The purpose of the Disability and Accessibility Studies initiative is to gather and support coursework that examines disability and accessibility from a variety of practical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Courses might examine practical matters such as the legal rights of persons with disabilities and the extent to which these rights are (or are not) realized in various sectors of society; the history of social movements for the recognition and extension of these rights; the scope of disability, including “invisible” disabilities, neurodivergence, chronic illness, and disabilities associated with injury or aging; issues in educational and institutional access such as IDEA, special education, and Universal Design; and the persistence of ableism and compulsory able-bodiedness in all its forms, from the barriers of inaccessible architecture, transport, and technologies to social stigma, pathologization, and discrimination. Courses might also examine such topics as: how disability and accessibility are depicted in cultural practices, from mainstream advertising to critical works of literature, cinema, and art; disability justice and activism; the intersection of disability with other aspects of cultural identity such as race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, immigration status, and language; various social theories as they relate to disability and access; and the ways that dominant conceptions of health and normalcy influence perceptions about ability/disability, embodiment, and neurodiversity. 

 

Course:	HR 372  Chronic: Disability, Sickness, and Care
Professor:	Evan Calder Williams
CRN:	16058		Schedule/Location:		Mon       3:10 PM – 5:30 PM Center for Curatorial Studies
Distributional Area:		SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice
Credits: 4						Class cap: 15
Crosslists: Architecture

This seminar engages with disability studies, queer theory, architectural and design history, political ecology, and histories of radical organizing and mobilization that focus on the idea and experience of disability and sickness. In traversing these materials, this seminar aims to to ask: rather than seeing disability and sickness simply as a limitation or failure to reach a "healthy" norm, what can the experience and often hidden histories of the disabled and chronically ill, as well as those who fight for their care, reveal about social structures, ideologies, and patterns of circulation that cannot be seen otherwise? What would it mean to move beyond the political and ideological centrality of the idea of health and to instead understand how it can function to normalize racialized and gendered structures of exclusion and privation? And what models of care, collectivity, flexibility, and access have been, and might be posed, against this, through the speculative work of chronic theorists and disability justice advocates and through hard-fought campaigns and daily ad hoc solutions alike? Authors considered include: Alexis Shotwell, Alondra Nelson, Liat Ben-Moshe, Aimi Hamrie, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Neil Ahuja, Georges Canguilhem, Mel Y. Chen, and Eli Clare.

 

Course:	HR 389  Disability Art & Politics: Crip Time & Life at Law’s Limits
Professor:	Constantina Zavitsanos
CRN:	15930		Schedule/Location:		Tue      2:00 PM – 4:20 PM Center for Curatorial Studies SEM
Distributional Area:		AA Analysis of Art D+J Difference and Justice
Credits: 4						Class cap: 18

What happens when life and death are not thought of in neat opposition? What does crip time do with the built environment, or the construct of Cartesian space itself which separates mind from body while undergirding key notions for the temporal? What material resist may disability offer the formal and conceptual arrangement of space and time (art) amid the laws that organize and govern the polis (politics)? This course traces the historical and ongoing struggle for disability rights in the colonized United States, while simultaneously questioning the framework of rights-based discourse and its legislative contingencies. We will think through disability representation, rights, and the right to opacity via a survey of cultural production in Disability Arts, and highlight the resistance to the violences of Vagrancy laws, Black Codes, the Ugly Laws, Anti-touch Laws, Stop & Frisk™, and other racist-eugenic logics, including “public health”, amid the latest pandemic . Our inquiry into concepts of confinement, quarantine, curfew, incarceration, asylum, austerity and enclosure will stay with disability culture, crip love, queer and trans abundance, and the everprescenient black outdoors that remain before and before every juridical turn. We will be guided by openings made in Disability Studies, Trans Studies, Black Studies, Disability Justice, and Disability Arts that gather in the struggle for and beyond rights, toward both the onto-epistemological understanding of disability and the real lived experience of disabled people. Constanina Zavitsanos is the 2021-22 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism.

