Society for Disability Studies

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Sociology and Equity Studies in Education
________________________________________
SES1957 Doing Disability in Theory and Everyday Life
Fall 2006 – Monday 10:00-1:00

Instructor: Dr. Tanya Titchkosky
Office: 12-236
Phone: 416-923-6641 ext 2248
Fax: 416-926-4751
tanyatitchkosky@oise.utoronto.ca
Office Hours: TBA & By Appointment

Course Description
“Doing Disability” brings us to a central premise of disability studies – disability is a space of cultural practices done by and to people. From this premise it follows that we are never alone in our bodies and so disability represents the material fact that bodies, minds, and senses always appear in the midst of people. Assuming that disability is done and re-done through everyday discursive practices, disability studies turns to a range of interdisciplinary work that enriches the potential to challenge our taken-for-granted understandings of social and political life. Theorizing how we do disability, even in the everyday of the (our) classroom, provides the occasion to critically engage contexts, such as, education, mass media, and the built environment, as they intersect with issues of identity and difference; embodiment; narrative; the constitutive structuring of ordinary, agentive, viable, life at their opposites. Orienting to disability as a social accomplishment of everyday life is a way to examine how versions of what counts as human are culturally organized and governed. Made by culture, disability is a key space of practices where we might theorize culture’s makings. In this course, we explore social models, and theories of disability, so as to develop a critical understanding of disability’s appearance in everyday life and to work to open ourselves to question how these new non-medicalized ways of knowing disability might influence pedagogical structures and practices.

Assigned Texts: All assigned readings are available in print and available through RFB&D, or on-line at journal sites, or on disk. While each assigned text is available in an alternative format, please contact me if there is another form of access required.

Course Themes
Week 1: Introductions, conversations, and the question of access and classroom practice
Week 2: What is (not) disability? What is (not) disability studies?
Week 3: Disability as medical problem and space of pathologizing and eugenic practices
Week 4: Disability as deviance and space of production of normate culture
Week 5: Disability as the problem of exclusion and bureaucratic management, and space of neo-liberal demands
Week 6: Disability as social phenomenon and critical space for critical cultural inquiry
Week 7: Disability Studies: Reading and Writing Disability Differently I
Week 8: Disability Studies: Reading and Writing Disability Differently II
– Student led seminar
Week 9: Disability as teacher and a space to re-think educational practices and beliefs
– Student led seminar
Week 10: Disability as a conflict of interpretations and space to re-visit social theory
Week 11: Disability as performance and space of creative cultural practice
-- Student led seminars
Week 12: Disability as X and space of Y – Student led seminar
Week 13: Disability as made to appear in the everyday life of this classroom and space of what sort of issue or questions? Evaluation of course.
Assignments and Evaluation:
There are two short exercises designed to bring us in touch with disability as it appears in everyday life and awaken our desire to forge alternative relations to its appearances. These short exercises, upon reflection, will eventually culminate in a major paper. However, alternative ideas for final writing assignments are welcomed. Please seek my assistance in designing alternative formats of evaluation. Each class focuses on one or two readings; these readings are listed first and are marked with an asterisk. The listed background readings should be consulted in relation to your interests and needs in developing a vivid understanding of disability studies. I welcome discussion of readings people are pursuing that may reflect or extremely disturb a disability studies perspective.
One— Exercise I—20%
Due: Week 3
Please describe an encounter with disability in your everyday life. Describe how disability is being done and the context within which it has made an appearance. Describe your concrete actual lived experience while asking how you knew this was the appearance of disability. Go on to distance yourself from this experience, moreover, distance yourself from any sense of an enlightened liberal or liberating relation to disability. Conclude by discussing your experience of the appearance of disability in your everyday life as it is NOT informed by a disability studies perspective. Length: 4-6 pages.

