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Spring 2023 Courses in Disability Studies
Spring 2023 Courses in Disability Studies
THEA 10.34/ WGSS 66.xx "Disability Arts and Activism" examines radical disability resistance through the lens of culture and performance to ask the central question: how does disability art make cultural change? Students will learn a history of disability activism as well as the impacts of disability policy and politics across the stage and streets. Using the frame of Disability Justice, students will develop analytic skills to unpack normative conceptions around bodies, visibility, and representation across multiple forms of difference such as size, race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality. We will explore the performance involved in protest, alongside the protest present in disability cultural forms, such as dance, sports, theater, music, and visual art. The course culminates in a research project that crafts an intervention into a local art space to build radical accessibility.
Taught by Julia Havard, Department of Theater
AAAS 35.02 “Disability and Madness in African American Literature and Film” analyzes representations of disability and madness in African American literature and film. Students will approach canonical texts (Passing, Beloved, The Color Purple) and less familiar texts (A Visitation of Spirits) for messier re-readings, unraveling(s) and mad Black ravings present in African American literature. Additionally, students will trace Black disabled and mad representations from the page to the screen (Passing, Beloved, The Color Purple, Native Son) to visualize how disability, gender, and race are co-constituted in American culture. The core questions for the term are: what do disability and madness look like in literature and film? What motifs, tropes, dialogue, and form are used to represent disability and madness as they intersect with Blackness? And finally, what is made possible through a Black disabled and mad lens? How are freedom, injury/pain and salvation better imagined through disability and madness?
Taught by Kianna M. Middleton, Department of African and African American Studies
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