Enabling the classroom and the curriculum: higher education, literary studies and disability

In this article the tripartite model of disability is applied to the lived experience of twenty-first-century higher education. The tripartite model facilitates a complex understanding of disability that recognises assumptions and discrimination but not at the cost of valued identity. This being so, not only the normative positivisms and non-normative negativisms but also the non-normative positivisms of the classroom and the curriculum are explored. Inclusion is taken as the starting point and the argument progresses to a profound and innovational appreciation of disability. The problem addressed is that inclusion, as shown in The Biopolitics of Disability, constitutes little more than inclusion-ism until disability is recognised in the context of alternative lives and values that neither enforce nor reify normalcy. Informed by this understanding, the article adopts the disciplinary example of literary studies and refers to Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney as a primary text. The conclusion is that, despite passive and active resistance, disability enters higher education in many ways, most of which are beneficial to students and educators alike

Not forgetting happiness: The tripartite model of disability and its application in literary criticism

This interdisciplinary article draws on the social sciences to posit a tripartite model from which literary research into disability can benefit. Ableism and disablism are defined by normative positivisms and non-normative negativisms respectively, but consideration is also given to non-normative positivisms. Informed by experiential knowledge, the model is illustrated with reference to a trilogy of literary representations of blindness: George Sava’s novel Happiness is blind (1987), Brian Friel’s play Molly Sweeney (1994), and Stephen Kuusisto’s memoir Eavesdropping (2006). The result is a complex reading that recognises problems but also non-normative renderings of happiness