ASU and Disability Studies

Arizona State University regents (via a committee) rejected a disability studies major (while approving a slate of technical and business majors). Majors get rejected all the time, but this one was telling, because the regent quoted clearly didn't get the humanities. Amy Silverman wrote about the decision.

Here's the reporting on the actual decision.

Searle said the degree in disability resources was a combination of arts, humanity, social science and looking at the issues that people with disabilities face.

Regent Larry Penley challenged the report ASU presented, stating that while addressing disability resources was important, he struggled with the learning outcomes presented.

“I struggle with whether those learning outcomes really articulate something students or prospective students can legitimately understand,” Penley said.
The degree was described as a combination of theory and practice to prepare students to address injustices, exclusions and misapprehensions regarding disabilities through advocacy, education, knowledge of the law and historical awareness. Those seeking the degree could pursue careers in business, policy and advocacy, social work, education, government, community and non‐governmental organizations, according to the presented learning outcomes.
“The demand in this space is quite intense in terms of interest and opportunity for students,” Searle said in defense of the program.

Penley said he could not vote for a degree he did not fully understand.

The actual learning outcomes are pretty typical. One could make similar outcomes for similar degrees.

These are screenshots of the pages linked to above. I know they are tough to read. /8 pic.twitter.com/wSlBw1rcwV

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) November 4, 2017

This regent, a former business school dean, needs to take some humanities courses.

On Being a Cripple - The Work of Nancy Mairs

Nancy Mairs: A great writer on disability, physicality, sex, pain, meaning, and more has passed away:

Here's the NYT obituary.

Ms. Mairs was a budding poet in her late 20s, suffering from agoraphobia and depression — she had once attempted suicide — when she was told that she had M.S. The inexorable progress of the disease provided her with her richest subject, as she wrote of her fears and hopes, her resolve to push against her limitations and her aversion to such euphemisms as “differently abled.”

“I refuse to participate in the degeneration of the language to the extent that I deny that I have lost anything in the course of this calamitous disease; I refuse to pretend that the only differences between you and me are the various ordinary ones that distinguish any one person from another,” she wrote in the introduction to “Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life” (1986), the essay collection that established her as a fierce, funny, feminist voice. Her essays “On Being a Cripple” and “Sex and the Gimpy Girl” made the point, defiantly.
...
“To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain,” she wrote in the introduction to “Carnal Acts.” “It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially but simultaneously. In my experience, the more such ambivalences you can hold in your head, the better off you are, intellectually and emotionally.”

I'm most familiar with her essay "On Being a Cripple," a version of which is hosted here:

First, the matter of semantics. I am a cripple. I choose this word to name me. I choose from among several possibilities, the most common of which are “handicapped” and “disabled.” I made the choice a number of years ago, without thinking, unaware of my motives for doing so. Even now, I’m not sure what those motives are, but I recognize that they are complex and not entirely flattering. People–crippled or not–wince at the word “cripple,” as they do not at “handicapped” or “disabled.” Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates /gods /viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger.

Go read it. It's worth your time. And remember Nancy Mairs.

Boston Bound #MAA2016

I am heading to the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy to talk about disability studies. I have a peculiar relationship with the field, as my published work is in cultural history, focusing on Venice, political myths, narratives of materiality, hagiography, and the pre-modern Mediterranean world. My next book, though, will be on contemporary disability rights issues, as is most of my journalism. So I'm very pleased to be chairing a session in which I'll have a chance to think about how my academic expertise and public advocacy intersect. Here's the session:

Friday: 10:15 AM–noon: Concurrent Sessions

13. Disability Studies in the Middle Ages [Dedham]

Organizer: Kisha G. Tracy (Fitchburg State University) 

Chair: David Perry (Dominican University) 

• John P. Sexton (Bridgewater State University) and Kisha G. Tracy (Fitchburg State University), “Disability Studies in the Middle Ages: Where Are We Now?” 
• Wendy Turner (Georgia Regents University), “The Past, Present, and Future of Medieval Disability Studies” 
• Moira Fitzgibbons (Marist College), “Managing Diagnosis in the Medieval/Disability Studies Classroom” 
• Karen Bruce Wallace (The Ohio State University), “The Body That Is Not a Body: Wisdom’s Construction of the Impaired Body in the Old English Boethius and Anglo-Saxon Conceptions of Corporeal Form and Function” 
• M. W. Bychowski (George Washington University), “Mad for Margery: Disability and the Imago Dei in the Book of Margery Kempe” 

5 short papers, and then ... we'll talk.

I'm particularly interested in thinking about the interdisciplinarity of pre-modern disability studies and glad to have colleagues from various disciplines on the panel.

Later today I will have a piece on "sexual ableism" and the case of Anna Stubblefield, published by the L.A. Review of Books, my first for them. I'll update here with a link when it's online.

Disability Studies at Toledo!

Kim Nielsen, professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo, has a new blog post up at the Beacon Broadside (note: from Beacon Press, also my publisher) announcing their undergraduate major in disability studies. It's the first such major in the country.

“I’ve never been this excited about my education before,” my student said as we discussed his undergraduate B.A. degree in Disability Studies. Then he laughed at himself with astonishment. Because of his commitment to the topic, he also was working harder in his college coursework than he ever had before; and he’d never imagined that academic hard work and excitement could go together. This student, like all of our students, came to the University of Toledo’s Disability Studies Program seeking a future job (for himself) and justice (for all).

This fall the University of Toledo (Ohio) launched the nation’s first undergraduate, interdisciplinary B.A. in Disability Studies. Enabled by a significant endowment from The Ability Center of Greater Toledo, and with support from our campus leadership, we’ve hired marvelous faculty. We’re drawing in marvelous students. We’re hearing from interested employers who want our students as interns and future employees. Our courses prepare students for employment by enabling them to better understand the world around them, think about the future, and solve problems. We offer courses on literature and poetry, history, public policy, law, health care systems, and sexuality through a disability analysis. Some of our students are disabled; some are not.

I met Nielsen and her colleagues last week. Nielsen attended my public writing workshop, then they hosted me for a talk on police violence and disabilities. I'm thrilled with the work they are doing there, modeling how to center disability studies in an undergraduate context. Congrats to everyone at Toledo!