examine Ellis Island in the early 20th century as a “special rhetorical space,” a heterotopia for the invention of new categories of deviation. And I will suggest that Ellis Island floats into every aspect of contemporary American society.  As Robert Chang has argued, “the border is not just a peripheral phenomenon…to be an immigrant is to be marked [always] by the border” (27).  Further, “it is through its flexible operation that the border helps to construct and contain the nation and the national community” (Chang 27).  Ellis Island has been rhetorically used, internalized, incorporated, embodied.

Metis, Mêtis, Mestiza, Medusa: Rhetorical Bodies across Rhetorical Traditions

by Jay Dolmage

The author argues that we have chosen a rhetorical history that normalizes and silences rhetorical bodies. In... more The author argues that we have chosen a rhetorical history that normalizes and silences rhetorical bodies. In response, the author exhumes an embodied history of rhetoric, reexamining the myths of the Greek goddess Metis as a means of enlivening rhetorical theory and history. The author then connects these myths to other rhetorical traditions invoked by Hélène Cixous and Gloria Anzaldúa, connecting Metis to Medusa and to mestiza consciousness. The author affirms the rhetorical power of the body, specifically of those bodies that challenge rhetorical norms.

"Breathe Upon Us an Even Flame": Hephaestus, History, and the Body of Rhetoric

by Jay Dolmage

This essay challenges accepted versions of rhetorical history by recovering the mythical figure of Hephaestus and the... more This essay challenges accepted versions of rhetorical history by recovering the mythical figure of Hephaestus and the cunning rhetoric he embodied, metis. This critical retelling offers a new and more expansive perspective on history, rhetoric, and embodiment, as it lays bare many of our assumptions about the available means of persuasion. The author asserts that a cunning approach to rhetoric might allow for the celebration of all of our embodied differences.

Mapping Composition: Inviting Disability in the Front Door

by Jay Dolmage

BETWEEN THE VALLEY AND THE FIELD: Metaphor and disability

by Jay Dolmage

This essay locates discourses about disability in opposing spaces – prose and poetry, the literal and the... more This essay locates discourses about disability in opposing spaces – prose and poetry, the literal and the metaphorical. The author explodes the binary and charts a new territory, following disability to challenge language use, to reveal the metaphorical nature of prose and the literal power of poetry, to shake up the terms that objectify people with disabilities and to listen, look and feel for new ways to express bodily experience.

Campbell, Fiona. (1985). Social Change for What?: Strategies for Self-Reliance and Independent Living. Keynote Paper, in Heath, J. (Ed). The Adelaide Experience: Report of the First Asia/Pacific Regional Convention of Disabled Peoples’ International, Adelaide, Australia, November 1984, Adelaide: Disabled Peoples’ International (Australia), pp. 91 – 98.

by Fiona Kumari Campbell

This paper was written by myself in 1985 - I did not have a university education. I had been doing small contract work... more This paper was written by myself in 1985 - I did not have a university education. I had been doing small contract work at a disability resource centre, volunteer work and also I did a short spate at a sheltered workshop. I am in the process of  doing a 20 year dialogue with that paper that I will eventually submit to a journal.There are certainly utopic sentiments in the text!

Campbell, F. (1984). Access to Community Health Care Services for Women with Disabilities. Australian Disability Review: (1) 30-33.

by Fiona Kumari Campbell

Campbell, F. (1999). ‘Refleshingly Disabled’: Interrogations into the Corporeality of 'Disablised' Bodies. Australian Feminist Law Journal 12 March: 57 - 80.

by Fiona Kumari Campbell

Campbell, F.K (2008). Exploring internalised Ableism using critical race theory, Disability & Society, 23 (2): 151 – 162.

by Fiona Kumari Campbell

Review of Contours of Ableism

by Fiona Kumari Campbell

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews November 2011 vol. 40 no. 6 694-695

Caroline Gray
Yale University
more
Caroline Gray
Yale University
cpgray@aya.yale.edu