Two— Exercise II —20%
Due: Week 6
Begin from the premise that to encounter disability in everyday life is to encounter, what Paul Ricoeur refers to as, a conflict of interpretation. Consider an appearance in your life that you encounter as disability. Release the conflict of interpretations within which this disability appearance has been made manifest, i.e., what cultural values, beliefs or structures must exist such that disability appears in the way that it does? Put differently, given that disability appears, but is not “at one” with what grounds its appearance, what sort of question must the space of disability be? Drawing upon disability studies theorizing, conclude by considering how the conflict of interpretations that disability must be provides a space for certain preliminary issues or yet to be developed questions. Length 4-6 pages
Three—Group Led Seminar–15%
Due: Varies, depends on date of seminar presentation
In small groups, students will select a way that disability appears in everyday life or a way that disability is defined. Please then trouble the immediate sensibility of disability’s obvious appearance by regarding it as providing for, or made possible by, various questions and issues. Use the readings to help you do this and to bring us into disability as a space of cultural processes and questions. A group grade will be assigned for the seminar. However, each group member is invited to write a 2-3 page analytical reflection on the presentation focusing on what was and was not learned in the process of leading the seminar (You may wish to have this reflection taken into account in the seminar grade).

Four—Project—45%
Due: Final Class – Please discuss alternatives final projects with me.
In considering the first two exercises, it should now be possible to discern and develop your particular interest in disability and disability studies. Consulting some “location of culture” (Bhabha) within which disability makes an appearance, make use of course material in order to address the following: What sort of question must the space of disability be and how might we develop alternative relations to it? Length: 15-20 pages.

