“What...[thought] cannot bear to know”: Crippin’ the Limits of “Thinkability”

In this essay, I show how disability studies scholarship can challenge normative ways of thinking in higher educational contexts. I call this “crippin’ the limits of thinkability.” To make this argument, I draw on one pedagogical context, the course Multicultural Education for Leadership Personnel, offered to nurse educators enrolled in a doctoral degree in Instructional Leadership offered jointly through the College of Education and the College of Nursing in the university where I teach. In this course, through disability studies scholarship, students came to interrogate their own socialization into authority-based practices intimately tied to the positivist claims of evidence-based research. Thus, in this paper, I use queer theory and crip theory to describe three methods: the study of limits, the study of ignorance, and the study of reading practice (Britzman, 1998) to illustrate how disability studies scholarship enabled students to critically reflect on the knowledge of bodies and the bodies of knowledge manifested in nursing pedagogy and curriculum

Project Re•center dot Vision: disability at the edges of representation

The representational history of disabled people can largely be characterized as one of being put on display or hidden away. Self-representations have been a powerful part of the disability rights and culture movement, but recently scholars have analysed the ways in which these run the risk of creating a ‘single story’ that centres the experiences of white, western, physically disabled men. Here we introduce and theorize with Project Re•Vision, our arts-based research project that resists this singularity by creating and centring, without normalizing, representations that have previously been relegated to the margins. We draw from body becoming and new materialist theory to explore the dynamic ways in which positionality illuminates bodies of difference and open into a discussion about what is at stake when these stories are let loose into the world

Bodies that do not matter: Social policy, education, and the politics of difference

This dissertation offers a re-theorization of disability by asking the following question: within what historical, social, economic, and political conditions does disability as an analytic of difference get constructed in a dialectical relationship with gender, class, caste, and race? To respond to this question, I conducted an ethnographic study of a voluntary organization in South India that provides rehabilitation services to children with disabilities. While interviewing the staff, I was soon aware of a persistent irony--the fact that the distinguishing line typically used to differentiate between client and service provider was blurred. This was because many service providers, particularly the poor, single, lower caste women, spoke of lives of destitution that often seemed to outstrip by far the destitution experienced by many of the disabled children who received services there. Moreover, the educational resources these disabled children had access to and the living environment they inhabited at DOST, were far superior to the impoverished conditions in which their able-bodied family members and some of their service providers lived. At the same time, even though it was the disabled children who were institutionalized, it was mostly their service providers who found themselves permanently shackled to DOST, unable to leave because of their desperate dependence on the voluntary organization for their economic survival. On examining these contradictions within the broader context of social structures, this study therefore describes how the politics of race, class, gender, and disability play a crucial part in determining who is entitled to quality educational services, the denial of which produces marginal populations whose limited contributions to the market are read as unproductive, who thus become dependent on social welfare, and who are thereby stripped of their rights to full citizenship. In this way, this study explains how the ideological category of disability is constructed so as to justify oppressive practices that are also implicated in the production of race, gender, class, and caste oppression, as well

Disability and the Political Economy of Place: Case Study of a Voluntary Organization in South India

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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/allyshi

(Dis)Embodied Form: Issues of Disabled Women.

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Critical Dis/ability Studies: Counternarrative of Students with Disabilities in Georgia

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Dissertation Studies: Counternarratives, Digital Ethnography, Storywork, and Performative Memoir

n this emergent scholar session, a group of researchers present their dissertation studies on a wide array of topics such as the misrepresentation of Asian Americans in media; counterstories of the intersection of disability & technology and its impact on identities of adults with dis/abilities; teaching with passion: engaging in Indigenous thought and storywork; and performing identities of the auditory-verbal deaf students in the classrooms: a teacher’s performative memoir. These researchers explore creative ways to push methodological boundaries, perform dissertation writing, and liberate academic writing by diving into life and writing into contradiction in schools, families, and communities in the U. S. South. Through visual, graphic, multimedia, and performative presentations, the presenters will illustrate diverse forms of dissertation research and representations such as a multiperspectival cultural studies, counternarratives, digital ethnography, Indigenous storywork, performative memoir, dance, fiction, painting, poetry, spoken word, and play. Theoretical traditions, forms of inquiry, and modes of expression are particularly explored.Innovative writings engendered from the inquiries are demonstrated. Potentials, challenges, and future directions of these inquiries and representations are also discussed