 

Course:	HR 390  Disability Art & Aesthetics: Extra-Visuality & Non-locality
Professor:	Constantina Zavitsanos
CRN:	15956		Schedule/Location:		Thurs      2:00 PM – 4:20 PM Center for Curatorial Studies SEM
Distributional Area:		AA Analysis of Art D+J Difference and Justice
Credits: 4						Class cap: 18

What “vision” does Visual Studies hold for the proliferation of extra-visual artworks that comprise both its histories and futures? How are “images” produced beyond the notion of sightedness? How might we deform social spaces that continually segregate audiences along an axis of dis/ability? What might incapacity and nonlocality offer art and artworks in dislodging the specificity of both site and sight? What happens at the specifically visual limit of surveillance amid racial global capital? This course surveys the field of cultural production and art historical works that have resisted the forms and primacy of ocularcentrism, while seeking to elaborate strategies in accessibility – often latent to production by D/deaf, Blind, and Disabled artists – for all audiences. Concepts will move with and through hapticality, pathology, contagion, heritability, reproduction, reparation, debt, speculation, spectrality, prematurity, death, and social life as theorized in Aesthetic theory, Black Studies, Queer & Trans Studies, Disability Studies, Performance Studies, Sci-fi, and Quantum Theory.

 

Course:	MAT ED512  Identity, Culture and the Classroom
Professor:	Michael Sadowski
CRN:	15778	Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Henderson Computer Ctr Annex 106
Credits: 2					Class cap: 18

This course examines the myriad factors that influence adolescent identity development, particularly as these have an effect on students’ learning, interaction, and engagement in school. Drawing on various readings in psychology, ethnography, and education research, the course places special emphasis on power dynamics in American society with regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, class, immigration, ability, and other factors. We consider such questions as: “How might an adolescent’s identity development be influenced by one or more of these factors?” “What experiences with these cultural forces do students bring to school, and how might these experiences affect their learning?” “How do school cultures mirror and/or reinforce the power structures and attitudes that exist around these issues in the larger society?” The purpose of the course is not to come up with fixed answers to these questions; rather, it is to help participants ask informed and essential questions about how these issues might play out in schools, in society, and in individual adolescents’ lives.  This course is cross-listed with the MAT program for 3+2 students. Course will run from February 1^st – March 17^th.

 

Course:	PHIL 219  Body and World: Selves and Social Sense-Making
Professor:	James Keller
CRN:	15626		Schedule/Location:		Mon  Wed     1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Hegeman 204
Distributional Area:		MBV Meaning, Being, Value
Credits: 4						Class cap: 22

Our everyday accounts of perception, action, social norms, language, and even intelligence take conceptual rationality as the essential feature of human life. A good deal of recent philosophy, though, explores the possibility that we might not be “rational all the way out” and that we use concepts to supplement other, embodied ways of knowing, being, and being with others. The first part of this course examines conceptual and non-conceptual ways that we make sense of reality. We then look at ways that bodies conform to or reconfigure social ideals of normalcy. The readings that we encounter argue for a more inclusive form of realism in our accounts of perception, action, language and intelligence, and we consider a plurality of diverse embodiments and a range of understandings of the ways that bodied selves and social life are woven together.

 

Course:	PSY 231  Neuroscience
Professor:	Frank Scalzo
CRN:	15388		Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Hegeman 102
Distributional Area:		SA Social Analysis
Credits: 4						Class cap: 22
Crosslists: Mind, Brain, Behavior

The ability to express thoughts and emotions, and to interact with the environment, is dependent in large part on the function of the nervous system. This course will examine basic concepts and methods in the study of brain, mind, and behavior. Topics include the structure and function of the central nervous system, brain development, learning and memory, emotion, sensory and motor systems, the assessment of human brain damage, and clinical disorders such as schizophrenia, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. Prerequisite: Introduction to Psychological Science, Foundations of Mind, Brain and Behavior, Introduction to Neurobiology, or permission of the instructor.