Course Outline and Readings
Week 1: Introductions, conversations, and questions of access and classroom practices
Week 2: What is (not) disability? What is (not) disability studies?
*Michalko, Rod. (2002). The Difference that Disability Makes. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press. Ch. 3: The Social Location of Suffering. 41 - 72.
[RFB&D Product#: DT-GT712]
Barnes, Colin. (1998). "The Social Model of Disability: A Sociological Phenomenon Ignored by Sociologists?" Ed. Tom Shakespeare. The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives. London: Cassell Academic: 66-78.
Hughes, Bill and Kevin Patterson. (1997). “The Social Model of Disability and the
Disappearing Body: Towards a Sociology of Impairment.” In Disability & Society. Vol. 12 (3): 325 - 340.
Linton, Simi, Mello, Susan, and O’Neill, John. (1995). “Disability Studies: Expanding the Parameters of Diversity.” Radical Teacher. Vol. 47: 4-10.
McRuer and Wilkerson. (2003). “Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability
Studies.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Vol. 9 (1-2): 1 - 24.
Murphy, Robert. (1987). The Body Silent. New York: W.W. Norton.
Oliver, Michael. (1996). Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice. New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
Oliver, Michael (1990). The Politics of Disablement. Hampshire, London: The MacMillan Press Ltd.
Zola, Irving Kenneth. (1993) “Self, Identity and the Naming Question: Reflections on the Language of Disability.” Social Science and Medicine, 36(2), 167-173.
Week 3: Disability as medical problem and space of pathologizing and eugenic practices
*Hubbard, Ruth. (1997). “Abortion and Disability.” In Lennard Davis (Ed.), The Disability Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. 187 - 200. [RFB&D Product#: AD-FV452]
*Patterson, Annette and Martha Satz. (2002). “Genetic Counselling and the Disabled:
Feminism Examines the Stance of those who Stand at the Gate.” Hypatia. Vol. 17 (3): 118 - 144. [On line library holdings]
Kerr, Anne and Tom Shakespeare. (2002). Genetic Politics: From Eugenics to Genome.
Cheltenham, UK: New Clarion Press.
Overboe, James. (1999) “‘Difference in Itself’: Validating Disabled People’s Lived
Experience.” Body & Society, Vol. 5 (4): 17 - 29.
Parens, Erik. (Ed.). (1998). Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications.
Washington, D C: Georgetown University Press.
Russell, Marta. 1998. Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract.
Maine: Common Courage Press.
Silvers, Anita. (1998). “A Fatal Attraction to Normalizing: Treating Disabilities as
Deviations from ‘Species-Typical’ Functioning.” In Erik Parens (Ed.), Enhancing
Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications. Washington: Georgetown University Press. 95 - 123.
Zola, Irving Kenneth. (1977). “Healthism and Disabling Medicalization.” In I. Illich (Ed.), Disabling Professions. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.
Reaume, Geoffrey. (2002). Lunatic to patient to person: Nomenclature in psychiatric
history and the influence of patients' activism in North America. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 25:4, 405-426.
Week 4: Disability as deviance and space of production of normate culture
*Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. (1997). Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Ch. 1 “Disability, Identity, and Representation” New York: Columbia University Press. 5- 18. [RFB&D Product#: AD-FS528]
*McRuer, Robert. (2002). “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” In Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, (Eds.), Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. 88-99. [RFB&D Product#: DT-GX090]
Titchkosky, Tanya. (2000a) “Disability Studies: The Old and the New?” Canadian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology. Vol. 25(2): 197 - 224.
Week 5: Disability as the problem of exclusion and bureaucratic management, and space of neo-liberal demands
*Stiker, Henri-Jacques. (1999). A History of Disability. Ch. 6:“The Birth of Rehabilitation.” Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 121- 189. [RFB&D Product#: AD-GG836]
*Prince, Michael J. (2004). “Canadian Disability Policy: Still a Hit-and-Miss Affair” in Canadian Journal of Sociology. Vol29(1): 59 - 82. [On-line library holdings]
Bickenbach, Jerome. (2006). “Canadian Charter v American ADA: Individual rights or Collective Responsiblities” in Crichton, Anne and Lyn Jongbloed (Eds). Disability and Social Policy in Canada. Toronto: Captus Press Inc. 87 – 95.
Gadacz, Rene. (1994). Re-Thinking Dis-Ability: New Structures, New Relationships. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.
Driedger, Diane. 1989. The Last Civil Rights Movement: Disabled Peoples’
International. New York: St. Martine Press.
Jones, Ruth J. E. 1994. Their Rightful Place: Society and Disability. Toronto: Canadian Academy of the Arts.
Ingstad, Benedicte and Reynolds Whyte, Susan. (Eds.). (1995). Disability and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rapp, Rayna and Faye Ginsburg. (2001). “Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kingship,
Re-imagining Citizenship.” Public Culture: Society for Transnational Cultural Studies. Vol. 13 (3): 553 - 556.
Shapiro, Joseph P (1994). No Pity : People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights
Movement. New York: Random House. [RFB&D Product#: DT-MM372}
Tremain, Shelly, (2002). “On the Subject of Impairment.” In Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (Eds.), Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. London: Continuum. 32 - 47.
Week 6: Disability as social phenomenon and critical space for critical cultural inquiry
