The Future of Disability Studies

The study of disability engages some of the most pressing debates of our time, questions about the beginning and end of life, prenatal testing, abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, accommodation in schools, public transportation and the workplace, technologies for the medical correction and “cure” of the non-normative body, disease, wartime injuries, post-traumatic stress, and healthcare. These questions could not be more relevant, given that people with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States, and that everyone who lives long enough will eventually become disabled. But beyond the numbers, the study of disability matters because it forces us to interrogate charged ethical and political questions about the meaning of aesthetics and cultural representation, bodily identity, and dynamics of social inclusion and/or exclusion. more

The Future of Disability Studies approaches disability as an embodied condition, a mutable historical phenomenon, and a social, political, and cultural identity; it explores some of the key debates within Disability Studies and will identify new directions for the future of the field. Among other questions, we will ask: How might we complicate the opposition between medical and social models of disability? What are the grounds for productive dialogue and intersection between Disability studies and Medical Humanities? How can we reconcile a commitment to the autonomy and self-representation of people with disabilities with the commitment to include people with the severest forms of intellectual and physical disability? How can Disability Studies further understand its relationship to other phenomena of embodied identity, such as race, ethnicity, and gender? How should Disability studies approach scientific developments in genetics, new reproductive technologies, augmentative communication devices, prosthetics etc.? How can the study of disability cast light on political debates over about healthcare, war, and education policy? And how is our consideration of these dynamics complicated and enhanced by putting them in historical and/or transnational perspective?

Working Group Schedule

SPRING 2012 EVENTS AND WORKING GROUP MEETINGS

“Showing Spine,” A Lecture/Performance by Alice Sheppard with a response by Chris Baswell
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall
February 9, 6-8pm

Put your back into it. Show some spine. Embodying metaphor in a disabled dancing body. Spine comes either from the Latin or Old French words for “thorn,” “prickle,” or, yes, “spine.” Botanically speaking, it is, “[a] stiff, sharp-pointed process produced or growing from the wood of a plant, consisting of a hardened or irregularly developed branch, petiole, stipule, or other part; a thorn; a similar process developed on fruits or leaves.” Anatomically, it is, “[o]ne or other of several sharp-pointed slender processes of various bones.” Eventually, the dictionary slides down to “any natural formation having a slender sharp-pointed form” (OED: subscription only).

Before you get to the definition or, more accurately, the list of usages for the word for the backbone of vertebrates, the dictionary descriptions stress not the rigidity of the backbone itself – though rigidizing and stabilizing are some of what a backbone does – but the relationship between the outgrowths, the thorny processes, and the word itself. I'm caught here. Intrigued.

Alice Sheppard, has been a musician and professor of medieval literature; she grew up in England and moved to the United States in 1991. Alice came to dance late in life; she began to explore movement in response to a dare from disabled dancer Homer Avila. She soon discovered that dance was a passion. Alice made her professional debut in New York with Infinity Dance Theater as a wheelchair dancer. She loves to explore a wide variety of dance forms; she is particularly interested in work that challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between dance and disability. She joined the AXIS Dance Company in 2006.

A clip of Alice Sheppard in performance with the AXIS Dance Company can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1-Tm2R4jFQ. Alice is the dancer who begins the performance at the upper right of the screen. Another performance can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=AaXn62CEhQk

Working Group Meeting
February 10, 12-2pm Barnard Center for Research on Women (101 Barnard Hall)

“Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity in Nightwood,” a lecture by Michael Davidson, respondent TBA
Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd Floor Barnard Hall
March 8, 6-8pm

This talk investigates the idea of biofuturity within modernism, focusing specifically on the figure of male maternity in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Although the figure of the pregnant male occurs in ancient and classical literature it surfaces significantly among modernist works–Joyce’s Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos, Freud’s Schreber case–at a moment when biological life was being re-imagined through the optic of eugenic science and comparative anatomy. The talk extends Lee Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurity in No Future to suggest that dystopic biological futures were being imagined around figures such as Dr. O’Connor whose desire, as he says, to “boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child...every nine months” reinforces his queer identity and annexes the importance of disability in many of the novel’s characters. Modernist cultural representations of the pregnant male foreground the spectacle of reproduction loosed from its putative organic site in the female body and displace it elsewhere–the test tube, the surrogate womb, the male body–and, not insignificantly–the novel. This displacement is both a queering and cripping of normative attitudes toward reproductive health and the futures that such embodiment implies. It also warps traditional narrative attitudes towards biological futurity when the family romance no longer reproduces the heterosexual body. Barnes’s novel is not as a baroque anomaly among stream of consciousness narratives but as perhaps the representative modernist novel by offering an inside narrative of individuals interpellated within biological and racial science.

