Disability Studies Perspective Research Articles

A Neurodiverse Perspective of the Eighteenth Century

From a disability studies perspective, the article seeks to contextualize the attainment of cultural and social capital within the Enlightenment. This work situates itself as part of the disability studies scholarship on cognitive impairment and neurological differences in the eighteenth century that has emerged in the last two decades as well as within the growing field of academic studies of autism and the humanities. Building on this recent work, the article analyzes Charlotte Lennox’s representation of Arabella’s atypical sociability in The Female Quixote (1752) alongside the court case of Hugh Blair of Borgue (1708–1760s), who was deemed an “idiot” within the discourse of the eighteenth century. In doing so, the article examines the emerging rhetoric of what we now term neurotypical privilege and its intersection with gender and social position. The conclusion is that while Hugh’s and Arabella’s perceived shortage of cultural capital affects their “value” on the market, their unconventional social skills can be interpreted as subversive.

Integration of a Disability Lens as Prerequisite for Inclusive Higher Education

PURPOSE. Occidental higher education often approaches disability as a disparate issue, failing to recognize that it is part of human diversity. Such an approach hinders inclusive education because it overlooks how disability is intertwined with other identities and concepts of exclusion. The overarching aim of this paper is to enhance understanding of (intersecting) disabling processes within education policy and practice and the impact thereof on students; and to raise educators’ awareness about how integration of knowledge from Disability Studies within pedagogy and their daily interaction with students, can positively influence disabled students’ wellbeing, their study opportunities and aid the overall process of inclusion. APPROACH. This paper offers a disability lens by (1) presenting a literature overview from a Disability Studies (DS) perspective about disability and exclusionary phenomena, in particular disablism and ableism; (2) substantiating how a current focus on accessibility hinders actual inclusion; (3) analysing a case-study through the presented perspective with attention to Dutch contextual factors. For the case-study, the first author and ‘Tess’ engaged in regular conversations during a year in which Tess shared her experiences as a student of higher education. In this paper, a selection of these experiences is presented from a reflexive perspective and with application of the presented frameworks. With this, the complex impact of exclusionary processes on interactions between students, educators and on the organization of university involved (social) events is illustrated. FINDINGS. The lack of nuanced, fluid and intersectional approaches to disability within mainstream education hinders the recognition of (epistemic) injustices. Exclusionary processes and practices in higher education remain unacknowledged, although they negatively impact disabled students and block their epistemic contribution. Moreover, the continued focus on accessibility hinders implementation of the international convention on the rights of persons with disabilities and deflects attention from the fact that inclusive education requires systemic change and a multi-layered approach. KEY MESSAGE. The current trajectory of disability inclusion is counterproductive without true systemic change. Integration of the presented disability lens is imperative for truly intersectional approaches to inclusion and offers educators a way to positively influence students’ wellbeing and identity development, even when policy changes are not yet achieved. Points of interest: Knowledge and attitudes about disability in higher education systems, in policies and practice, often do not portray disability from the perspective of disabled people themselves. There is also a lack of understanding how disability is part of human diversity and is intertwined with other identity aspects. Because higher education often focusses on including disabled people in existing systems by way of individual accommodations rather than on changing the design of the system, disabled students experience various forms of exclusion, varying from opportunities to study to the way they are approached by educators, that effect their wellbeing. The usefulness of disability studies theory is illustrated by applying them to the experiences of ‘Tess’, demonstrating how her personal and professional life was influenced by them. We argue that policies need to change and that educators themselves can work on true inclusion by recognising disability as diversity and by integrating up-to-date knowledge from the perspective of disabled people themselves in their approaches.

Who can you trust these days?: Dealing with imposter participants during online recruitment and data collection

The use of digital technologies in qualitative research has been found to increase access and participation by minimizing geographical, scheduling, and financial barriers. However, discussions among the qualitative research community about the challenges of conducting research online and, specifically, what steps can be taken to mitigate “imposter participants” remain limited. Anchored in a critical disability studies perspective, in this field note paper, we discuss lessons learned in conducting online qualitative research and preserving data trustworthiness.

