Field Of Disability Studies Research Articles

Understanding the Philosophical Foundations of Disabilities to Maximize the Potential of Response to Intervention

In the United States and elsewhere in the world, disabilities are being studied by two different schools of thought: special education and disability studies. In the field of special education, analyses are often pragmatic and instrumental. In contrast, analyses in the field of disability studies are often historical and cultural, explaining disabilities as constructed by social value. This lack of agreement about disabilities leads us to ask: How can practitioners and researchers begin to address the issue of which students might need intensive interventions for their disabilities through the response to intervention (RTI) approach when disabilities are viewed so differently by scholars in the field? In this article I compare and contrast the philosophical foundations of disabilities in special education and disability studies and conclude that the dimensions of pragmatic, instrumental, historical, and cultural factors must be taken into account in order to achieve both the macro and micro levels of RTI implementation.

“It’ll Grow Organically and Naturally": The Reciprocal Relationship between Student Groups and Disability Studies on College Campuses

Although few colleges and universities offer undergraduate disability studies curricula, our own experiences suggest that higher education settings provide opportunities for students to engage with and act upon disability studies theories and concepts. To learn more about the interactions between undergraduate student groups and disability studies, we interviewed students and faculty on three campuses. We found that students not only access disability studies theory through both formal and informal means, but that they also actively engage with it to develop their understandings of disability and interpret their experiences. Additionally, student groups educate their campus communities by advocating for the inclusion of disability studies in curricula, sharing their perspectives in the classroom, and hosting events related to disability studies. Through these activities, often in collaboration with faculty and staff, students forge reciprocal relationships between their activism and the field of disability studies.Keywords: Student groups, activism, advocacy, narrative, undergraduate education

Thinking With Disability Studies

In this essay, I offer tentative ruminations about the possibilities/challenges of theory and praxis in the field of disability studies. I begin the essay by thinking through my own positionality as a non-disabled woman of color scholar/ally in the field. Cautiously situating myself in a location of outsider-within (Hill-Collins,1998), I explore how disability studies is disruptive of any boundaries that claim to police distinctions between disabled/non-disabled subject positions. Noting the dangers of claiming that everyone is disabled at some historical moment, I propose instead a relational analysis to engage the materiality of disability at the intersections of race, class, gender, nation, and sexual identity within specific historical contexts and discuss the complicated impasses that continue to plague disability studies at these intersections. I conclude the essay by recognizing the labor of scholar/activists in the field who call for a committed politics of accountability and access via disability justice. Keywords: disability studies, historical materialism, identity politics and intersectionality, disability justice, politics of accountability/allyship

Growing Rhizomatically: Disability Studies, the Art Gallery and the Consortium

In this essay, we propose that the Deleuzoguattarian rhizome offers a map and metaphor for the field of disability studies, especially as it develops outside the boundaries of a defined program or curriculum. As an example of rhizomatic growth, we discuss a series of events in the Philadelphia area in fall 2012 that focused on disability studies and disability arts and culture, including an art exhibition entitled What Can A Body Do? and a scholarly residency sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Women’s Studies Consortium. We suggest that the art gallery offers a generative space for the growth of disability studies, disability aesthetics, and new models of access, and we emphasize the importance of cross-institutional collaboration in the development of disability studies not only as a field but as a field of energy.Keywords: rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari, art gallery, contemporary art, curator, access, audio description, multisensory, collaboration, consortium, disability aesthetics, What Can A Body Do?

Here There Be Monsters: Teaching Disability Studies at CUNY’s Bronx Community College

As a scholar deeply invested in disability studies (DS) and as an educator just as deeply committed to serving students at the City University of New York’s Bronx Community College (BCC), where I teach, I frequently reflect on the way we welcome novices to the field of DS. In the twenty or so years since the publication of Lennard Davis’ ground-breaking Enforcing Normalcy (1995) and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s foundational Extraordinary Bodies (1997), DS in the humanities has moved from an emergent arena of inquiry to a burgeoning field with hundreds of active scholars and dozens of academic programs in the US alone. It has weathered criticism from those who have portrayed it as one of “so many other trendy ‘studies’” in departments “where standards are forgiving and arcane theories flourish” (Allen), or, who derided it as being chief among the “victim disciplines” (Schoenfeld), and DS is now widely recognized and respected in larger academic communities. A 2013 New York Times piece confirms the academic stature of the discipline: “Like black studies, women’s studies and other liberation-movement disciplines, DS teaches that it is an unaccepting society that needs normalizing, not the minority group” (Simon). By every measure—programs, courses offered, scholarly publication, the growth of learned journals and societies—DS is flourishing. With this growth, the scholarly sophistication of DS has also developed. Though the field has always demonstrated substantial rigor, early work necessarily covered essential ground, pointing to the presence and role of disabled characters and authors in fiction, for example, or, reclaiming disability identity for historical figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This initial work has given rise to ever more nuanced scholarship. For instance, early theorists of disability identity favored “people-first” language (e.g., a person with autism), arguing that an individual’s personhood should be respected as the foremost aspect of identity, but as thinking has developed, disability is increasingly regarded as fundamental to the composition of self, and recent scholarly writing in the field is beginning to evidence more direct language, reflecting the integral place of disability in identity (i.e., “autistic person,” or, “autist”). (Jim Sinclair’s widely disseminated “Why I Dislike ‘Person First’ Language” serves as an early expression of such resistance, but recent writing indicates a growing trend in this direction [Collier; Chacala et al.].) Likewise, early DS urged interpretations forwarding disabled agency; disability had for so long (and so destructively) been con-

