bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Self-Advocacy and Socially Just Pedagogy
Authors: Slater Jenny
Published: March 2016

Discussions of 'special educational needs' (SEN), 'children with SEN' and 'inclusion' continue to portray disabled learners as problematic 'others' to be tolerated and managed (Allan 2004). The neo-liberal prioritisation of entrepreneurship and autonomy create further problems for disabled learners attempting to negotiate an increasingly market-driven education system. This paper comes about as a result of eight-weeks spent as a volunteer in an organisation offering self-advocacy based projects to young people with the label of ‘learning difficulties’, and considers such projects alongside Deleuzoguatarrian Disability Studies discussions of socially just pedagogy. By drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome, and considering desire as productive, it is argued that such projects have the potential to offer an alternative, more engaged and socially-just education to the one currently offered in schools.Keywordsself-advocacy, pedagogy, education, Deleuze and Guattari
Representing Disability & Disfigurement: Modes of Representation in Nina Berman's Photographs
Authors: Wehbi Samantha
Published: March 2016

This paper focuses on modes of representation of people with disabilities in documentary photography. The paper begins with a brief description of the modes of representation following the typology provided by GarlandThomson, and then proceeds to an analysis of how at least three of these modes apply to the work of Nina Berman, contemporary American photographer. The paper argues that the images presented by Berman need to be read as a complex rendering of various modes of representation. Specifically, the paper focuses on an analysis of images from the series Marine Wedding. Through a discussion of several images, the paper argues that Berman’s counter-hegemonic anti-war message is advanced at the expense of hegemonic portrayals of people with disabilities.KeywordsPhotography, Nina Berman, war, disability, veterans, modes of representation
Review of Original Minds
Authors: Meyer Craig A.
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Review of Carlson, The Faces of Intellectual Disability
Authors: Moeller Carol
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
"Sweetheart, I wish you Could Text without Help": Mediating Emotional Communication within the Context of Close Personal Relationships
Authors: Green Sara E. , Brightman Beth , Kassner Katie
Published: March 2016

This article explores the emotional challenges of mediated communication from the point of view of mediators who have close personal relationships with the people for whom they perform the mediating role. The article is based on the personal experiences of the three authors and on qualitative analysis of interviews with mothers and fathers of seven young adults who rely on mediated communication in their everyday lives. Our narrative highlights six key themes related to mediation within the context of close personal relationships: 1.The importance of parent/child communication; 2.The development of idiosyncratic communication systems – sometimes in defiance of professional constructions of what constitutes "real communication;" 3. The continued need for mediation after independent communication techniques have been mastered; 4. Parental concern about who will mediate in their absence; 5. Complications involved in parental mediation during the transition to adulthood; and 6.The problem of "blended voices" when both the mediator and communicator have an emotional stake in the communication.Keywords: Disability, Mediated Communication, Caregiving, Emotion, Close Relationships
Setting the Stage of ‘Ab/normality’ in Rehabilitative Narratives: Rethinking Medicalization of the Disabled African Body
Authors: Ndi Alfred
Published: March 2016

This paper draws from social narratives as public 'writings' (Weate, 2003), to explain how Eurocentric approaches to rehabilitation based on medicalization and modernization, that is, on normality/abnormality dichotomies, led, paradoxically, to de-welfarization stories and post-modern legacies that were either detrimental to disabled persons in the continent or justified their recourse to new progressive struggles. It proposes to investigate the various postmodern narratives that emerged in Africa as a direct consequence of this medicalization approach supported by professionals and suggests the need for them to take these developments into consideration in order to optimize their rehabilitation output.Keywords: medicalization, African body, ab/normality, post-modern narratives, social de-welfarism, rehabilitation
Economic Satisfaction of the Elderly in Rural Tamil Nadu: A Study with Special Reference to the Madurai District
Authors: Hariharan Ramu
Published: March 2016

The elderly in the rural areas of India are suffering due to separation or loneliness resulting from urbanization and emergence or increase of nuclear families. Within the elderly population individuals differ, not only in their socio-demographic, economic and health characteristics, but also by their gender roles in various aspects of life. This paper explores the gender differences of the rural elderly population in their socio-demographic, economic and health characteristics in Madurai district, Tamil Nadu. The data, collected from 160 elderly persons in four villages of the Madurai district selected through a disproportionate stratified random based on the number of households, reveal that most of the rural elderly males were older and married, while most elderly females were widowed. Elderly males mostly lived with their spouses and elderly females with their children. Marital status was found to be the most positive significant variable to an increase in economic wellbeing of the rural elderly, and living arrangements were found to be a significant negative one. The elderly suffer either by not receiving sufficient economic support, physical support, or both to some extent. This is due to a rising cost of living, less or no reliable employment opportunities in the village, and increasing nuclear families. They opined that the government should provide employment opportunities for the elderly, as well as other educational and health infrastructural facilities for their children in their rural localities, and that the government should accelerate the eligibility criteria and proper implementation of an old-age pension scheme. Elderly people requested this so that rural-urban movement of their children could be stopped to ensure their economic and physical supports for the long run.Keywords: Economic well-being, Gender, Madurai, Rural elderly, Tamil Nadu
My Bipolar Body
Authors: Eisenhauer Jennifer
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Introduction: Movement Politics
Authors: Ralph Michael
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
From Phantoms to Prostheses
Authors: Cohen Emily
Published: March 2016

