IDS 3212 DISABILITIES STUDIES
The field of Disability Studies investigates "disability" not as a medical state but as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon. How is disability defined, by whom, and with what consequences? How is disability represented and experienced? Exploring these questions requires thinking of disability as a constructed identity that depends on social and cultural context. This course will examine texts and sources from a variety of disiciplines that shed light on how understanding of disability have been constructed over time, and in our own day. We will juxtapose scholarly sources from history, sociology, anthropology, education, gender studies, legal studies, and public policy with representations in literature, film and the arts, and with accounts of lived experience of disability, in the form of personal essays and narratives. Students will take a very active role throughout the semester in leading discussion and developing their own individual term projects, on which they will report at several stages. Following a few introductory weeks in which we will build common ground of terms and concepts, our weekly reading will also be determined, in part, by students, using our various course readers as sources.