ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Disability Sciencing: Measuring and Classification at Sites of Knowledge-Making

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

“Disability sciencing” is defined as an engagement with scientific tools, terms, and processes that center disability and use disability as a source of expertise for knowledge-making (Osiris 39). As an analytic, it draws attention to not only how scientific actors measured, classified, and intervened on bodies, but also to how disabled people, practices, and communities informed the production of scientific authority. This panel brings together histories of immigration, obstetrics, rehabilitation, and neonatology to trace how disability shaped diagnostic tools, measurable values, and classificatory schemes that translated difference into legible, and therefore governable, categories.

Across the case studies in this panel, disability sciencing emerges as anything but a neutral or purely technical enterprise. Instead, the act of defining who “counted” as healthy, capable, or fit, became a means of stabilizing social boundaries and reinforcing normative visions of health and citizenship. At stake were broader political claims about who was entitled to belong, reproduce, or participate within national and imperial projects. As the papers collectively show, such claims also embedded gendered, racialized, and imperial logics into the techniques designed to assess human bodies and their differences.

In Britain, for instance, immigration officers operationalized disability as a criterion of exclusion, using diagnostic tests and observational techniques to deny entry to migrants perceived as “undesirable” (McGuire). Imperial powers were also extended through the design of forceps for pelvimetry, for obstetric measurement practices tended to reinforce racialized and gendered hierarchies of reproductive capacity that disabled certain maternal bodies (Freeth). Gender also configures medical expertise, whether through nurse anesthetists’ sensory experience translating the Agpar Score into a standard metric (Jackson), or how disabled mothers defied gendered expectations and made use of domestic rehabilitation programs to position themselves as experts in adaptative parenting (Wathen). Together, these papers center disability to foreground the contested terrain on which expertise was claimed, negotiated, and even resisted, through practices of measurement and classification.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Hilary Buxton, Kenyon College

Individual Presentations

• “A Coarse Sieve:” The Measurement of Disability in British Immigration Health Inspections, 1906–1939 - Coreen A. McGuire, Durham University

• The “Abnormal” Pelvis: Pelvimetry and Forceps Use and Design in the British Empire from the late 19th century to the early 20th century - Corinne Freeth, University of Delaware

• Making Tacit Medical Knowledge Measurable: How the Apgar Score Smuggled in Sensory Expertise through the Rise of Medical Statistics - Rebecca L. Jackson, Durham University

• “I Am an ‘Iron-Lung’ Mother”: Polio Mothers and Homemaker Rehabilitation in the Postwar United States. - Emma Wathen, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Session Organizer

• Jaipreet Virdi, University of Victoria