Colombia, a country at war for over fifty years, has one of the highest rates of landmine injuries in the world.  For decades, landmine victims have remained outside the nation’s popular consciousness.  Today, landmines and rehabilitative medicine profoundly shape public life. This article shows how the seemingly mundane activity of walking becomes a strangely familiar experience among amputees and an increasingly technical one among medical practitioners in Colombian rehab units. It’s worth noting that when patients and medical staff discussed how they or their patients learned how to walk using prostheses, they also often talked about their experiences with phantom limbs. As subjective as bodily sensations are I argue that they are nonetheless implicated in social relations of power and political and economic change.  Within rehab medicine, clinicians frequently see phantoms as part of a patient’s healing process and sometimes worry that failing to experience the amputated limb as a felt presence makes recovery more difficult. Without a missing object, there is no object to desire, they presume.  Rather than treat phantom limb sensation as a kind of psychosis, this essay explores how the Colombian medical establishment talks about rehabilitation with prostheses as a form of social, physical, and psychological integration. I also show how patients, meanwhile, experience a kind of ambivalence—marked by oscillating feelings of strangeness and naturalness—regarding limb loss and the prostheses they use to manage it. Keywords: phantom sensation, limb loss, rehabilitation, Colombia, war
Reflections on Seeing HUG
Authors: Martin Emily
Published: March 2016

The following is a discussion of the film, HUG, a 2009 Sundance Official Selection. The plot of HUG focuses on when Asa, friend and manager, realizes musician Drew is off his meds, and the cross-town drive to sign his contract becomes significantly more complicated. Keywords: psychosis, sound, race, masculinity, disability
Tamara's Opus
Authors: Bennett Joshua
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
An Interview with David Onley: On Leadership, Inclusivity, and Re-conceptualization
Authors: Pletsch Carolyn
Published: March 2016

David Onley is the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario.   As the first Lieutenant Governor with a visible disability, Onley has committed to using his position to bring attention to issues that affect Ontario's 1.8 million people with disabilities, including, for example, accessibility and obstacles to employment and housing. As such, he has been a significant and effective leader in Ontario's efforts to raise the visibility and to reduce the stigma of disability by speaking regularly and consistently about a positive and more accurate rendering:  that disabled workers are assets and contribute significantly to their workplaces, as well as to the larger communities of which they are a part. In this interview Onley reflects on his own workplace experiences, research that would add to the argument for greater inclusivity, and the challenges that lie ahead for those that would make Ontario's workplaces more accessible.  Key Words: leadership, inclusivity, workplace accessibility, productivity, re-conceptualization
Disabled Capitalists: Exploring the Intersections of Disability and Identity Formation in the World of Work
Authors: Galer Dustin
Published: March 2016

Many people with disabilities share the mainstream ethos that participation in the competitive workforce constitutes a primary feature of their identity. While unpaid work may fulfill the desire to be productive and provide a sense of purpose and contribution, the cultural imperative to achieve personal autonomy partly through material independence situates paid employment at the centre of personal identity formation. While disability activists struggle to carve out an empowered collective identity instilled with rights-based protections, many people with disabilities identify with the liberal individualism upon which participation in the capitalist labour market is largely based. Individuals with disabilities seek not simply to shrug off an identity defined by burden, but to claim an identity marked by self-fulfillment. Within the world of paid work, then, tension and compatibility co-exist regarding the nature and value of identity development for people with disabilities. Keywords: disability, work, employment, identity, identity politics, disability activism
"You’re Not the Same Kind of Human Being": The Evolution of Pity to Horror in Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon
Authors: Cline Brent Walter
Published: March 2016