The cross-fertilization of critical race theory and Disability Studies: points of convergence/ divergence and some education policy implications

This article discusses the ways in which insights from critical race theory can be used in order to supplement and reinforce the field of Disability Studies by highlighting the intersecting and contextually contingent ways in which the notion of disability is constructed and positioned. The cross-fertilization of critical race theory and Disability Studies can enhance understanding of the intersecting effects of racism and disablism through a reflexive process of exploring points of convergence and divergence of racial and corporeal markers of difference. These understandings should permeate anti-discrimination legislation and other education policy frameworks aimed at redressing systemic injustices and power inequities that impact upon disabled people’s identities and lived experiences.

When the light turns blue: journeying into disability studies guided by the work of Ellen Brantlinger

Ellen Brantlinger's research and activism created opportunities for scholars who seek to locate and interrupt the social processes that shape educational inequities. In this essay, we reflect on Ellen's contributions by identifying three key signposts – lessons from Ellen's work that guided our own journeys and shaped the field of disability studies in education. These signposts include the assertions that (1) qualitative research is essential to understanding the contextual factors that shape the identification, location and response to difference as social phenomena, (2) inclusion and exclusion are political and ideological processes shaped by discursive practices and (3) research is a form of (in)activism. We conclude the essay with a consideration of the questions that Ellen's work positions us to ask as we move forward.

Edward Wheatley Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a DisabilityStumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability. Edward Wheatley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. xiii+284.

<i>Edward Wheatley</i> Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability<i>Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability</i>. Edward Wheatley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. xiii+284.

Who “Owns” Dis/ability? The Cultural Work of Critical Special Educators as Insider–Outsiders

The article describes the work of critical special education scholars and teacher educators in the field of Disability Studies who challenge the fundamental assumptions on which special education is founded, illustrating implications for all educators. A brief history of the field acknowledges the enormity of the institutionalization of special education as a complex, multi-faceted, multi-layered establishment. The intellectual limits of that institution are described through the medicalized knowledge base that has arisen within special education, a base that gives rise to specific, restricted discourses of what constitutes a dis/ability and why. The author presents alternative sociocultural knowledge bases, as informed by Disability Studies and put forth by critical special educators, that broaden the understanding of dis/ability. Contrasting these theoretical groundings, implications for teacher dispositions toward differences among students are discussed, and ways in which a new perspective on dis/ability is related to the goals and practices of social education are identified.

Reflexivity in Research: Disability between the Lines

The purpose of this article is to consider the implications to reflexivity in disability research. The author begins by positioning herself in the field of disability studies, disclosing her own experiences. She goes on to trouble the expectation to disclose. The call to confess may be grounded in historical developments within feminist scholarship, including standpoint theory and research reflexivity—methodological tools that are certainly valuable in the pursuit of knowledge, but that are not without criticism. The author explores some key critiques, and considers the implications, specifically regarding her own responsibility to give account. She demonstrates that the sharing of personal experience and the disclosure of identity is not only difficult, uncomfortable, and invasive, but is sometimes useless, for even our confessions may be subject to thematic interpretation.Keywords: disclosure, standpoint theory, reflexivity, narrative, invisible disability

Design Meets Disability (Pullin, G.; 2011) [Book Review

This book was initially released as a hardcover volume in 2009. It aims to entice and excite designers about the possibilities and prospects of designing for disabled people. With his concept of resonant design, defined as intended to address the needs of some people with a particular disability and other people without that disability but perhaps finding themselves in similar circumstances, the author tries to skirt the tensions between particularity and generality. He argues that designing for disability can invigorate design practices and inject different ways of thinking into the design community. The book is divided into two sections. The first outlines a series of tensions or meetings between key issues ostensibly separating the worlds of design and disability. In the second section of the book, the author engages in a series of (imaginary and real) conversations with chosen designers about designing a specific product for disabled people. The book is an engaging and accessible read. As it is rare to find work about disability outside the field of Disability Studies, the author is to be commended for his efforts to place design and disability in conversation. In directing his efforts at recruiting designers to the field of disability, perhaps new collaborations and affinities will emerge.

