scholarly journals Whales, Water, and Disability. Towards a Blue Cultural Disability Studies

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-283
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Ojrzyńska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Marine Environment ◽  
Context Dependence ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Aquatic Mammals

The article explores possible intersections between cultural disability studies and the blue humanities. It opens with a discussion of cultural representations of atypical aquatic mammals and fish. Yet, the main focus is placed on various contemporary literary texts (Mateusz Pakuła’s Wieloryb: The Globe, John Wilson’s From the Depths, and Kaite O’Reilly’s In Water I’m Weightless), which were written either by or for artists with disabilities. As will be shown, all of them allude to water or/and marine environment in order to comment on disability, its social constructedness and context dependence, and the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. In doing so, these texts challenge the fixedness of the disabled/non-disabled binary and subtly hint at a possibility of transgressing the traditional opposition between the human and the animal. This in turn points to the potential of applying the oceanic perspective, or what Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters call ‘wet’ and ‘more-than-wet’ ontologies, in disability studies.

scholarly journals Marketing the Prosthesis: Supercrip and Superhuman Narratives in Contemporary Cultural Representations

Philosophies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Chia Wei Fahn
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Capital Gain ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Scientific Advance ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
And Gender

This paper examines prosthetic technology in the context of posthumanism and disability studies. The following research discusses the posthuman subject in contemporary times, focusing on prosthetic applications to deliberate how the disabled body is empowered through prosthetic enhancement and cultural representations. The disability market both intersects and transcends race, religion, and gender; the promise of technology bettering the human condition is its ultimate product. Bionic technology, in particular, is a burgeoning field; our engineering skills already show promise of a future where physical impediment will be almost obsolete. I aim to cross-examine empowering marketing images and phrases embedded in cinema and media that emphasize how disability becomes super-ability with prosthetic enhancement. Though the benefits of biotechnology are most empowering to the disabled population, further scrutiny raises a number of paradoxical questions exposed by the market’s advance. With all these tools at our disposal, why is it that the disabled have yet to reap the rewards? How are disabled bodies, biotechnology, and posthuman possibilities commodified and commercialized? Most importantly, what impact will this have on our society? This paper exemplifies empowering and inclusive messages emphasized in disabled representation, as well as raising bioethical concerns that fuel the ongoing debate of the technological haves and have-nots. Furthermore, this paper challenges the ideals of normative bodies while depicting the disabled as an open, embodied site where technology, corporeality, and sociology interact. To conclude, I believe that an interdisciplinary approach that balances the debate between scientific advance, capital gain, and social equality is essential to embracing diverse forms of embodiment.

scholarly journals Heterographics as a Literary Device

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-216
Author(s):  
Helena Bodin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Spatial Features ◽  
Visual Spatial ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
French And English ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Cultural Affinity

Abstract Heterographics (“other lettering”) refers to the use of two scripts in one text or a translation of a text from one script to another. How might the occasional use of heterographics in literary texts highlight issues of cultural diversity? Drawing on intermedial theory and studies of literary multilingualism, literary translation, and pluriliteracies, this article examines various functions of heterographics in selected contemporary literary texts. Examples of embedded Greek, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Arabic script are analysed in works published in Swedish, French, and English between 2004 and 2015, selected because they thematise cultural diversity and linguistic boundaries. The conclusion is that heterographic devices emphasise the heteromediality of literary texts, thereby heightening readers’ awareness of the visual-spatial features of literary texts, as well as of the materiality of scripts. Heterographics influence readers’ experiences of cultural affinity or alterity, that is, of inclusion or exclusion, depending on their access to practices of pluriliteracies.

scholarly journals Engaged Humanities. New Perspectives of Experience-Oriented Humanities

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Klaudia Muca
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Sustainability ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
New Model ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
The Status

Abstract The term engagement was used in critical cultural studies as a term that name an attitude of scholars, and a feature of cultural and scientific texts, that are based on the experience of an individual or a group of people. In the recent two decades, many of Polish academic narrations on the field of cultural production focused on the issue of engagement. In the article, a phenomenon of engagement in the context of disability studies is considered. The main objective of the article is the analysis of disability studies as a new model of experience- oriented discipline. What is particularly interesting is a possibility to relabel experiences of the disabled as a significant report on the status of modern narrations, which should include different minority bodies. The main aim of disability studies is to present a project of engaged attitudes towards social sustainability that is not based on exclusions of any social groups of people. Studies on disability are also introduced as an experience-oriented discipline in the field of engaged humanities. This article aims at presenting critical narrations on the issue of engagement in other to connect disability studies to the engaged humanities. Promoting engagement in many areas of culture and social life seems to be a way of introducing more open politics towards difference, and social sphere of life that is equally accessible for everyone.

scholarly journals Rehabilitation as a Disability Equality Issue: A Conceptual Shift for Disability Studies?