Key words: mental disability, Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, pity, narrative theoryOf American novels that engage with the topic of mental disability, few are more popular than Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. Such popularity seems based on a simplistic reading of the novel where the mentally disabled are objects of good-natured compassion. A more thorough reading of how Charlie Gordon is presented, however, leads to the conclusion that mental disability is the embodiment of death in the novel. Readers are first taught to pity the pre-operative Charlie, but once they come to respond to the ethical voice of the post-operative Charlie, his regression to his original state becomes the rhetorical villain in the novel. At first an object of pity, the mentally disabled Charlie Gordon eventually becomes the metaphorical horror of oblivion that no character has the power to overcome.
New Conversations in Disability Studies
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: March 2016

Not Available
Review of Swartz, Able-Bodied: Scenes from a Curious Life
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Review of Leigh, A Lens on Deaf Identities
Authors: Johnson Kristen Laubscher
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Review of Lewiecki-Wilson and Cellio, Disability and Mothering
Authors: Kafer Alison
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Accidents Happen: An Art Autopathography on Mental Disability
Authors: Derby John
Published: March 2016

This essay uses Couser’s presentation of autopathography as a frame for disseminating creative autoethnographic research practices. The preface outlines the conceptual framework for the research, which critically explores personal, cultural, and institutional contexts of mental disability discourses in response to Foucault’s thesis that the arts dismantle normalizing myths about mental disability. Following Foucault’s treatment of visual, performing, and literary arts as a homogeneous entity, the ensuing story demonstrates how traditional and emerging art practices and creative writing can be hybridized to create complex representations of disability that challenge ableist, normalizing discourses.keywords: art, autopathography, hybridity, mental illness, mental disability
Editor's Introduction
Authors: Ostrander Noam , Henderson Bruce
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Review of Titchkosky, The Question of Access
Authors: Hamraie Aimi
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Review of Kuppers, Somatic Engagement
Authors: Nelson Mallory
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Review of Film: Rust and Bone
Authors: Shapiro Lawrence
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Disclosing Our Relationships to Disabilities: An Invitation for Disability Studies Scholars
Authors: OToole Corbett
Published: March 2016

In this paper, I address the question of public nondisclosure of one’s relationship to disability within Disability Studies. I argue that we need to examine our reluctance to support public disclosure, open academic inquiries into public signifiers, encourage public disclosure, and use signifiers of one’s relationship to disability in all Disability Studies contexts. I tease out the importance of public disclosure while maintaining personal privacy related to impairment information. I explore the embedded ableism in nondisclosure. And I challenge Disability Studies to address nondisclosure as a significant barrier in the field. Specific recommendations for disclosure surrounding our relationship to disability are provided
Becoming-undisciplined through my Foray into Disability Studies
Authors: Moss Pamela
Published: March 2016

My pathway to becoming a disability studies researcher has been a series of discontinuities, a circuitous route full of twist and turns with the occasional misstep. Enmeshed in my peregrinations are my academic training as a geographer, my shift in institutional location from geography to an interdisciplinary program, and my everyday life organized around living with chronic illness. As I write my story of these entanglements, I cannot help but understand my career in terms of one refractive ray of I as a subject, assembled together through my foray into disability studies. Writing autobiographically, I explore some of the embodied contours of my career and how my own illness has been part of my intellectual shift. In this article, I reflect on how I write and the assumptions that go into how I use one refractive ray of I as a subject to foreground my movement toward becoming-undisciplined.Keywords: academic, autobiography, autobiographical writing, becoming, becoming-undisciplined, contested illness, Deleuze and Guattari, embodied knowledge, feminism, interdisciplinarity
Review of Chen, Animacies
Authors: Ferguson Kennan
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Improving Communication Across the Independent Living/Mental Health Divide
Authors: Baron Richard C. , Dezenski Linda , Rogers Joseph
Published: March 2016

Keywords: Centers for Independent Living, mental health, psychiatric disabilities, physical disabilities, inter-system collaborationCenters for Independent Living (CILs) increasingly recognize the importance of providing effective services and supports to individuals with psychiatric disabilities.  While those with psychiatric disabilities turn to their local CIL for the same types of assistance as do others, serving people with psychiatric disabilities may suggest the need for CIL staff to communicate and/or collaborate with their local mental health (MH) authorities, mental health clinical and rehabilitation providers, and/or mental health peer-run service programs.  Productive contact across the CIL / MH divide, however, is often difficult, reflecting both mutual unfamiliarity and long-standing tensions.   CILs are often unsure how much their staff should know about mental illness (that is, about symptoms, diagnosis, medication, treatment, and rehabilitation alternatives), how closely they should work with traditional mental health treatment and rehabilitation providers, and how to connect to the expanding network of mental health peer-run services and supports.  This article reviews these questions in the context of the tension between the mental health and independent living paradigms, and provides initial recommendations for improved communication and collaboration across the IL/MH divide.
Interpretation Makes It Real: Disability and Subjectivity in Three Women Artists' Biopics
Authors: Nyman Micki
Published: March 2016