*Asch, Adrienne. (2004). “Critical Race Theory, Feminism, and Disability: Reflections on Social Justice and Personal Identity.” In Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchinson (Eds.), Gendering Disability. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 9-44 [RFB&D Product#: DT-HA498]
*Paterson, K., and Hughes, B. (1999) “Disability Studies and Phenomenology: The Carnal Politics of Everyday Life.” Disability and Society, 14(5), 597-610. [On-line holdings.]
Hunt, Paul. (1998[1966]). “A Critical Condition.” In Tom Shakespeare (Ed.), The Disability Studies Reader: Social Science Perspectives. London: Cassell Academic. 7 - 19.
Longmore, Paul. (1997). “Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemmas: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal.” In The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (pp. 134-158). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. [RFB&D Product#: AB-FV667]
Morris, Jenny. (Ed.). (1996). Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability. London: The Women’s Press, Ltd.
Week 7: Disability Studies: Reading and Writing Disability Differently I
*Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell. (2006). Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [RFB&D Product#: DT-HP913]
Grosz, Elizabeth. (2003). “Histories of the Present and Future: Feminism, Power,
Bodies.” In Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss (eds.), Thinking the Limits of
the Body. New York: State University of New York Press. 25 - 38.
Linton, Simi. (1998). Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New
York University Press. [RFB&D Product#: DT-MM747]
Titchkosky, Tanya. (2005a). “Disability in the News: A Reconsideration of Reading,” Disability & Society. Vol. 20 (6): 653 - 666.
Week 8: Disability Studies: Reading and Writing Disability Differently II, Student led seminar
*Shildrick, Margrit. (2005a). "Beyond the Body of Bioethics: Challenging the Conventions." In Margrit Shildrick and Roxanne Mykitiuk (Eds.), Ethics of the Body: Postconventional Challenges. Cambridge: MIT Press: 1 - 29. [RFB&D Product#: DT-HJ762]
*Diprose, Rosalyn. (2005). “A “Genethics” That Makes Sense: Take Two.” In
Margrit Shildrick and Roxanne Mykitiuk (Eds.), Ethics of the Body:Postconventional Challenges. Cambridge: MIT Press: 237-258. [RFB&D Product#: DT-HJ762]
Rinaldi, Jacqueline. (1996). “Rhetoric and Healing: Revising Narratives about Disability.”
College English. Vol. 58 (7): 820 - 834.
Weiss, Gail. (2003). “The Body as a Narrative Horizon.” In Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and
Gail Weiss (Eds.), Thinking the Limits of the Body. New York: State University
of New York Press. 25 - 38.
Week 9: Disability as teacher and a space to re-think educational practices and beliefs
– Student led seminar
*Erevelles, Nirmala. (2000). “Educating Unruly Bodies: Critical Pedagogy, Disability
Studies, and the Politics of Schooling.” Educational Theory, Vol. 50 (1): 25 - 47. [On line library holdings]
Belkin, Lisa. (2004, September 12). “The Lessons of Classroom 506” in The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/12MAINSTREAMING.html
Ferri, Beth A. and David J. Connor. (2006). Reading Resistance: Discourses of
Exclusion in Desegregation and Inclusion Debates. New York: Peter Lang.
Gabel, Susan L. (Ed.). (2005). Disability Studies in Education: Readings in Theory and Method. New York: Peter Lang.
Jenkins, Richard. (Ed.). (1998). Questions of Competence: Culture, Classification and
Intellectual Disability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Michalko, Rod. (2001). “Blindness Enters the Classroom.” Disability & Society, Vol. 16 (3): 349 - 359.
Peters, Susan. (1999). “Transforming Disability Identity through Critical Literacy and
the Cultural Politics of Language.” In Marian Corker and Sally French (Eds.), Disability Discourse. Buckingham: Open University Press. 103 - 115.
Titchkosky, Tanya (2003). Disability, Self and Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Final Chapter
Week 10: Disability as a conflict of interpretations and space to re-visit social theory
*Mollow, Anna. (2004). "Identity Politics and Disability Studies: A Critique of Recent Theory," Michigan Quarterly Review. Vol. XLIII (2): 269 - 296. [On-line library holdings]
*Lorde, Audre. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.”Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. 114-123. [RFB&D Product#: AB-DA560]
Pronger, Brian. (2002). Body Fascism: Salvation in the Technology of Physical Fitness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Radley, Alan. (2002). “Portrayals of Suffering: On Looking Away, Looking At, and the Comprehension of Illness Experience.” In Body & Society. Vol. 8 (3): 1 - 24.
Shildrick, Margrit (2005b). "The Disabled Body, Genealogy and Undecidability,"
Cultural Studies. Vol. 19 (6): 755 - 770.
Scott, Joan. (1998). “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: or The Uses of Postcolonial Structuralist Theory For Feminism.”Feminist Studies. Vol. 14 (1):32-50.
Week 11: Disability as performance and space of creative cultural practice
Student led seminars
*Mairs, Nancy, (1996). Waist-High in the World. Boston: Beacon Press.
[RFB&D Product#: AB-FP049]
Kuppers, Petra. (2003). Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. New
York: Routledge.
Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. (1995). Performativity and Performance.
London: Routledge
Sandalh, Carrier and Philip Auslander (Eds.). (2005). Bodies in Commotion: Disability
and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Week 12: Disability as X and space of Y – Student led seminar
Readings to be decided as a class from: Snyder, Sharon L. , Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, (Eds.), Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. [RFB&D Product#: DT-GX090]
Week 13: Disability as made to appear in the everyday life of this classroom and space of what sort of issue or questions?
Evaluation of course. Readings to be decided by the class