The Small Boy Was “Other”: Disability in James’s Fourth Phase

Abstract: Henry James’s fourth phase memoirs A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother benefit from a disability studies perspective. Furthering the social criticism of The American Scene , James’s life-writing disclosed his alterity—queer, neuro-divergent, and chronically ill—to resist regimes of normalcy and hegemonic masculinity, epitomized by Theodore Roosevelt. His intent to adopt Hendrik Andersen demonstrated this shift in his gay identity. Disability connects James’s life-writing to his fictional protagonists whose impairments include chronic illness and the non-normative cognitive and sexual difference of Jamesian artist figures.

Disabled people’s accessible taxi experiences in Toronto, Canada

Many paratransit agencies contract out trips to accessible taxi services. The literature has identified an array of transport barriers facing disabled people, and offers useful insights into how they experience different transport modes. However, remarkably little attention has been given to understanding how disabled people experience accessible taxi trips. In this paper, we present findings from a study focused on understanding how disabled people experience accessible taxi services in Toronto, Canada. Findings emerged from a thematic analysis of 590 customer complaint reports and 494 driver-reported incident reports that were provided by a local accessible taxi brokerage. To question the embodied experiences of disabled people during accessible taxi trips, we employed a critical disability studies perspective informed by phenomenological and critical ableist studies. Findings underscore the temporal experiences of disability, while highlighting ableist aspects of accessible taxi services that are contributing to various barriers for disabled riders relating to service quality issues, safety concerns, and inflexible taxi service policies. In this paper, we call for enhanced disability-related training for drivers, flexible accessible taxi policies that better account for the needs of disabled riders, improved communication protocols, and greater engagement with disabled people when developing new policies and operational changes.

포스트휴먼 장애학 관점에서의 ‘학생 주도성’ 개념에 대한 비판적 고찰: 2022 개정 교육과정을 중심으로

The aim of this study was to critically examine the concept of student agency, an idea that has characterized recent curriculum reform policies, focusing on the 2022 revised curriculum, from the perspective of posthuman disability studies (PDS) and to propose a more inclusive framework for it. To this end, this study first explored how PDS enables us to rethink human agency, which underlies the notion of student agency. Next, the analysis of the 2022 revised curriculum and its related policy documents revealed that student agency embodied in the 2022 revised curriculum is predicated on the logics of choice-responsibility undergirding a range of curricular devices (e.g., the high school credit system). Drawing on PDS, the study argues that the 2022 revised curriculum may (inadvertently) contribute to the perpetuation of ableism by assuming that student agency can be exercised based on modern humanist values, such as autonomy, self-determination, and self-responsibility. Furthermore, it was also found that, unlike non-disabled students, disabled students are positioned in the curriculum as potentially less agentic, i.e., exceptional learners requiring educational interventions whose focus is on special kinds of learning experiences for their independence. Finally, the study discusses directions for developing a more just and inclusive version of the future curriculum that reflects PDS-based alternative ways of thinking about not only student agency but students’ differences, including disabilities.

“Have a Flare with Me!”: Disability Storytelling on TikTok

ABSTRACTPeople with shared health conditions, including contested conditions like central sensitivity syndromes (CSSs), are utilizing TikTok to both seek and tell visual illness stories—and to co‐create health information in creative, mimetic, and platform‐specific ways. This poster presents results from a pilot qualitative content analysis study of 100 TikTok videos and comments by people personally experiencing #fibromyalgia, a pilot codesign session with a CSS TikTok community member, and late breaking results from a dissertation in progress. These studies are the first stages in the goal to understand and support these embodied, creative, and often‐collective storytelling abilities, necessary within the CSS community experiencing invisibility, stigma, and difficult diagnoses. The visual poster format enables discussion, with examples of TikTok videos illustrating 7 identified themes, iconographic elements, and examples of reoccurring creative choices and collective storytelling features. Last, of broader interest in our field, this poster presents methodological challenges and sparks for discussion of best methods for TikTok research, including: (1) a novel sampling approach addressing gaps in current research and the slippery definition of TikTok communities, (2) a brief description of preliminary codesign findings and the method's promise in this domain, and (3) discussion of critical disability studies perspectives guiding this research.