Gênero e deficiência: interseções e perspectivas

O campo de estudos feministas e de gênero tem avançado à medida que se articula com outras categorias de análise, tais como geração, classe, raça/etnia, orientação sexual, região e religião. Uma questão, contudo, permanece à revelia do esforço de interseção dessas categorias, a saber, a deficiência. Para tanto, busca-se aqui avaliar algumas das possibilidades de análise de fenômenos sociais e culturais nas quais se considera oportuno o diálogo entre os estudos feministas e de gênero com o campo de estudos sobre deficiência. Espera-se proporcionar maior visibilidade para o debate dessa questão, avaliando seu potencial analítico e político em vista da sua contribuição para as políticas públicas.

Science and technology enabled changes in ability expectations: Challenges for successful aging of people with and without so called impairments

This presentation relates to the symposium entitled ‘Diverse National Policies and Programs Supporting Inclusiveness and Healthy Living’ organized by Dr. Jill Le Clair. Emerging and envisioned sciences and technologies enable changes in the abilities people cherish and vice versa. Advances in science and technology and the changing landscape of ability expectations increasingly enable two health related paradigm shifts. One is the move away from species-typical as the framework of reference of ‘being healthy’ towards a framework of ‘health’ which incorporates, condones, and even expects the modification of the human body beyond species- typical boundaries as one prerequisite of being ‘healthy’. The other is the move towards patient-driven health care consumer models which includes the move towards a ‘quantified self’ (where people diagnose themselves), user generated data consumer personalized medicine, health social networks and ‘participatory medicine ‘in which networked patients shift from being mere passengers to responsible drivers of their health?[1]. These two paradigm shifts influence severely our vision of how we should age, aging and the elderly. The term ableism was originally developed by the disabled people rights movement and the academic field of disability studies to question the favouritism for species-typical and discrimination against as sub species-typical labelled body abilities and medicalization of such as sub species-typical labelled bodies.

No Beauty or Truth Excluded

In this essay, I challenge the ableist and prejudicial assumptions that underlie common Scripture interpretations of people with disabilities. I assert that the lived experiences of this marginalized group, as well as the insights from the emerging field of disability studies, must be brought to the center in interpreting Scripture. The groundbreaking work of Nancy Eiesland, Donald Senior, and other theologians and disability thinkers offers valuable support to this contention.

The Dilemma of Disabled Masculinity

A much-cited point by those who study the intersection of gender and disability is that masculinity and disability are in conflict with each other because disability is associated with being dependent and helpless whereas masculinity is associated with being powerful and autonomous, thus creating a lived and embodied dilemma for disabled men. This article maps and critically evaluates the conceptual development of this dilemma of disabled masculinity, tracing how several developments in the fields of disability studies and the critical study of men and masculinities have shaped sociological understandings of disabled masculinity. We suggest that, while social science scholarship has increasingly moved beyond a static understanding and toward a dynamic view of the articulation and interaction between masculinity and disability, there are nevertheless several problems that require attention. The most critical issue conceptually is that the focus of study has been more on masculinity and how it intersects with ‘disability’ as an almost generic category, rather than on how masculinity (or masculinities) intersect(s) differently with various types of impairment. Thus, though there is quite a bit of research on the dilemma of disabled masculinity for men who acquire a physical impairment post-childhood and for groups of men with diverse impairments studied as if they were a homogenous group, less research has been conducted with men who have specific impairments, particularly early-onset, intellectual or degenerative impairments. In this paper we urge researchers to open up the concept of intersectionality to accommodate a range of differences in bodily, cognitive, intellectual and behavioral types (impairments) in their interaction with various masculinities and to show more explicitly how context and life phase contribute to this dynamism.

Disability Studies and the Support of Individuals with Significant Disabilities and their Families: An Introduction to the Issues

This article introduces a set of four articles with a shared focus on the emerging field of disability studies and its relevance to individuals with significant disabilities and their families. The purpose of this introduction is to summarize the common themes that run through the following articles. Points of agreement and disagreement are discussed.

Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (review)

Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music. By Joseph N. Straus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. [x, 205 p. ISBN 9780199766451 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9780199766468 (paperback), $24.95.] Glossary of musical terms, bibliography, index. The conception of disability, while in flux over the past 300 years, has exerted a strong influence on both criticism and reception of composers and performers with disabilities and even works. In Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music, Joseph Straus counterpoints the voices of composers, performers, critics, and theorists in a discussion that spotlights not only musicians with disabilities but also disability metaphors in music discourse. Acknowledging a debt to Garland-Thomson and other writers in the field of disability studies, this pioneering book is the first to lay the foundation for such a study in the field of music. What Straus modestly calls a slender volume authoritatively sets the stage for further thought, focusing on the core of the Western art music canon and the best of much-read critical literature with extensive quotes that allow the reader to hear from music experts in a substantive way. Roughly a third of the book is devoted to disabled musicians and critical reception. Another third of the book features narratives of disability as told through music. Although there are no printed musical score excerpts, the examples are common enough that readers would either know the pieces or have access to them. The remaining chapters engage music-theoretical traditions and theories of hearing. Straus introduces his topic by making the distinction between disability as material reality and disability as historically contingent, socially and constructed meaning. He defines disability as any culturally stigmatized bodily difference (p. 9) and includes within this definition any permanent or temporary physical or mental condition. By adopting this broad definition, he proposes that disability affects virtually every human being along with cultural products and points to the nature of disability that is paradoxically ubiquitous and yet also perceived as strange and remarkable (p. 11). Underlying the study is a single guiding purpose: to help us rethink defect as difference. In discussing individual composers and performers, Straus observes that musicians with disabilities are linked by common critical responses that he groups into four categories. The first model, the pre- Enlightenment notion of disability as affliction-God's punishment, an outward mark of inner failing-contrasts with the second, the nineteenth-century view of disability as divine inspiration marking an individual as transcendent. Critics depend, for example, on both of these models when they hear Landini's music as divine compensation for the great misfortune of his blindness. The third model, widely held since the early 1800s, responds to disability as medical defect to be overcome or cured. This model accounts for much of the reception of Beethoven's middle-period music, for example, in which critics hear a narrative of overcoming deafness. The fourth model centers on the recently developed notion of disability as personal, cultural, and social identity deserving affirmation. Straus demonstrates ways of revising historic critiques along the axis of this new model: blindness, for example, can be conceived as a positive artistic resource allowing Landini to do more successfully the things that composers needed to do (hold vast amounts of music in memory and improvise). Another theme emerges from these essays, that of disability overwhelming the critical view of compositions and performances. Straus observes that the narrative of Robert Schumann's madness engulfs critical reception of his late music. Similarly, the narrative of Evelyn Glennie's deafness at times engulfs critical responses to her performances. Many artists deflect discussion of their disabilities for just this reason, preferring to be known as artists rather than disabled artists, while other musicians have come to see their role in public life as that of an activist. …

Understanding complexity in disability sport: The potential of feminist philosophies and intersectionality

Disability studies is a dynamic, hotly debated and evolving research body. Traustadüttir and Kristiansen (2004) assert it is a discipline with strong roots in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the US and is now gaining momentum in Europe and the Nordic countries. This paper will address the potential of combining feminist scholarship and disability scholarship consistent with recent developments in disability research. Feminists who work in the field of disability studies have increasingly written about the importance of ideas in feminist theory being applied within disability theory, analysis and politics (e.g. Morris, 1991; Thomas, 1999, 2004; Wendell, 1996). Furthermore, Thomas (1999) argues that disability studies can learn a great deal from the work of feminist authors. Narratives within this context have broken through ‘giving voice’ to disabled women in scholarly writing.

“In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister”: Technik und Ästhetik der Klaviermusik für die linke Hand allein (review)

