People performing diverse embodiments of sexualities, gender, and variable physical and neurological patterns, among others, often encounter specific difficulties and sometimes hostility when practicing Buddhism. In this talk, Professor Bee Scherer will look at these experiences of abjection, their grounding in social psychology, and how they relate to positions found in Buddhist philosophy and narratives. How can we negotiate oppressive readings of, for example, key Buddhist notions such as karma, No-Self, and detachment? How can ...

The co-conveners of the Disability Studies Initiative invite you to come and join us for tea or coffee. We will discuss as a group potential activities for the year and come up with an agenda of exciting events and initiatives. Let's meet face to face if you can. Participants may also register and join us online so we can exchange ideas and brainstorm about current research in Critical Disability Studies. Let's continue our work on ...

This talk will examine how fools in early modern drama and literature were considered intellectually disabled, if viewed in the light of early modern criteria for intellectual disability. The English law was the discipline that most of all strove to conceptualize such a disability: calling it idiocy, it defined it as someone’s incapacity to manage property. Such thinking influenced the way literary characters were represented on the stage and page. Hence, they showcased a tendency ...

Please join us for a discussion on disability in Latin American and Latinx contexts. While disability studies is a diverse and evolving field, much of the focus has been on exploring disabled bodyminds in the context of the Global North, often leaving out questions of neoliberalism, colonialism, and racialization. This conversation will begin to explore how scholars interested in disability might begin expanding this conversation by including both Latin American and US Latinx perspectives on ...

In her 1982 work, In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan outlined a new manner for women to think about moral values and practices, and put forward the concept of care, which has recently been at the core of a new ethics. The ethics of care centers our social relations on vulnerability, dependency, and interdependence. In this session of the Disability Studies Initiative, we will discuss works that address the limit of individual autonomy and the ...

In this talk, Alexis Padilla will focus on defining and showing the significance of LatDisCrit as a transdisciplinary sub-field. Padilla will use three illustrative counterstories to capture how disability gets racialized in Latinx marginalization dynamics, while race/ethnicity serves as a proxy for oppressive disablement through exclusionary processes within US settings. Dr. Alexis Padilla is the Director of Research at the Disability Policy Consortium. Padilla is the author of Disability, Intersectional Agency, and Latinx Identity. Theorizing ...