Intersectionalities and Disability: A Transformative Approach

• In Event: 52.025 - Bringing Disability Studies Into the University Curriculum: An Interdisciplinary and Intersectionalities Approach

Abstract

Abstract
At our large state university in the Southwest, with over 1,300 students working with the Disabilities Resource Center, accessibility, climate and inclusion are critical. A new certificate program Disability Studies (DS) was designed to address exclusions that have long permeated the academic community and to provide a framework for understanding the legal, historical and culture representations of disability; the economic, discursive and material effects of ableism, and the struggles for social justice and dignity for people with disabilities. This complements a campus-wide IGERT grant on person-centered technology.

This paper provides background and context on the DS initiative and frames this within critical pedagogy and curriculum development in a School of Social Transformation—the home for African and African American Studies, Asian Pacific Studies, Justice and Social Inquiry, Women and Gender Studies and the Center for Indian Education. Bringing together faculty from fine arts, education, public programs and a new school of social transformation, this disability studies initiative was grounded from the beginning in principles of intersectionality. The basic curricular focus was on providing learning contexts for faculty and graduate students to go beyond superficial inclusion – or exclusion – of content related to disability issues. Several transdisciplinary discussions included ways in which different programs were using literature from their field or from DS across the curriculum and how much more could be done.

Internal funding allowed us to offer two in-depth workshops for faculty and graduate students. The first began with a dance performance and emphasized social justice, inclusion and intersectionality issues and offered a range of activities and concrete examples of ways to infuse DS content across undergraduate and graduate courses. The second workshop focused on DS theory and curriculum development and provided examples from other programs. As a result, new courses were developed, syllabi were revised to include more substantive inclusion of DS content, and other resources are being developed to support this curricular initiative.

Intersectionality is a central concept in the field of women and gender studies and it is hard to image an analysis of gender or women’s lived experience that was not intersectional. As the editors of a special issue of Signs, a leading journal in the field of women’s studies, point out intersectionality is an analytic sensibility or disposition, a way of thinking about and conducting analyses and not a list of categories. For them, “what makes an analysis intersectional—whatever terms it deploys, whatever its iteration, whatever its field or discipline—is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing—conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power—emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is” (Cho, Crenshaw and McCall, 2013,p. 795).

Authors

• Beth Blue Swadener, Arizona State University

• Mary Margarget Fonow, Arizona State University - Tempe