A Grounded Theory and Collaborative Design Approach to Disability Storytelling on TikTok

This developing dissertation explores the use of TikTok as a platform for individual and collective storytelling and information creation practices – within a specific online health community of people experiencing painful, invisible, and difficult to diagnose central sensitivity syndromes (CSSs) – to understand and support these embodied, creative, and collective information behaviors. Ongoing data collection indicates that people with CSSs are using TikTok affordances to tell and scaffold complex micro-stories about their expertise and social experiences of disability: by employing iconographic elements to make disability visual; intimate cinematography; audio, visual, and community-specific mimetic options; and platform-specific novel feature use. The research design draws upon critical disabilities studies (CDS) sensitizing concepts. A constructivist grounded theory approach will be employed, by theoretically sampling TikTok micro-videos, their top comments, and, by the time of this presentation, conducting semi-structured interviews with CSS TikTok community members. This poster also discusses these preliminary results, as well as a novel initial sampling approach which addresses both the hashtag and algorithmic logics of the platform, and an implementation of feminist ethics of care in research methods. Then, three codesign workshops with individuals experiencing CSSs will develop creative storytelling materials that can be utilized in various contexts. These workshops promote the inclusion of disabled community members as co-designers and aim to co-design physical and digital storytelling resources such as prompts, templates, and TikTok features.These findings expand storytelling theory into the health domain, introduce and define algorithmically mediated online health communities, and promote critical disability studies perspectives in information science.

Giving Birth in Silence

Jacinta, deaf from birth, chose to give birth to her own baby at home without her hearing aids. Fu-Yu assisted and took photos of the process. This is a Photo Essay about alternative possibilities to biomedical childbirth. We share our experience through this medium, as the ‘visual’ was our shared sensory perception at the time. Besides acknowledging the intersubjectivities that surfaced, we see the importance of recognising that ‘images are representations of the world filtered by the positionalities of the makers themselves, influenced by unique experiences that brought them to that point in time … Images become an extension of a way of thinking, visually connecting maker with participant along lines of thought’ (Cartwright and Crowder 2017, 515). Although Fu-Yu is the one operating the camera, Jacinta, her partner, her mother, her cat and her home ‘make the image’. Whilst Jacinta was in labour, Fu-Yu was assisting Carmen Susana (the midwife) and recording the event at the same time with a camera hanging around her neck. We want to offer the audience this shared ‘visual’ experience as an invitation to think and ‘visualise’ care and childbirth from a disability-studies perspective.

From Disabling Community to Embracing Gospel:

Biblical text relating to disability usually approached with either a metaphorical or literary interpretation. Both of these approaches themselves provide a negative view of people with disabilities. Both of these approaches show that disability is a condition to be eliminated. This tendency itself arises because of the lact of attention to the context of the Bible itself and the limited approach to understanding disability only in the medical approach. By paying attention to the socio-religious context of Luke’s Gospel—particularly the meal, body and wholeness in Jewish understanding, and the concept of sickness and healt—which is dialogued with the perspective of disability studies, this article attempts to explore the message of the text of Luke 14:12-14. The result is that the text findsalignments with people with disabilities in three form, namely the collapse of normalism, embracing “damaged” bodies, and eating together as an act of solidarity. This article will show that in the text of Luke 14:12-14, physical disability is not something that should be eliminated, but celebrated in communal meal.