In her (2005) added commentary to the re-released biopic An Angel at My Table (1990), director Jane Campion agrees with the subject of her film, New Zealand-born author Janet Frame (1924-2004), that "almost everything we do is imagined; it's only your interpretation that makes it real." Campion's subjective biopic was among the first to experiment with cinematic technique in order to convey the lived experience of disability, a category that now includes Richard Eyre's Iris (2001) and Steven Shainberg's Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006). All share a similar tendency to blend subjectivity, memory, and disability through the eyes of their film's respective protagonists. This essay explores the ways in which these films adapted from autobiography, biography, and memoir use cinematic technique to suggest that while subjectivity is plural and fluid, it must nonetheless ultimately contest a delimiting matrix of social oppression.Key Words: disability, subjectivity, women, artists, biopics, film, adaptations, difference, impairment, aesthetics, biography, memory, gender, Bergson, Deleuze, Grosz
Segregating the Chickenheads: Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the Post/humanism of the American Eugenics Movement
Authors: Pottle Adam
Published: March 2016

This essay reads Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a critique of the American eugenics movement. Replete with historical allusions and satiric wordplay, Dick's novel condemns the eugenics movement as eliminating disability, diminishing human diversity, discouraging empathy, and ushering in harmful posthuman ideas before their time. Keywords:Eugenics; Philip K. Dick; America; Science fiction; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
"It's not like I have a disability or anything!" Perceptions of impairment and disability among rural, young people
Authors: Bourke Lisa , Waite Catherine
Published: March 2016

Understandings of disability and impairment among the general public influence how people without disability interact with those with disability.  This paper explored how disability and impairment are understood by young people living in six rural communities in southeast Australia, including the perspectives of those with and without a disability.  Of the 172 rural young people surveyed, 6% self-identified as having a disability, 7% were categorised as ‘at risk’ of mental ill-health and almost half reported some type of impairment or health condition.  Using various measures, young people’s responses reflected key discourses of disability, including dimensions of impairment, social judgement and limited function, and a blending of the medical and social models.  These same young people separated the terms impairment and disability, embedding stigma in the latter.  The study concluded that these rural communities need to reconstruct understandings of disability so as to support young people with disability and/or impairment.
Test Anxiety: Benign or Malignant for Students with Vision Impairment?
Authors: Datta Poulomee
Published: March 2016

Test anxiety has been identified as a threat in evaluative situations and academic performance by sighted students. Students with vision impairment are no exception to it. This study investigated the test anxiety scores of the students with vision impairment in South Australia. It also provided insights into the reasons for high test anxiety in the participants studied. This study was divided into two Stages-1 and 2. The Spielberger’s Test Anxiety questionnaire was administered on students with vision impairment in Stage 1. Interviews were conducted in Stage 2 with participants with vision impairment, their parents and teachers. The Stage 1 results revealed that the majority of the adult females with vision impairment and all adult males with vision impairment obtained high test anxiety scores. The majority of the adolescent females and males with vision impairment were noted to have test anxiety scores in the high to moderate range. A great number of participants with vision impairment scored higher in the emotionality in comparison to the worry subscale of test anxiety. The high test anxiety scores are congruent with the interview responses obtained from the three groups of respondents. A number of factors have been identified as the major determinants of test anxiety in students with vision impairment.Keywords: test anxiety, participants with vision impairment, worry, emotionality, South Australia
The Georgian Dactyl Alphabet
Authors: Makharoblidze Tamar Shota
Published: March 2016

In the Soviet period sign languages in this region were highly influenced by the Russian language and the old Georgian dactyl alphabet was totally based on the Russian one, with only a few additional specific letters. The idea of creating a new original Georgian dactyl alphabet came form the local community of deaf and hard of hearing people and I was honored to work together with these people on this project. The creation of a new original dactyl alphabet based on Georgian letters was a natural step for Georgia and consistent with the sign language nationalization developments in the post-Soviet linguistic space.    This paper presents the results of our work: the new Georgian dactyl alphabet. This alphabet is one-handed with the dactyls which are easy to create and to move between. The method of processing is a mixed type and it is a letter-dactyl (non-syllabic) alphabet by the principle of marking. In the presented papers we also display the theoretical base and the main principles for the dactyl alphabets and the 10 rules of dactiling.
Research on Methods of "Touching the World" ―The Aim of the Exhibit Area of Tactile Learning in Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology
Authors: Hirose Kojiro
Published: March 2016

