Disability Studies Lens Research Articles

Those Who Can't, Teach: The Disabling History of American Educators

This essay is an exploratory history of American educators as viewed through the lens of disability studies. By this I mean that I am looking at the history of school teachers with disability as the primary marker of social relations, in much the same way that I and others have looked at the history of education through the primary lens of race, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, and sexuality. Looking at the history of teachers through the analytic framework of disability studies allows us to see first, how educational systems, practices, values, and professional norms have developed in a way that excludes people with disabilities from educational employment, or assigned them to parallel and marginalized institutions of special education and second, how notions of normality have defined the work and identity of all educators. It is this latter point that is my greatest interest here: how cultural concepts of ability and disability have shaped all educators' occupational identity and experience over time.

Disability as Constructed Difference: A Literature Review and Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies

Disability theory and disabled people's voices have remained marginal in attempts to include a wider range of theoretical perspectives and voices in organization studies. This includes studies of the normative assumptions underpinning socially constructed categories of difference. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing the literature on social categories of difference, intersectional studies and studies across human resource management and diversity literatures. The argument here is that, while research has begun to move from an individualized discourse of disability, disability remains inadequately theorized as a constructed difference. The paper reviews the disability studies literature to identify the relevance of conceptualizing disability for work organizations, problematizes the concepts of disability and impairment and differentiates competing discourses of disability. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it offers an alternative social interpretation discourse which argues that disability is constructed as a negated difference through assumed ableism, which is a normative expectation of non‐disability. Second, it presents impairment effects as legitimate organizing requirements rather than individualized problems. The paper argues impairment effects, the effects of bodily and cognitive variation, have legitimate implications for how disabled people negotiate organizing contexts. Third, it develops a disability studies lens to advance theoretical approaches to the study of social categories of difference in the field of management and organization studies.

Objects and Objectivity

This essay examines the sociological works of Harriet Martineau, particularly 1838’s How to Observe Manners and Morals, through the lens of disability studies and Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto.” The authors argue that Martineau depended, due to her perceived “disabilities” of deafness, illnesses and gender, on objects such as the ear trumpet, the telescope, and various theoretical constructs to mediate her access to the outside world. In doing so, she created a “cyborg self” whose tools allowed her to re-write traditionally masculine concepts such as scientific objectivity. These tools were both actual – the ear trumpet and telescope allowed the detachment and control necessary for the nineteenth-century scientist – and metaphorical – Martineau stressed that her disability forced method, a concept that grew ever more important to scientists as the century progressed. Martineau's disabilities reshaped her into a “cyborg self” who was able to approach questions of scientific objectivity from an un-gendered perspective.

Edward Albee’s Eugenic Theatrics: Disability Presence in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a landmark American play for the challenges it presented to conventional theater, both thematically and dramaturgically. In this essay, I argue that recognizing the disability presence in Albee’s play as embodied in the work’s references to eugenics is also important to a fuller understanding of the play’s revolutionary nature. Through his references to pronatalism as well as genetic engineering and sterilization, Albee invokes the presence of those disabled bodies upon whose oppression the regulation of normalcy over the twentieth-century has rested. In this way, we can come to see that disability does not simply metaphorize the gender oppression and middle-class complacency the play attacks, but is itself also recognized and historicized. Reading Albee’s play in this way further suggests the importance of re-reading canonical drama through the lens of disability studies.

What Makes Mr. Hyde So Scary?: Disability as a Result of Evil and Cause of Fear

This article brings Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde under the lens of disability studies by exploring the role disability plays in the creation of Mr. Hyde as a villain. Utilizing both historical and current understandings of disability, this article discusses how Mr. Hyde's social and cultural disconformities are reliant upon the understanding of Hyde as "deformed." "What Makes Mr. Hyde So Scary" contends that what makes Mr. Hyde so frightening to other characters, and perhaps to readers as well, is not inherent evil, but disability itself.

A Disability Studies Perspective on the Bush Education Agenda: The No Child Left Behind Act of 20011

Our educational system is undergoing great scrutiny. The success of our nation's schools and their students is under serious evaluation and interpretation. Currently, one of the most visible and pertinent “political products” impacting our schools and students is the federal legislation No Child Left Behind (2002). Specific concerns arise around schools' ability to include students with disabilities, among other “disadvantaged groups,” in strategies for academic success. Disability Studies contends that the place and positioning of disability is fundamentally political. This article uses a Disability Studies lens to critique NCLB. The potential benefits, problematic areas, and dangerous aspects to schools, teachers, parents, students with disabilities, and the community at large are presented within this Disability Studies context.

The staff of Oedipus: transforming disability in ancient Greece

Ancient Greek images of disability permeate the Western consciousness: Homer, Teiresias, and immediately come to mind. But The Staff of Oedipus looks at disability in the ancient world through the lens of disability studies, and reveals that our interpretations of disability in the ancient world are often skewed. These false assumptions in turn lend weight to modern-day discriminatory attitudes toward disability. Martha L. Rose considers a range of disabilities and the narratives surrounding them. She examines not only ancient literature, but also papyrus, skeletal material, inscriptions, sculpture, and painting, and draws upon modern work, including autobiographies of people with disabilities, medical research, and theoretical work in disability studies. Her study uncovers the realities of daily life for people with disabilities in ancient Greece and challenges the translation of the term adunatos (unable) as disabled, with all its modern associations.