The lecture series will present new work by recognized scholars in the field of Disability Studies. Talks will explore new ways of conceptualizing people with disabilities as social actors on a global scale who resist, revise, and re-imagine contemporary understandings of human differences. Lecturers will draw from examples that are trans-historical and cross-cultural in order to understand possibilities for the creation of new collective efforts to contest the assignment of disability to a stigmatized social status.
Speakers in the Fall 2008 semester:
- September 17: Robert McRuer, Associate Professor in the Department of English at The George Washington University. "Bad Education: Crip Representation and the Limits of Tolerance"Contemporary crip representations, particularly in film, expose and critique discourses of tolerance. Professor McRuer examines the antisocial thesis that is, at this point, well known in queer theory but has no clear analogue in Disability Studies. What might antisocial theory have to offer Disability Studies and how might crip theory be more central to larger contemporary critiques of identify, neoliberalism, and futurity. Robert McRuer is an associate professor in the Department of English at The George Washington University, where he teaches disability studies, queer theory, and cultural studies. He is the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and co-editor, with Abby L. Wilkerson, of "Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies."
- October 15: Sumi Colligan, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. "Conceiving Social Justice: Disability Rights Discourse and Practice in an Israeli Setting"An incipient disability rights movement in Israel has articulated ideas about challenges by imagining and implementing narrowly- or broadly-conceived notions of social justice in an Israeli context. Professor Colligan draws from interviews and participant-observation research with activists to examine ways in which national ideology, a climate of militarism, the penetration of neoliberalism, and the global circulation of human rights discourses shape and constrain contemporary conceptions, strategies, and struggles. Sumi Colligan teaches Anthropology and Disability Studies at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her current research interests include cultures of resistance and the Middle East. She, along with Liat Ben-Moshe, recently co-edited a special issue of the Disability Studies Quarterly on "The State of Disability in Israel/Palestine."
- November 19: Nirmala Erevelles, Associate Professor of Social Foundations of Education and Instructional Leadership, University of Alabama. "Unspeakable Offenses: Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Intersectionality."The omission of race in Disability Studies and disability from Critical Race Studies has disastrous consequences for disabled people of color caught in the violent interstices of multiple differences. Professor Erevelles draws upon her case study research about a 13 year old African American girl who is functionally illiterate and her mother's combat with an uncaring Special Education bureaucracy that is threatening to expel the girl from middle school. The talk describes how individuals located at the intersections of race, class, gender, AND disability come to be constituted as a non-citizen and a (no)body by the very institution that is designed to protect, nurture, and empower disabled students and their families. Nirmala Erevelles is Associate Professor of Education & Instructional Leadership in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Technology Studies at the University of Alabama. Her teaching and research are in the areas of Disability Studies, Sociology of Education, Multicultural Education, Feminist Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and Qualitative Research Methodologies.
All lectures will begin at noon in the 1810 Liacouras Conference Suite, Liacouras Walk, on the main campus of Temple University.