SES1957 Doing Disability in Theory and Everyday Life
Final Paper – 45% Due December 15th by Noon. Length: 15-20 pages.

In considering the first two exercises, it should now be possible to discern and develop your particular interest in disability and disability studies. Consulting some “Location of Culture” (Bhabha, 1994) within which disability makes an appearance, make use of course material in order to address the following: What sort of question must the space of disability be and how might we develop alternative relations to it?

Or
In the exercises completed earlier in the class, lies a problematic, an indeterminate, unsettled, ambiguous knot of questions worthy of examination. Beginning from your lived experience of an appearance of disability, let your exercises now lead you to a discussion of this problematic. Explore disability as a space of questions by revealing how this problematic is not peculiar to you, but takes its existence from culture, is, in deed, a doing of culture. Turn then to culture and show how this problematic is repeated or represented in everyday life. That is, consult culture as a way to mirror what you have begun to image regarding disability and non-disability. Once you have done this, use what you have learned in class to theorize, wonder about (but not explain), the meaning of disability for the everyday life of capitalist, neo-liberal, colonial power organizing our embodiment. Working with the need to imagine things otherwise, Homi K. Bhabha’s (1994:2) work provocatively suggests that:

The move away from the singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions – of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation – that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating…”

The appearance of disability, from which your exercises proceeded, can be read as a claim to identity inhabited by a host of positions, issues and powers. As neither the orginary cause nor the after effect, what might the space of disability be and what might be elaborated in that space?

If you need a little extra guidance, please read the following paper where I exemplify what I am asking you to do:
Titchkosky, Tanya. (2005). “Disability in the News: A Reconsideration of Reading,” Disability & Society. Vol. 20 (6): 653 - 666. Log on to e-library resources and go to the following and get the following 09687599, Disability & Society (Vol: 20, Issue: 6) pp. 655 - 668

Or An Alternative

The body – what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body – is a medium of culture… The body is not only a text of culture. It is also… a practical, direct locus of social control. Banally, through table manners and toilet habits, through seemingly trivial routines, rules, and practices, culture is “made body”…
Susan Bordo, Gender/Body/Knowledge (1989:13).

Pedagogic Aim: This exercise asks you to demonstrate your ability to engage the social organization of knowledge about disability as it relates to the three general basic themes of disability studies.
One: There are powerful Traditional Conceptions of Disability (e.g., bio-medical, individualistic, bureaucratic, and sociology of deviance conceptions of disability).
Two: There are Social Model(s) of Disability which conceive of disability as the effect of complex social and political arrangements and which make disability a site of oppression.
Three: Disability exists in our world as both and thus is a prime critical space for critical inquiry where both embodiment and the world may be imagined otherwise than ordinary.
Assignment: Part One
Go to a library at OISE/UT. Pay attention to your movement through the library space, the socially accepted depository of important human knowledge. Use whatever means you deem fit to find two books. The first of these books needs to represent theme one: a traditional, medicalized or individualized rendering of disability. The second of these books needs to represent theme two: a social conception of disability and not a traditional study of disability. Please sign out these two books. When you sign out the books, take them with you to some location other than the library, get someone else to look at your two books. Consider how you experience your two books as you flip, glance, and read snippits. (Attach full citations and the copy of any one or two pages from each book to your paper as an appendix.)
Part Two
Please read no less than 5 pages from each book. On the basis of your readings, establish how book 1 is indeed representative of theme one, and establish how book 2 is indeed a representative of theme two. Use words from the text to demonstrate the differences between the books. Write up your comparative analysis of the two different books as they relate to two different ways of knowing/studying/living with disability.

Part Three: Reading and Writing Disability Differently
For the final part of your assignment, treat some aspect (any aspect) of the experience of part one and two of the exercise as something to think about. Use your experience of disability, i.e., something that can appear and seem known through the routine order library research, as an opportunity to work with and through theme 3. Use your personal experience of engaging the issue of disability as “food for thought,” as socio-cultural data, as a critical space from which to uncover and reveal conceptions surrounding disability. In other words, write a critical theoretically informed reflection on your experience of doing this exercise, a reflection that aims to further uncover conceptions that mediate our relation to disability and may show us how such conceptions are a medium of culture.
Overall Tip: Please never quote anything without introducing the reader to why you need to quote it and by following the quote up with what you need to do with it, or how it helps you to proceed.