The author acknowledges that blind and visually impaired people constitute only about one percent of annual visitors to his museum, but has nevertheless implemented tactile exhibits to enhance the learning and enjoyment of everyone.  He describes tactile workshops he has developed to train visitors to get the most out of handling and exploring objects through touch. Key words: Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology, blind and visually impaired Japanese, tactile exhibits, universal design in museums.
Shared Visions: Reflections of a Blind Docent
Authors: Schmeidler Judith Kahn
Published: March 2016

Can a blind person serve as a museum docent? This personal account proves that it is possible and rewarding. The author shares her experience of lost vision due to Retinitis Pigmentosa, and the challenges she meets in order to continue as a docent at a museum that she loves. Key words:Blind docent,Retinitis Pigmentosa, Jewish Museum
A Docent’s Perspective: From Tour Guide to Advisor
Authors: Wilburn Donnelly
Published: March 2016

This is a personalaccount of a dedicated museum docent who lost her vision in 2007, but retainedher passion for art. For the past five years, she has been an advisor on theSeattle Art Museum’s docent committee for access. She discusses what a museumcan do to enable her to form a distinct mental image of an artwork and a deepconnection to the artist.   Key words: Blind museum access, blindness, low-vision, Seattle Art Museum, verbal description of visual art, audio description
Talking Blind: Disability, Access, and the Discursive Turn
Authors: Cachia Amanda
Published: March 2016

The author describes two exhibits: Blind at the Museum at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2005, and What Can a Body Do?, at the Canter Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College in 2012.   She argues for inclusive design in the exhibits themselves, as well as what she calls the exhibit’s discursive elements--catalogues, docent tours, symposia, and websites--that not only extend the life of such exhibits but also expand access for attendees and others.   Key words: Blind artists, inclusive design, accessible exhibit design, the discursive turn, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Canter Fitzgerald Gallery.
The Philosophical, Political and Religious Roots of Touch Exhibitions in 20th Century British Museums
Authors: Hayhoe Simon
Published: March 2016

This article examines the philosophical, social and cultural roots of touch exhibitions in British museums during the Twentieth Century. The theory and practice of these exhibitions was influenced more by cultural tradition, and political and social guidance, than by the needs of the majority of people with disabilities of sight. In particular, a theory of the use of touch was derived from pedagogies developed in schools for the blind, which were themselves influenced by a philosophy of enlightenment from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This pedagogical and theoretical approach does not serve people with disabilities of sight well. The study concludes that touch should only be used as one of a number of multimodal approaches to museum access, and people with disabilities of sight should be considered according to their individual needs.Keywords: blindness, disabilities of sight, touch, tactile, museums, galleries, exhibitions, access, enlightenment, philosophy, schools for the blind, pedagogy
Notes from the Low Vision Gallery
Authors: Kuusisto Stephen
Published: March 2016

The author describes some experiences as a blind visitor  to The Prado in Madrid, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and elsewhere. Key words: blindness, blind museum access, Prado, Museum of Modern Art
Acknowledging the Psycho-emotional Impacts of Disablism
Authors: Nishida Akemi
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
On the Negative Possibility of Suffering: Adorno, Feminist Philosophy, and the Transfigured Crip To Come
Authors: Fritsch Kelly
Published: March 2016

Critical theorist Theodor Adorno is rarely considered as a philosopher of the body. The body which leaks, desires, rages, and lusts is seemingly disjointed from the dry and dense writings that often characterize Adorno's work. As bleak as this description of Adorno’s writings may be, however, the body is both central to his critique of modernity and the site of hope and desire against the total domination and suffering that capitalism imposes. This paper highlights some of the ways in which feminist philosophy of disability and disability studies, more generally, would benefit by thinking in constellation with Adorno's negative dialectic to interrogate the ways in which meanings get made about bodies and, furthermore, use the margins of difference, in relation with others, to challenge what Adorno calls the "wrong state of things." I argue that the transfigured crip to come is central to this fight against the "wrong state of things."Keywords: Adorno; negative dialectics; suffering; disability; crip
Into the White: Larry Eigner’s Meta-Physical Poetics
Authors: Lauro Sarah Juliet , Riordan Lindsay Waggoner
Published: March 2016

Disabled poet Larry Eigner makes striking use of the space of the page to create poetry that operates in a visual as well as linguistic register. Many critics have read Eigner’s oeuvre in light of his physical condition, but no scholar has previously looked to the parallels between the Black Mountain artists’ experiments in abstraction and Black Mountain poet Larry Eigner’s work, though the same influences are clearly evident. Working collaboratively and interdisciplinarily, the authors combine their expertise in the disciplines of literature and art history, reading both the words on the page and the page as picture, in a manner that engages specifically with phenomenological philosophy, to explicate how these poems work on the body of the reader. Key words: embodiment, abstraction, poetics, typography, metaphysics, phenomenology
Stepping backwards with disability humor? The case of NY Gov. David Paterson’s representation on ‘Saturday Night Live’
Authors: Haller Beth , Becker Amy Bree
Published: March 2016

