Mad at school
Subtitle: rhetorics of mental disability and academic life
By: Margaret Price
Series: Corporealities; Corporealities
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Language: eng
Number of pages: 279
ISBN-13: 9780472071388; 9780472051380
Subjects: Stereotyping; Education (Higher); Mentally ill; Psychology; College students; Mental health; Mentally Disabled Persons; College teachers; Faculty; Personal Narratives; Communication; Employment
Description: "Mad at School explores the contested boundaries between disability, illness, and mental illness in the setting of U.S. higher education. Much of the research and teaching within disability studies assumes a disabled body but a rational and energetic (an "agile") mind. In Mad at School, scholar and disabilities activist Margaret Price asks: How might our education practices change if we understood disability to incorporate the disabled mind? Mental disability (more often called "mental illness") is a topic of fast-growing interest in all spheres of American culture, including popular, governmental, aesthetic, and academic. Mad at School is a close study of the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture. Investigating spaces including classrooms, faculty meeting rooms, and job searches, Price challenges her readers to reconsider long-held values of academic life, including productivity, participation, security, and independence. Ultimately, she argues that academic discourse both produces and is produced by a tacitly priviledged "able mind," and that U.S. higher education would benefit from practices that create a more accessible academic world. Mad at School is the first book to use a disability-studies perspective to focus specifically on the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture at institutions of higher education. Individual chapters examine the language used to denote mental disability; the role of "participation" and "presence" in student learning; the role of "collegiality" in faculty work; the controversy over "security" and free speech that has arisen in the wake of recent school shootings; and the marginalized status of independent scholars with mental disabilities." --
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-271) and index.
Table of contents: title: Listening to the subject of mental disability : intersections of academic and medical discourses; title: Ways to move : presence, participation, and resistance in kairotic space; title: The essential functions of the position : collegiality and productivity; title: Assaults on the ivory tower : representations of madness in the discourse of U.S. school shootings; title: "Her pronouns wax and wane" : mental disability, autobiography, and counter diagnosis; title: In/ter/dependent scholarship.