Working Group Meeting
March 9, 12-2pm Barnard Center for Research on Women (101 Barnard Hall)

Screening and Discussion of Girlfriend (Justin Lerner, 2010)
Discussants Elizabeth Emens and Maura Spiegel
104 Jerome Greene Hall
April 26, 6-8:30pm

Evan is a young man with Down Syndrome who lives with his mother in a poor, working-class town hit hard by the recent economic recession. When he unexpectedly comes into a large amount of money, Evan uses it to romantically pursue Candy, a girl from town whom he has loved since high school. Candy, now a barely-employed single mom, is facing financial debt, possible eviction, and the inability to rid herself of Russ, her abusive and volatile ex-boyfriend. In no position to turn down Evan’s offers of financial support, Candy hesitantly accepts his gifts, which causes the pair to enter a complicated emotional entanglement. When Russ catches on to Candy and Evan’s relationship, all three of them become intertwined in a complex triangle of secrets, jealousy and revenge. Despite his many hardships and the seeming impossibility of Candy being able to return his love, Evan struggles to remain a resilient, pure embodiment of human compassion.

Working Group Meeting
April 27, 12-2pm Barnard Center for Research on Women (101 Barnard Hall)

FALL 2011 EVENTS AND WORKING GROUP MEETINGS

“Disabled at Columbia” 
Thursday, October 6, 6-8pm
Case Lounge (Room 701), Jerome Greene Hall, Columbia Law School  

We begin our project with a panel of students, faculty, and staff who discuss the ways the university has both accommodated and excluded people with disabilities. What are some of the surprising and innovative ways that Columbia has sought to include people with disabilities in its community? Conversely, how has it managed to maintain ADA compliance, while creating an unwelcoming environment for people with disabilities? Our campus will serve as a starting place for a broader
discussion about disability, access, and higher education.

Scheduled speakers include Christopher Baswell (Professor of English, Columbia and Barnard), Robin Kemper (Narrative Medicine graduate student), Colleen Lewis (Office of Disability Services), Ansel Lurio (Columbia College graduate), and Suzanne Walker (Barnard Class of 2012).  

Working group meeting and lunch with panelists Friday, October 7, 12-2pm
101 Barnard Hall, Barnard College   

“Disability Studies and Medical Humanities” 
Thursday, October 27, 6-8pm
Jed D. Satow Conference Room (5th floor), Lerner Hall, Columbia University

This panel will explore the the conflicts and common ground between two fields that have often been in tension with one another. Speakers will be asked to share their insights into this tension, identifying spaces of possibility where the two might intersect/collaborate/learn from one another.  

Scheduled speakers include Rita Charon (Director of Narrative Medicine Program, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons), Sayantani DasGupta (Narrative Medicine Program, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons), Rebecca Garden (Bioethics and Humanities, Upstate Medical University), and G. Thomas Couser (Hofstra University)

 Working group meeting and lunch with panelists Friday, October 28, 12-2pm
101 Barnard Hall, Barnard College   

“The Mad Woman Project: Disability and the Aesthetics of Human Disqualification”
Tuesday, November 22, 6-8pm
Sulzberger Parlor (3rd Floor, Barnard Hall), Barnard College

A talk by Tobin Siebers (Department of English, University of Michigan) with a response by Elizabeth Leake (Department of Italian, Columbia University)  "The Mad Women Project: Disability and the Aesthetics of Human Disqualification" takes its departure from a series of photographs by Park Young-Sook called "The Mad Women Project," with the goal of debating significant arguments designed by the field of disability studies. From 1999 to 2005 Park investigated the representation of women with mental disabilities by photographing gestures and postures used to identify women as "crazy." We will examine the physical echoes of cognitive and intellectual disability, interrogating how aesthetics participates in the disqualification of disabled people as inferior. We will also consider "The Mad Women Project" in the context of feminist theory and the work of Cindy Sherman.  

Reception to follow

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The Future of Disability Studies

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Working Group Schedule