REGISTER NOW In honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month and the thirtieth anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Disability Studies Initiative is joining the Carsey-Wolf Center and the UCSB Library to host a virtual discussion with the directors of Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (2020). In the early 1970s, teenagers with disabilities faced a future shaped by isolation, discrimination, and institutionalization. Located in the Catskills, New York, ramshackle Camp ...

REGISTER NOW Drawing together insights from disability theory, literary studies, and interdisciplinary pain studies, Lau's lecture contributes to what Alyson Patsavas has called "cripistemologies of pain" that prompt us to think from the position of pained lived experience to imagine radically different models of care that move beyond the reductive binary of either amelioration or annihilation of pain. Can we theorize a standpoint (or what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has called "sitpoint") theory of pain that attends ...

REGISTER NOW Simone Chess will focus on early modern disability, queerness, and adaptive technologies. Chess is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (Routledge, 2016) and coeditor, with Colby Gordon and Will Fisher, of a special issue on “Early Modern Trans Studies” for the Journal ...

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82480745298?pwd=a3RkcUVKaWJoN0dEUkZPQjFQWVN1dz09 This discussion will focus on thinking about new paradigms in autism and neurodiversity. We will read the article titled "Throw Away the Master's Tools: Liberating Ourselves From the Pathology Paradigm," by Nick Walker (from Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking ) and the introduction to Autistic Disturbances (2018) by Julia Miele Rodas. If time permits, the discussion will also include Mad at School: Rhetorics of Disability and Academic Life (2011) by Margaret ...

Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87492220092?pwd=RExPbnl0N3d0ZVR2ZGpEdkJ1cHdPQT09 While the lived reality of disability in the Middle Ages was surely a wretched one, at the same time we encounter persistent associations between disabled and royal or aristocratic bodies in medieval culture, its imagery and narratives. Nowhere is this truer than in the Arthurian world, at whose core there lies a powerful but immobile figure, the Rich Fisher King. This talk looks at such linkage through Arthurian texts and illustrated ...

ATTEND DISCUSSION We will be discussing Professor Elizabeth Guffey's introduction and chapter 1 to her latest book, Designing Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018). A Professor of Art & Design History, and Director of the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory at State University of New York at Purchase, Professor Guffey co-edited Making Disability Modern (Bloomsbury, 2020) and is the founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Design and Culture (Routledge). Cosponsored by the IHC’s Disability ...

ATTEND DISCUSSION Professor Rachel Lambert (Education, UC Santa Barbara) will offer a workshop on Universal Design for Learning (UDL). She will shed light on its development, including roots in Universal Design. She will describe the radical possibilities in UDL, as well as critiques. She will present some of her own work, which seeks to integrate design thinking as a process for educators to use UDL to (re)design curriculum, spaces and systems. Prior to the workshop, ...

Our discussion will focus on Isidro González's paper and another piece of scholarship. González's research focuses on Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded in Eldridge, California, and how eugenics field workers—those involved in observing and notating nonnormative (“dysgenic”) phenotypic, familial, and lifestyle attributes of institutionalized people—crafted individualized clinical narratives of "inmates" to not only legitimize their profession, the state employer, and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), but also to surveil, pathologize, and medicalize “unfit” human ...

In celebration of Black History Month, the Disability Studies Initiative invites you to discuss two essays that shed light on the material intersections of disability and race: Josh Lukin's short article, "Disability and Blackness" (2006), which calls for the consideration of Black experiences in the history of disability and its artistic representations, and Michelle Jarman's "Race and Disability in US Literature" (2018), which takes its framework from Black feminist theories and calls for relational approaches ...

Thirty years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, much of the built environment remains inaccessible to disabled people. Accordingly, the vast majority of research and writing on accessibility seeks to convince the unconvinced of the value of inclusion. This field, which Professor Aimi Hamraie terms “Access Studies,” would benefit from greater engagement with the concepts, practices, and political commitments of critical disability studies. In this talk, Hamraie will discuss the emerging field ...

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 ...