CHALLENGE, CONFRONTATION, COGNITION der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister: Technik und Asthetik der Klaviermusik fur die linke allein. By Albert Sassmann. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2010. [360 p. ISBN 9783795212964. i48.] Music examples, portraits, bibliography, catalog. With the recent auction of the formerly inaccessible Wittgenstein Archive, with an increasing number of one-hand pianists now sustaining successful concert careers, and with more American musicologists interested in the intersections between music and disability, the once-marginalized repertoire of one-hand piano music is now ripe for historical and critical scrutiny. This monograph, by the Austrian pianist Albert Sassmann, is an important contribution to the topic. Sassmann divides his study into four main sections: (1) a long-range history of the left hand's role in piano music, culminating in the cultivation of the lefthand- piano repertoire by pianists Leopold Godowsky, Geza Zichy, Wittgenstein, Otakar Hollmann, and others; (2) a consideration of one-hand performance practice and technique; (3) an aesthetics of one-hand performance, meditating on the reasons why many composers are drawn to this medium; and (4) a large, ninety-page catalog of piano repertoire written for the left hand alone. Generously illustrated with over two hundred music examples, and written in straightforward German prose, Sassmann's study has the potential to appeal to a diverse audience, including primarily the students and faculty of graduate programs in piano performance and composition. (Several fine Ph.D. and D.M.A. dissertations anticipate Sassmann's topic, including So Young Kim-Park, Wittgenstein und die fur ihn komponierten Klavierkonzerte fur die linke [Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 1999] and Won-Young Kong, Paul Wittgenstein's Transcriptions for Left Hand [D.M.A. diss., University of North Texas, 1999]). Sassmann's monograph paves the way for future doctoral students in piano performance to embark on similar studies. In his title, Sassmann quotes from the penultimate line of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem Natur und Kunst: der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister, or, mastery reveals itself in limitation. (Sassmann stops there, but Goethe closes his famous sonnet with an equally relevant formula: Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben, or, only law can give us freedom.) This conception of artistic achievement and expressive freedom- as predicated on rules, limitation, Beschrankung-is a trope that composers of one-hand piano music repeatedly invoke. Sassmann quotes Godowsky (whose virtuosic one-hand arrangements of Chopin were staples of Wittgenstein's performance repertoire): Working within self-imposed convinced me that economy of means lead to a superior form of concentra - tion (pp. 212-13; italics added). Variations on this trope may be seen in many of the excerpts included from interviews that Sassmann conducted with composers of one-hand piano music; consider the comments of the Australian composer Michael Hannan: [T]he idea of placing a limitation or set of on what you do . . . stimulates the discipline of composing; and it makes one work harder to achieve solutions to problems (p. 221; italics added). The Beschrankungen of the one-hand piano repertoire, though certainly restrictive in one domain (the reduced number of fingers), are liberating in another. The same formulation may be adjusted to apply to performance (musical or otherwise): the single-handed achievement is more impressive than a two-handed enactment of the same feat. This is a powerful reconfiguration of the nature of limitation (and it parallels how the field of disability studies has sought to reinterpret the supposed limitations of physical impairment). An ambitious Sass - mann reads the implications of his aesthetic into artistic works, styles, and genres that lie far outside the one-hand piano repertoire: he also discusses one-note fantasies, Ligeti's Musica ricercata, minimalist music and art-even the continuous takes famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in his film Rope. …

Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: Storied Lives of Immigrant Muslim Women. By Parin Dossa. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

I n the realm of power inequality, the fields of disability studies and antiracist feminism occupy overlapping spaces, yet their literatures are disconnected. Despite the similarity in focus, disability studies do not fully cover racialized women in the literature, and disability is found at the periphery of antiracist feminism. Parin Dossa’s Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: Storied Lives of Immigrant Muslim Women bridges this gap. Her work examines the experiences of disabled immigrant and refugee women of color and the barriers they face in accessing essential institutions. While Western immigration policy appears altruistic, admittance is governed by political and economic incentives. Unless migrants embody the white male ideal or are deemed labor ready, their presence is devalued. Male migrants are targeted for their utility as cheap labor, while women are often viewed as dependents with lower earning potential, excluding unpaid labor in the domestic sphere. Dossa shows that disabled migrant women are viewed as dependents with no earning potential who will thus drain state funds. The master status of disabled imparts a subhuman status, which, when compounded by gender and race, renders this group invisible. Based in Vancouver’s Muslim South Asian and Iranian communities, Dossa uses narrative ethnography to illuminate the hidden, isolated lives of differently abled racialized women. Incorporating a life course perspective, Dossa carefully fits their individual experiences into the larger social context. She richly demonstrates how these women interact with institutions that dehumanize them. Since disabled persons do not embody the norm, they are given second-class status, forced to battle for rights and services. However, through their own agency, they recover their humanity by creating their own space and constructing identities that reconnect them to members beyond the secluded disabled community. These powerful narratives center on their lived experiences and the identities these women construct. Drawing on culture, religion, and gender, these women establish themselves in the community as mothers, sisters, teachers, students, or congregants. As Tamiza eloquently stated in her narrative, “disability p difference p value” (77). Through active participation, they carve out their own space within the mainstream, shedding the stigma associated with their identities and transforming their experiences. In doing so, they become accepted members of the community.