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Shakespeare ◽  
Harriet Cooper ◽  
Dikmen Bezmez ◽  
Fiona Poland
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Rehabilitation Science ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Conceptual Shift ◽  
New Research ◽  
Rehabilitation Sciences

Rehabilitation is a controversial subject in disability studies, often discussed in terms of oppression, normalisation, and unwanted intrusion. While there may be good reasons for positioning rehabilitation in this way, this has also meant that, as a lived experience, it is under-researched and neglected in disabilities literature, as we show by surveying leading disability studies journals. With some notable exceptions, rehabilitation research has remained the preserve of the rehabilitation sciences, and such studies have rarely included the voices of disabled people themselves, as we also demonstrate by surveying a cross-section of rehabilitation science literature. Next, drawing on new research, we argue for reframing access to rehabilitation as a disability equality issue. Through in-depth discussion of two case studies, we demonstrate that rehabilitation can be a tool for inclusion and for supporting an equal life. Indeed, we contend that rehabilitation merits disability researchers’ sustained engagement, precisely to ensure that a ‘right-based rehabilitation’ policy and practice can be developed, which is <em>not</em> oppressive, but reflects the views and experiences of the disabled people who rehabilitation should serve.

scholarly journals Exploring experiences of ableism in academia: a constructivist inquiry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Brown ◽  
Karen Ramlackhan
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Data Generation ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Critical Disability Studies ◽  
Constructivist Inquiry ◽  
The Disabled

AbstractTo understand the experiences of the disabled in academia, a fully accessible and inclusive workshop conference was held in March 2018. Grounded in critical disability studies within a constructivist inquiry analytical approach, this article provides a contextualisation of ableism in academia garnered through creative data generation. The nuanced experiences of disabled academics in higher education as well as their collective understandings of these experiences as constructed through normalisation and able-bodiedness are presented. We show that disabled academics are marginalised and othered in academic institutions; that the neoliberalisation of higher education has created productivity expectations, which contribute to the silencing of the disabled academics’ perspectives and experiences due to constructions of normality and stigmatisation; and that it is important to enact policies, procedures, and practices that value disabled academics and bring about cultural and institutional changes in favour of equality and inclusion.

Can The Disabled Musician Sing?

2020 ◽  
pp. 567-589
Author(s):  
Adam Patrick Bell ◽  
Jesse Rathgeber
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Assistive Technology ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Critical Case ◽  
Music Learning ◽  
Viral Video ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Critical Case Study

This chapter investigates uses of social media by disabled musicians/musicians with disabilities (DM/MwD). It first frames social media as assistive technology, examining how the platforms SingSnap, Bandhub, and Facebook are used by disabled musicians/musicians with disabilities to connect with others and create content. The discussion proceeds with an examination of how this content is perceived and may be (mis)represented and (mis)appropriated by nondisabled audiences. Using a viral video of Julia Maritza Ceja Medina as a critical case study, the analysis applies disability studies literature by examining how content generated by disabled musicians/musicians with disabilities can become inspiration pornography. The authors conclude by noting both the positive and problematic potentials of social media in the music learning and music making of disabled musicians/musicians with disabilities.

Svetlana Alexievich’s Soviet Women Veterans and the Aesthetics of the Disabled Military Body: Staring at the Unwomanly Face of War

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-96
Author(s):  
Catherine Baker
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Military Training ◽  
Women Veterans ◽  
The Other ◽  
Disabled Veterans ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
The Military

Aesthetics, embodiment and militarisation are particularly closely joined in representations of and reactions to the military body disabled as a result of war. Against militarised depictions of the vigour and glamour that military training and service bestows on bodies, experiences and representations of disabled veterans become embodied evidence of the other transformations that war inflicts. By investigating aesthetic practices of representing disability and disfigurement in Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of interviews with women Red Army veterans, The Unwomanly Face of War, this chapter views the gendered structures of emotion and aversion projected on to disabled military bodies through the cultural and literary turn in disability studies to explain what is affectively at stake when the military body disabled by war becomes a literary device.

Disease versus Disability: The Medical Humanities and Disability Studies

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 593-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Price Herndl
Keyword(s):  
Medical School ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Literature And Medicine ◽  
Teaching Literature ◽  
First Job

One of the consistent problems i find in the work I do—which is focused on women and the cultural representations of illness—is classification. There was not really a category of “disability studies” when I started this work in the 1980s, and I would have resisted that label even if there had been. Since embracing the field of disability studies, I have wondered about my early resistance to it. At first, I attributed it to my own ableism (and I don't think I am necessarily wrong about this), but as I have continued to work on the issues, I am coming to see it more as a result of a disciplinary divide between the medical humanities and disability studies. My first job teaching literature was in a medical school, and I was early on immersed in the idea of the medical humanities, an idea I am beginning to think is antithetical to disability studies (though not to disability itself). My talk today discusses the source of that divide, the problems I see with it, and suggestions for what we can do about it. I want to examine the two interdisciplinary fields in terms of their disciplinarity, and in the interest of time, I'll use a shortcut to do this; I will compare two relatively recent MLA publications, Teaching Literature and Medicine (2000) and Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002).

Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 586-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert McRuer
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Disability History ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Directions ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Visual Rhetorics ◽  
The Difference

In “seeing the disabled: visual rhetorics of disability in Popular Photography,” Rose-marie Garland-Thomson argues that representations of disability in photography, over more than a century, have generally fallen into four broad categories: the wondrous, which places the disabled subject on high and elicits awe from viewers because of the supposedly amazing achievement represented; the sentimental, which places the disabled subject in a diminished, childlike, or custodial position, evoking pity; the exotic, which makes disability strange and distant—a freakish or perhaps transgressive spectacle; and the realistic, which brings disability close, potentially minimizing the difference between viewer and viewed. In the essay, which first appeared in print in the important disability studies anthology The New Disability History, Garland-Thomson reiterates some of the central disability studies insights that have transformed scholarship in the humanities over the past decade. Simultaneously, she takes disability studies in new directions, providing a critical taxonomy that those of us in the field can use as a foundation for countless other projects.

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