In the modern era, discerning TV viewers know the shows that trade in cheap laughs by making fun of people with disabilities are not tapping into much creativity. So it was a surprise in 2008 when the highly regarded comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) stooped to that level by ridiculing the blind governor of New York, David Paterson, in a series of sketches lasting two years. This article analyzes the way humor narratives about a high-profile blind politician on television, like those depicted in the SNL skits, may have influenced larger cultural themes about blindness. Because the East Coast news media reported on the SNL skits every time an episode aired, this project undertook a textual analysis of all aspects of the controversy including the content of the SNL skits, the repeated responses from Gov. Paterson and the blindness community, and the news media framing of the SNL-Paterson skit story. This analysis examines the intertextuality of the event, revealing that the blindness community had a very different reading of the SNL skits, due to concerns about continuing media narratives that devalue and stereotype them. Keywords: blindness, disability humor, TV comedy shows, skit comedy, politicians
Illuminating the Vulnerability of Hegemonic Masculinity through a Performance Analysis of Physically Disabled Men’s Personal Narratives
Authors: Scott Julie-Ann
Published: March 2016

This performance analysis traces the emergence of masculinity in the open-ended narratives of 14 men who self identify as “physically disabled.” The participants range in physical ability, age, relationship status, build, and socioeconomic status. They also range in their responses to the interaction of their ability and gender: mourning, resisting, accepting, and/or embracing their daily performances of physically disabled masculinity. Through bodies defined as the negation of ‘normal,’ they attend to and expose the nuances of the interacting cultural components of hegemonic masculinity that all human beings negotiate, interpret, create and re-create through our interactions. Their stories and insights offer opportunities for us to understand the impossibilities of ideal gender performance all humans co-imagine, reiterate, and pursue but can never realize. Keywords: Performance Analysis, Masculinity, Physical Disability, Personal Narrative
Autistic Strengths and Stereotypes
Authors: Paul Trisha
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Combating Prejudice in the Workplace with Contact Theory: The Lived Experiences of Professionals with Disabilities
Authors: Harpur Paul David
Published: March 2016

People with disabilities often confront barriers in exercising their right to work.  Social model scholarship has recognised that attitude is a key factor in the disablement of people with impairments.  This study reports on 28 semi-structured interviews with professionals with disabilities.  Drawing from their lived experiences and roles in the disability rights movement, the professionals with disabilities interviewed in this study provide unique perspectives on the instances of attitudinal discrimination.  The interviewees discuss the tactics they employ to reduce the negative impact of erroneous stereotypes and the successes of such tactics.  Many of the tactics employed by interviewees reflect strategies discussed in contact theory scholarship.  This study focuses upon contact theory and considers the similarities between this theory and the interventions of interviewees.  Through positing interviewees' tactics in the literature this study is able to analyse possible positive and negative consequences of such interventions.  Keywords: Contact theory, right to work, professionals with disabilities
Growing Rhizomatically: Disability Studies, the Art Gallery and the Consortium
Authors: Lindgren Kristin Anne , Cachia Amanda , George Kelly C.
Published: March 2016

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?
A Persian Alice in Disability Literature Wonderland: Disability Studies in Iran
Authors: Goodrich Negin H.
Published: March 2016

Exploring major requisites to establish an Iranian disability studies, the aim of this study is to determine how a local literature of disability can be formed in Iran, as well as how the Iranian and global disability studies might interchange disability knowledge. In an analysis of the responses to a qualitative questionnaire, three themes emerged: rudimentary resources, disability literature, and political prerequisites. Accordingly, human and financial resources, a bank of Farsi and English literature on disability, as well as developing academic relations between Iranian and international disability scholars (as an outcome of improving the Iran-USA political affairs) are essential to form a local disability studies in Iran and to engage it in the global discussions of disability studies.Keywords: disability, global disability studies, Iran
Review of Who Cares About Kelsey
Authors: Ware Linda
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Access and Fandom: Disability Studies From a Feminist Science Fiction Perspective
Authors: Wagner Kathryn , Lothian Alexis
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Review of Disability Rhetoric
Authors: Brewer Elizabeth
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Miracle Madness
Authors: Hedge Coke Allison
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Non-Combatants and Other Peace Activists: “Everyday” disability in a time of war
Authors: Andree Courtney
Published: March 2016

