Written by Madison Bigelow, with support from The DAC Team
***The link to the presentation slides from this event can be accessed here. The link to the captioned transcript can be accessed here.
Dr. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a Professor of English and Bioethics at Emory University, recently visited the University of Connecticut and presented at the UConn Humanities Institute on September 12th, 2023. Invited by UConn’s Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, with support from the Department of English, she prepared two talks for the students and faculty at UConn: a workshop titled “From Theory to Praxis: Expanding Disability Cultural Studies into Healthcare Ethics” and a public lecture aptly called “Thinking about Disability All Along the Way.” While I didn’t have the chance to attend the workshop , RGT’s later lecture was an illuminating and exemplary overview of the history and perseverance of academic disability studies.
To begin with, the room was filled to the brim with people. I arrived early to the lecture and still struggled to find a seat. While I was bothered by the sight of people struggling to enter the conference room due to the sheer lack of space (which is truly ironic, given that RGT’s lecture was partially about accessibility), I couldn’t help but feel excited by how many people were in attendance. As an undergraduate student, disability seems to be appearing more often in discussions about identity, marginalization, and social justice in the classroom, but still not as much as it should be. So, when I saw, in addition to the many faculty and graduate students, a large number of undergraduate students, I sighed a breath of reassurance: others do care.
According to the flier that advertised her visit, RGT’s lecture focused on:
“the academic field we now call critical disability studies [that] developed in the last decades of the twentieth century from sociology, medical anthropology, and healthcare fields into a fuller disciplinary knowledge enterprise, complete with academic specializations, degree programs, academic journals, conferences, professional organizational structures, and broad recognition as a useful competence in employment. [It] traces this knowledge emergence and some of the work [critical disability studies] does in the world.”
For those who are interested in disability studies but aren’t quite familiar with its academic foundations, RGT’s lecture was the perfect stepping stone into the field. She first offered different definitions for ‘disability’ in its social, political, and medical contexts. Then, she proceeded to establish the overarching aims of critical disability studies, and finished with, what could best be called, an annotated bibliography, in which she presented an extensive list of books, paintings, songs, and more that touched upon, in some way, disability and/or disability studies.
I am eternally grateful to have been in attendance in that audience; being there not only signified that my peers were similarly interested in disability studies and its applications to every aspect of the world around us, but also that UConn has begun to commit themselves towards bolstering university programs concerning disability studies.
I hope to see many more opportunities like this one in the future— creating space for the UConn community to discuss disability and access as an academic discipline and social injustice issue is a crucial first step in enacting progress towards a more inclusive and accessible world, and I am overjoyed to know that such a space was created on September 12th on our UConn campus.
The DAC Team would like to thank Robert Miller for captioning this lecture, and Carolyn Conway for providing the presentation slides and recording of the event.
Disability & Access Collective 