Disability studies has solidified itself as a vibrant interdisciplinary field with the potential to transform and challenge not just how we think about disability but also to reframe the basic assumptions we make about what it means to be human beings. Rather than viewing disability as something inherently bad or problematic, disability studies aims to recast disability as a difference that should be valued. Despite its overwhelming potential, in the social sciences at least, disability studies still has not gained the attention it is rightly due. However, developments in the field of sociology, such as the recent formation of the Disability and Society section for the American Sociological Association suggest that this is changing.
Fiona Campbell’s recent book titled Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Ableness offers a welcome addition to social scientific literature on disability. In particular, Contours of Ableism may be viewed as part of a growing literature in disability studies that emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between disability and ability or ableism, as Campbell refers to it. This literature positions disability in a broader discursive and normative framework where all bodies are subjected to normalizing scrutiny and regulation

The ‘reasonableness” of reasonable adjustment theory in disability law, polemics and paradoxes

by Fiona Kumari Campbell

14th – 15th September 2011

Keynote for
‘Theorizing Normalcy and the Mundane: 2nd International conference’
Manchester Metropolitan University
Gaskell Campus

audio keynote: more audio keynote: http://soundcloud.com/fionakumaricampbell/campbell


Working notes only:


Notions of normalcy and abledness prefigure conceptual frameworks of law. Law itself not only regulates the constitutional compartmentalization of abledness and disability, juridical systems of thought in effect bring into being what is sayable about disability and also proffer limits of citizenship in the realm of domestic and international laws. Disability studies has identified some enduring presuppositions that underpin disability policy and undercut the development of legal strategies aimed at social inclusion. One theme relates to ways to tackle the significant exclusion of disabled people from the labour market as employment is viewed not only from the viewpoint of economic productivity but also as a vehicle that enables contributory citizenship. The disabled person is rarely viewed as a normative citizen, rather as a (vulnerable) minority, an afterthought and hence ‘special interest’ group. Disabled people become partial citizens given the availability of economic reservations on equality claims in ways that would be unthinkable if the accommodations were gender or race related. A key mechanism that law uses to facilitate disabled peoples’ integration into the workforce and ongoing retention of employment status is through the adoption and utilization of the notion of reasonable adjustment (in the USA ‘accommodation’).
This keynote discusses how ‘reasonable’ is the concept of Reasonable Adjustment? The commitment to equality has followed a model based on equality as sameness where the orientation of anti-discrimination law has been on reducing differential behaviour attributed to presumed differences (e.g. gender, race). In contrast, facilitating the entry of disabled people into the labour market means that employers and the applicant are required to negotiate and foreground difference, the difference that impairment might make to productivity. ‘Accommodation’ or ‘adjustment’ has a ring of exceptionality about it, an extra gesture for which there should be gratitude. The paradigm of reasonableness introduces a normative quantum into the discussion. We may ask whether reasonable adjustment is a way of acknowledging the validity of disability difference – or is it really a provisional and limited mechanism that leaves intact existing ableist relations of corporeality?

Do We Need More “Ministerial Exceptions”? by Kile B. Jones

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published by the Feminism and Religion project

In a recent unanimous and precedent-setting Supreme Court ruling, a “ministerial exception” was given to Hosanna-Tabor... more In a recent unanimous and precedent-setting Supreme Court ruling, a “ministerial exception” was given to Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School regarding employment discrimination.  Cheryl Perich, a “called teacher” at Hosanna-Tabor, was fired after issues surrounding her narcolepsy developed.  As is well known in the United States, innumerable federal, state, and local laws exist to protect employees from discrimination based on race, sex, age, disability, and so forth.  Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964) prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin.  In the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, signed in 1990), employers are also held liable for discrimination based on an employees’ disability.  The “ministerial exception” excludes religious institutions and ministers from the ADA.  It is important to note that the ADA protects employees hired by private companies as well as public ones.

In the slip opinion, the Supreme Court argues that, “The Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment bar suits brought on behalf of ministers against their churches, claiming termination in violation of employment discrimination laws.”