While depictions of war-related disability would come to dominate the novels of male combatants in the decades following the First World War, congenital disability continued to be represented in the works of female novelists who were advocating peace. Even as the figure of the disabled veteran became hypervisible in Britain, civilians with disabilities frequently came to be overlooked where charitable aid, vocational training, and governmental assistance were concerned. We can chart a similar movement in the literature of the period, as representations of the war maimed came to eclipse "civilian" or congenital disability. In Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916) and Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected (1918), characters with physical disabilities become outspoken activists for the anti-war movement as they openly combat the illogic of the war and continue to labor as artists and intellectuals. Besides making these disabled bodies visible again, Allatini and Macaulay draw attention to what fitness means in sexual, intellectual, and physical terms, and encourage readers to consider what it means for the “unfit” to reject a war that has already rejected them. Keywords: First World War; Congenital disability; War disability; Women writers
Exploring Issues of Disability in Children's Literature Discussions
Authors: Adomat Donna Sayers
Published: March 2016

In this qualitative study, the author uses the theoretical lens of disability studies to examine how children in two multiage classrooms examine issues of disability through conversations during read-aloud and literature circle discussions. In this study, the author looks at how children build positive understandings of disability from children’s literature but also how societal attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes might play into their interpretations of literature. Student’s talk before, during, and after literature discussions was audio- and videorecorded. Several themes emerged from a discourse analysis of the transcriptions, including: defining disabilities, questioning and critiquing notions of normalcy; idealizing disabilities; identifying with characters; developing an advocacy stance; and using imagination to open up perspectives towards people in the real world. Through exploring characters in books, children not only learned about various disabilities, but they came to understand characters with disabilities as full and complex beings, similar in many ways to themselves. Keywords: children's literature, literature discussions, disability studies, elementary education, qualitative research
Legacies of Colonialism: Toward a Borderland Dialogue between Indigenous and Disability Rhetorics
Authors: Wheeler Stephanie K.
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Listening to the Lyricals: A Partial Discovery
Authors: Burke Teresa Blankmeyer
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Disabled Capital: A Narrative of Attention Deficit Disorder in the Classroom Through the Lens of Bourdieu’s Capital
Authors: Berezin Jared David
Published: March 2016

Within each socio-economic class there exist able classes, characterized by the ability to successfully access and enact their preferred capital. There also exist disabled classes of individuals who possess preferred capital, but remain unable to perform in the same manner as able bodies. In the attempt to perform accumulated knowledge and normality, the disabled individual confronts the relationship between his capital and body, his intention and ability. By examining my own classroom experience as a student with attention deficit disorder, together with research from the fields of education and disability studies, this research-based narrative reveals that preferred capital does not merely comprise cultural knowledge and social relationships, but also the ability to perform one's knowledge and desires through behavior that is valued in the classroom. In a field dominated by able-bodied individuals, the disabled body possesses "disabled capital", as preferred capital becomes compromised when housed within a disabled body.
Mzungu
Authors: Elder Brent Carson
Published: March 2016

This piece of creative non-fiction documents the author’s experiences collaborating with the Ministry of Education in Kenya in 2011. The aim of the project was to develop sustainable inclusive primary school programs where children with and without disabilities access education in a shared space. Specifically, the purpose of the project was to establish the foundations of an inclusive education system aligned with Article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). However, the author’s experiences encompassed more than an education system. The project brought to light issues of (post)colonialism and development. It also transcended cultural identity, and crossed country lines. Connectivity and community were at the core of the experience.
Throw Yo' Voice Out: Disability as a Desirable Practice in Hip-Hop Vocal Performance
Authors: Porco Alex S.
Published: March 2016

Disabled bodies and disabling spaces— especially the recording studio— shape the sound iconicity of hip-hop vocal performances. The disabled voice is the audible sign by which hip-hop artists trouble cultural definitions of the self and other; exceptionalism and failure; the natural and techno-mediated; comedy and tragedy; and aesthetic play and seriousness. Hip-hop vocal performances also function as self-conscious acts of transvaluation that challenge the discursive dominance of ableism. A materialist approach to vocal performance resists reducing voice to a silent metaphor for race, oppositionality, or liberation; and it emphasizes, instead, the physiological and social processes that render hip-hop voices unique, particular, and audible. It emphasizes the agency hip-hop artists possess in seeking out disabled bodies and assuming disabled identities for aesthetic and political ends. Thus, the body is returned to the analysis of style.
Cartographies of Friendship, Desire, and Home; Notes on surviving neoliberal security regimes
Authors: DasGupta Debanuj
Published: March 2016

