This course will introduce students to ongoing debates and new directions in the field of Disability Studies with special emphasis on emergent intersectional and global approaches. We will survey recent efforts to establish genealogies of disability and disability-related concepts and archaeologies of archival silences in order to develop useful theories for the present. What histories of disability and ability remain untold and what are the stakes of telling them? How might comparative and historical methods empower disability movements in the US and abroad, and how does the study of disability reveal linkages and convergences with the political and cultural movements associated with class struggle, anticolonialism, the women’s movement, LGBTQIA+ liberation, animal rights and environmentalism, and demands for racial justice? Scholarly texts we will examine include Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip, Nermala Erevelles’s Disability and Difference in Global Contexts, Jay Timothy Dolmage’s Disabled Upon Arrival, and Denis Tyler’s Disabilities of the Color Line. Students will develop their own research questions and bibliographies and have the option of writing an article- or chapter-length paper.

Class Format:

In-person