From the Editor

From the Editor Jennifer L. Airey In our last issue, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature had the honor of publishing on the special topic of “Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing,” guest edited by Elisabeth Bekers, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, and Helen Cousins. The issue focuses on literary innovations and experimental forms of writing by British women of African and African Caribbean descent since the 1990s. Through five articles and interviews with four contemporary authors, the guest editors craft an issue that “raises critical questions about the extent to which precedence has been given to the politics over the aesthetics of their writing.”1 The issue recognizes Black women’s writing as a driving force of contemporary literary innovation in Britain. It was a pleasure to work with the guest editors on the issue and to publish this important work. With this special issue, we had three new members join our editorial board: Robin Hackett, Cynthia Richards, and Mary Youssef. Since I was not able to announce them in our last issue, their introductions appear below along with the editorial board members joining with this issue: Gabeba Baderoon, Kimberly Anne Coles, and Laura E. Tanner. While I am looking forward to working with all these exemplary scholars, I am always sad to bid farewell to those rotating off the board. With great appreciation, I say goodbye to Anupama Arora, Mary Jean Corbett, Marilyn Francus, Hala Halim, Jean Mills, and Carrie J. Preston. Robin Hackett is Associate Professor of English at University of New Hampshire, where she specializes in feminist theory, queer theory, British literature after 1800, and modernisms. She is the author of Sapphic Primitivism: Productions of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction (2004) and coeditor of Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (2019) and At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British Women Write the Thirties (2009). She has contributed to several collections including Communal Modernisms: Teaching Twentieth-Century Literary and Cultural Texts in the College Classroom (2013), At Home and Abroad in the Empire, and Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press) and published articles in venues including Woolf Studies Annual, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Cynthia Richards is Professor of English and Richard P. Veler Endowed Chair in English at Wittenberg University, where she directs the Center for Teaching and Innovation, the Women’s Studies Program, and the Writing Across the Curriculum Program. She is the editor of The Wrongs of Woman; [End Page 5] or Maria and Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (2003) and coeditor of Approaches to Teaching Behn’s “Oroonoko” (2013), Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (2021), and Quotidian Fevers in the Enlightenment: Patient Narratives of the Eighteenth Century (in progress). She is also currently completing a monograph, The Body, Trauma, and War, 1667–1798 (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press), which focuses on re-thinking the representation of the body and domestic space in eighteenth-century canonical works using the perspective of disability studies and trauma theory. Richard has also published numerous articles in venues including Literature Compass, English Language Notes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, analyzing the works of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is a Contributing Behn Editor at The Scriblerian and a Fulbright Scholar Alumni Ambassador. Mary Youssef is Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, with a courtesy appointment in the Translation and Research Instruction Program at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Her book, Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel (2018), critically examines discourses surrounding race, religion, class, gender, sexuality, and language within the Egyptian literary and socio-cultural arenas through case studies of the novels of Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Ṭahir, ᶜAlaᵓ al-Aswani, Yusuf Zaydan, Muᶜtazz Futayha, Ashraf al-Khumaysi, and Miral al-Tahawi. She has published in journals including Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Journal of African Literature Association (JALA), and International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and has contributed to Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies...

드라마를 통해 본 청년기 자폐성 장애인의 삶 연구

The purpose of this paper is to examine the developmental tasks and problems of inclusion of young adults with autism, which are reproduced in the drama Extraordinary attorney Woo. And to clarify their significance and limitations, and to meet the life cycle of young adults with autistic spectrum disability, through comparison with reality. It is to seek disability policies and support measures that can aim for inclusion. In order to view the lives of young adults with autistic spectrum disability in the drama Youngwoo Woo, this study approached from a convergent perspective of cultural studies and disability studies, and after analyzing the contents of the drama, the analysis results were critically evaluated. The main character of the drama Youngwoo Woo is a person with autistic spectrum disability who successfully completes the young adults development tasks of work, love, and independent living through meaningful communication with the people around her during her young adults, which can be an important starting point for inclusion into society. In addition, the drama Youngwoo Woo draws attention in that it raises the need for inclusion, emphasizing that Korean society is a space where not only people with autistic spectrum disability, but also people with diversity who are discriminated against by another form of prejudice live together. However, the fantasy of these dramas is far from reality. In reality, the problems of achievement of development tasks and inclusion of people with autistic spectrum disability should be recognized as important, and support for appropriate social systems and programs considering diversity and difference should be sought.