In this auto-ethnographic essay I shed light upon processes of racialiazation and sexualization which work to construct the figure of the disabled, diseased, alien. The paper argues disability based immigration policies, along with neoliberal notions of productivity and enterprise operate as technologies of power, excluding queer HiV positive migrant subjects from the gates of the US nation-state. I shed light upon HIV based immigration policies, disability and sexuality rights activism, pre and post 9/11 US national security practices by retracing lived experiences of mine from Kolkata, India and post 9/11 New York City. The narrative journeys to spaces such as HIV clinics, S&M chambers, and hospital rooms in hopes of understanding collective claims to life being made by those occupying the interstitial shadow spaces between nation-states, perverse/ normal, ability/disability, and ultimately life/death.
Sites of Normalcy: Understanding Online Education as Prosthetic Technology
Authors: Moeller Marie , Jung Julie
Published: March 2016

Research on online education in relation to disability has, importantly, focused on issues of access and usability. This article seeks to complicate this research by examining the ways in which online education participates in an ideology of normalcy. Toward this end, we first describe online education as a site that promotes normalcy through its material practices of marginalization. We then extend this reading by analyzing how cultural narratives about online education function asdiscursive sites of normalcy by marking both online education and its users as less-than substitutes for the "real" versions. By constructing online education as a prosthetic technology, these narratives persuade marginalized bodies to recognize themselves as problems in need of solution, yet this reading itself becomes open to revision when we consider how the complexities of embodiment challenge an understanding of normalcy as a determinate discursive force.
The Giver: Movie Review
Authors: Santinele Martino Alan , Spiri Vanja
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Video Game Accessibility: A Legal Approach
Authors: Powers George , Nguyen Vinh , Frieden Lex
Published: March 2016

Video game accessibility may not seem of significance to some, and it may sound trivial to anyone who does not play video games. This assumption is false. With the digitalization of our culture, video games are an ever increasing part of our life. They contribute to peer to peer interactions, education, music and the arts. A video game can be created by hundreds of musicians and artists, and they can have production budgets that exceed modern blockbuster films. Inaccessible video games are analogous to movie theaters without closed captioning or accessible facilities. The movement to have accessible video games is small, unorganized and misdirected. Just like the other battles to make society accessible were accomplished through legislation and law, the battle for video game accessibility must be focused toward the law and not the market.
Disability, Inc.: The Exploitation of Difference by the Prison-Industrial Complex
Authors: Janechek Jennifer Anne
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Robots, Disability, and Good Human Life
Authors: Carnevale Antonio
Published: March 2016

In this paper, I want to show the role that emerging robotic technologies could play in the future in daily life of disabled people. When I talk about disability, I mean any temporary or permanent limitation due to a chronic disease and deficit, as well as, socially disadvantaged conditions, which imply functional and emotional restrictions experienced at any age. All these limitations can be characterized by a specific mental and physical impairment or, more often, by a cluster of medical impairments and social barriers. To this end, the academic literature has generally differentiated between two disability models: 'medical' versus 'social'. The main attempt of this paper consists into showing how the development of robotic technologies — particularly in assistive and healthcare fields — could allow us to go beyond this outdated dichotomy, contributing to create new philosophical premises to rethink the universality of the human condition, that is, the sense of what we intend for 'good human life'.
Universal Design: Places to Start
Authors: Dolmage Jay
Published: March 2016

Beginning with a series of possible ways to introduce an essay on Universal Design for Learning, this contribution instead resolves to offer a long listing or inventory of different places to start implementing Universal Design in classroom settings. The goal is to reframe Universal Design away from checklists and reductive formulas and towards more critical, problematized and active forms of engagement or "ways to move." The long archive is also offered through a linked Wiki which provides a place to add ideas, respond to those already offered, and suggest ways that access needs might collide.
Syllabus: Beyond Quality of Life: Exploring Disability and Bioethics
Authors: Schilling Carol , Blankmeyer Burke Teresa
Published: March 2016

The syllabus for "Beyond Quality of Life: Exploring Disability and Bioethics" was designed for the Master of Bioethics program at the University of Pennsylvania. This first course on disability for the program conducted an inquiry into bioethical responses to human variations that become categorized as disability. The interdisciplinary project of disability studies provided a fresh theoretical and practical lens through which to view bioethics, its philosophical framework, and the library of cases concerning disability that are argued within that frame.
Picturing Mental Disability in the Classroom: Review of Ellen Forney's Marbles
Authors: Samuels Ellen
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Review of Kuppers, Petra. Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction.
Authors: Kleege Georgina
Published: March 2016

No abstract available
Book Review Ronald J. Berger, Introducing Disability Studie
Authors: Jarman Michelle
Published: March 2016

No abstract available