Weeding Out the Weak: Labor, Gender, and Disability in a U.S. Fossil Fuel Boomtown

COVID-19 has radically reshaped the labor dreams of many U.S. workers. This essay uses pre-pandemic fieldwork in an oil and gas “boomtown” to consider post-work imaginaries in the wake and midst of COVID-19. I use feminist and disability studies perspectives to argue that economic analyses must not only move beyond the discourse of “jobs” but must also attend to gender-based and ableist modes of discrimination that persist even in so-called booming economies. I posit the figure of the economically productive worker, asking how routine practices of identity-shaped discrimination undermine the capacities of some to embody this figure. My interview-derived and ethnographic data suggest that economic self-sufficiency is a woefully inadequate model for meeting the material needs of people, and that labor innovations such as a universal basic income are necessary to achieve the kinds of flourishing sought by those participating in the “great resignation.”

장애 여성 김지영

This article was to shift from the objectification of disability as metaphors and stereotypes prevalent in literature and film towards the corporealization disability as human subjectivity. Thus, using a disability studies perspective, Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982 and <Kim Ji-Young, born 1982> were analyzed in three ways. First, both novel and film used disabilities for rhetorical purposes, in spite of subtle differences. Second, depending on the genres(reportage and melodrama) that each text takes, the present existence and reality of disabled women were represented differently. Third, not only the subjectivity of disabled women but the possibility of empathy and solidarity among varies groups relied on the ways in which each text takes in terms of genre techniques and disability metaphor uses and deployments. Lastly, the implications of disability representations and discourses were discussed.

Affective Realities and Conceptual Contradictions of Patricia Piccinini’s Art: Ecofeminist and Disability Studies Perspectives

The recent exhibition of Patricia Piccinini’s art called That’s Us (Toruń, CSW) largely represents the Australian artist’s visions and fascinations known from earlier exhibitions. Questioning and erasing the borders between species, the affective realities of Piccinini’s art are bound to the concepts of care, empathy and fragility, which refigure what is human and non-human and the relations between them by expanding the notion of mothering and fostering to include interspecies relations. Beginning with a discussion of the uncanny, abjection and monstrosity, this article aims to examine the complicated implications of interpreting Piccinini’s art within the conceptual framework of ecofeminism, as well as in the context of disability aesthetics. In her explorations of different and alternative corporealities, Piccinini, among many other things, asks questions about ideologies of normativity and able-bodiedness, suggesting the possibility of going beyond them.

The sounds of memory: Troubling the professionalization of knowledge through Black women’s memoir and interpretive disability studies

In this article, the authors encourage the consideration of the use of Black women’s memoir to inform pre-service early childhood education by exploring Mary Herring Wright’s memoir of growing up Black and deaf in the southern USA in Sounds Like Home and bell hooks’ memoir of childhood in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. In their engagement with Wright and hooks, stories of childhood, longing and memory appear as valid forms of knowing that attend to issues of power, hegemony and social inequity. The authors further demonstrate that the standards of practice promoted within the Ontario College of Early Childhood Educators, particularly ‘Standard II: Curriculum and Pedagogy’, understand knowledge as valid primarily if based on empirical and developmental ways of knowing. Black women’s memoirs and counternarratives, engaged with from an interpretive disability studies perspective, trouble this by suggesting that memories and stories of childhood also serve as valid and important forms of knowledge in pre-service early childhood education training and beyond . How might one encourage and support a disability studies approach to inclusion in pre-service early childhood education settings? How might such an approach help blur the child–adult binary that often appears in pre-service early childhood education, and in almost all the relationships that children have with adults? Melding the creative and the critical, the authors argue that Black women’s memoir can deepen our understanding of belonging and love, and therefore is a necessary intervention in educational institutions embedded within a normative order that creates binaries between children and adults.

Cathleen ni Houlihan: A Dual Perspective of Disability Studies and Postcolonial Studies

Disability studies generally registers disability as a social and political phenomenon; as against one of personal affliction, and it aids us in understanding the power and oppression in diverse contexts, whereas postcolonial studies allows for a wider-ranging investigation into power relations as to how they occurred. Recent studies have found, in terms of empowerment and inferiority, there is a notable convergence between disability studies and postcolonial studies. The image of crippled Ireland has been formed in the lengthy history of colonization through the practice of othering, and this image of disempowerment has already been extensively represented in the annals of Irish and British literature. The play Cathleen ni Houlihan, by William Butler Yeats, conveys a national call to promote national identity. The story-line of the play is very dramatic and emotional by the famous transformation of Cathleen, from a feeble old woman to a vibrant young girl, which symbolically manifests a re-establishment of not only Ireland’s youthful vigor, but also its native powers of creativity and capability, as an independent nation state. As the play contains numerous representations of physical and mental disability, an interpretation of the dual perspective of disability studies and postcolonial studies provides a new understanding of how literary works present complex and intricate insights into the politics of disability and provide multifaceted illustrations of the disabled images.

Navigating dis/ableist school playgrounds and toilets with geographic maturity: stories of young people with dwarfism from their secondary education

ABSTRACT Little attention has been paid to the experiences of disabled young people of school playgrounds and toilets in mainstream settings. Drawing on the qualitative, first-hand accounts of 19 young people with dwarfism, this paper explores how they make sense and navigate school playgrounds and toilets during their secondary education from a Critical Disability Studies perspective. The findings suggest that playgrounds are experienced as inaccessible, hierarchical, panoptic and unsafe. Moreover, several factors affect the choice of school toilet – disabled or gender-binary – including the in/accessibility of toilets, the regulation of access to disabled toilets, and the social meanings attached to them. I argue such experiences are the outcome of both spaces being dis/ableist, designed for and with the ‘normatively developing’ body in mind. Participants’ stories also illustrate how they are aware of and resist the spatial scripts of these spaces – how they are meant to be used and who is allowed to inhabit them. This paper concludes with the need to listen to and engage with disabled young people for inclusive spaces to be achieved.

Understanding Disability Policy Development: Integrating Social Policy Research with the Disability Studies Perspective

Studies on the development of social policies have provided us with a rich body of knowledge. However, being based mostly on class, gender or racial analysis, this body of work has seldom used disability as an analytical framework. This article proposes a systematic research agenda for addressing this lacuna. Drawing on the political and institutional approaches, this article illustrates how mainstream theories on social policy development cannot be assumed applicable to disability policies ‘as is’. To apply them effectively, we argue, students of social policy need to rework them in light of the insights of disability studies. Such conceptual work would involve closer attention to the uniqueness of disability as a socio-political category. Integrating these social policy theories with disability studies will allow us to better identify the unique political and institutional factors behind the trajectories of disability related policy. We conclude this discussion with suggestions for future research.

Sponsored Silence: Literary Selective Mutism in Children's Fiction

Many contemporary children's novels follow this pattern: a traumatic event; a child who stops speaking; a crisis; the child speaks. These texts falsely claim to represent selective mutism. I propose the term "literary selective mutism" (LSM) to reflect the translation of this disorder in children's literature. Literary selective mutism has its own causes, symptoms, and treatment. It generates a particular plot structure and cast of characters. A disability studies perspective allows us to critique the way texts featuring LSM use this condition as a metaphor to focus on questions of silence, voice, and power.