Disability Studies Quarterly

Editors' Introduction

Jeff Brune — 2023-06-12

No abstract available.

Against Productivity & Liberal Pity: A Case Study in Prison Abolition & Disability Justice

Autumn Miller — 2023-06-12

No abstract available.

Patient Resistance to Psychiatric Discourse and Power

Matthew S. Johnston — 2023-06-12

Drawing on 5090 English reviews of 486 psychiatrists working in Canada posted on ratemds.com, this study explores how mental health service users refuse to become subjectivized by psychiatric discourse and power. We interrogate how digital mediums provide mental health service users with a community of critique to regain control over settings where there are many power imbalances. We argue that websites like ratemds.com act as a digital agora in which people are afforded the ability to make the personal political. Through critiquing their own doctors, mental health service users invert the question of what is “wrong” with them to what is “wrong” with agents of the psychiatric apparatus. By regaining a say over their treatment/conditions and insisting doctors are asking the wrong questions to better control their identities, service users refuse to accept the diagnoses, pathologies, and practices imposed on them. We discuss how their transgression in this forum provides new insights into psychiatric resistance that is of special interest to scholars and service users positioned in the Mad Studies movement.

Disability Identity in Older Age? - Exploring Social Processes that Influence Disability Identification with Ageing

Ann Leahy — 2023-06-12

While there is much debate about a disability identity, this does not apply to the identification processes of people experiencing impairment or disability first in older age, who are often assumed not to identify with a disability identity. This article aims to deepen understanding of the elements affecting identification with disability when impairment is experienced first in older age and their interplay. It does so by discussing findings from a new empirical study drawing on data from interviews with people first experiencing impairment with ageing and by engaging with scholarship from both critical studies on ageing and on disability. The findings discussed show that the issue of a disability identity in older age is more complex and fluid than has heretofore been assumed and that identity is always subject to renegotiation. It points to the role of dominant and binary discourses of ageing, and separate policy frameworks and approaches to activism on ageing and on disability, in constructing (or failing to construct) a ‘disability’ identity in older age. The article argues for greater linkages between the fields of ageing and disability in scholarship and advocacy and suggests that this offers potential to make the issue of ableism more broadly understood and resisted. It calls for more engagement by disability scholars with what disability experienced in older age illuminates about culture and with the implications of disability becoming a more widespread phenomenon due to population ageing.

The Curious Case of Carson McCullers: Appropriation, Allyship, and the Problem of Speaking for Others

Alexander Steele — 2023-06-12

In this article, I situate the life and work of Carson McCullers within the larger disability studies debate over the problem of speaking for others. The essay makes two arguments that build on one another. The first is for including McCullers more fully in the disabled community and in studies of literary disability, despite her having expressed a small number of ableist comments. The article suggests that McCullers’s experience as a queer disabled woman became a key lens that animated much of her writing. The essay then turns to its second and larger goal, which is to consider how the complicated case of McCullers can help the field distinguish allyship from appropriation and unethical identification. Turning to feminist theorists of communicative ethics Iris Marion Young and Linda Alcoff, as well as Deaf and disability scholars like Rebecca Sanchez, the article ultimately argues that McCullers’s “use” of deafness in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, though undeniably flawed, is not an act of appropriation but an early historical attempt at allyship from a differently disabled perspective. Her commitment to deafness is driven by a sustained critique informed by the shared afflictions of injustice, but one that also overall refuses to dissolve human difference or speak for deafness.

Empowerment Respect: A Conception of Respect Suitable for People with Severe and Profound Intellectual Disabilities

Cara O'Connor — 2023-06-12

No abstract available.

Affective Ablenationalisms and Interspecies Entanglements

Anastasia Todd — 2023-06-12

In 2015, the news outlet Today posted a video interview with Chopper Maroshek, a former Navy Seal, about the “unbreakable bond” between himself and his service dog, a German Shepherd named Chopper. Before Chopper was Maroshek’s service dog, he was his multi-purpose canine partner, trained and deployed for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. This article analyzes representations of Chopper and Maroshek in the Today video, its comment archive, and popular news articles to show how Chopper, in his role as a multi-purpose canine-cum-service dog, is hailed to participate in the project of ablenationalism. I argue that Chopper is constructed as an exceptional technology of rehabilitation, facilitating Maroshek’s ability to fold back into the nation as an “able-disabled” subject. Building on transnational disability and animal studies scholarship, I illuminate how the circulation of Maroshek and Chopper’s spectacular story justifies the uneven biopolitical inclusion of American veterans with mental and/or psychiatric disabilities, effectively obscuring the violent production of disability through war. Ultimately, I show how the nationalist affects that shape Chopper as the apotheosis of a service dog covertly sutures an ablenationalist politics of disability to a racialized U.S. biopolitics of war.

Who is “Us” in “Nothing About Us Without US”? Rethinking the Politics of Disability Research.

Kay Inckle — 2023-06-12

No abstract available.

What Do We Need? Accommodations in the Workplace: People with Lupus Share Their Work Experiences

Orly Calderon — 2023-06-12

This article discusses disability inclusion in the workplace. It identifies barriers and makes recommendations to help meet employment needs of people with disabilities, utilizing lupus as an example. A convergent mixed method design study examined the workplace experiences and needs of individuals with lupus. Availability sampling yielded 1,776 participants from across the United States. The results revealed 69% of the respondents reported lupus symptoms had a negative impact on their employment and 48% of the participants reported needing help or accommodations in the workplace. An inductive thematic content analysis with an inter-coder agreement ranging from 71% to 73%, yielded 4 themes encompassing issues related to productivity, interpersonal relationship in the workplace, and adjustments in work responsibilities and work environment, respectively. The results suggest that training programs about the American with Disability Act may have a positive impact on organizational functioning. Employers have a responsibility to maintain a flexible work environment whenever possible to address variability in employees’ needs. Employers and employees should engage in ongoing discussions that seek to identify the accommodations that will help employees with disabilities meet their workplace responsibilities and to enhance their contribution to the organization. Managers and administrators are encouraged to create an environment that values a diverse workforce, including persons with disabilities.

After 504: Training the Citizen-Enforcers of Disability Rights

Karen M. Tani — 2023-06-12

No abstract available.

“Checking a Box Isn’t Exactly Helpful”: Interpretations of the Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability Form During the Job Application Process

Kaylin Duncan — 2023-06-12

The United States Department of Labor created the Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability (VSD) form in 2014 to improve the employment rate for people with disabilities. As part of this initiative, federal contractors with 50 or more employees are expected to have at least 7% of their workforce identify as having a disability. Unfortunately, only 13% of organizations met this goal in 2015. By conducting a survey of 472 individuals, the present study examined how people with and without disabilities interpret the Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability (VSD) form during the job application process. Specifically, respondents inferred positive (e.g., accommodations), negative (e.g., discrimination), neutral (e.g., person-job fit), and conflicting interpretations (e.g., a mix of positive and negative interpretations) of the VSD form.

Further, nearly 60 percent of applicants perceived the VSD form as a strategy to decrease the number of people with disabilities rather than increase. With insight on organizational signals, employers and policymakers can better design and develop recruitment materials to improve the application process for people with disabilities.

Challenging and Reinforcing the Ability/Disability System through Advocacy for Disabled Dogs

Katja M. Guenther — 2023-06-12

This paper illuminates how volunteers and animal rescuers who assist dogs from a high-intake public shelter in the Los Angeles metropolitan area simultaneously resist the devaluation of the lives of disabled dogs while sensationalizing and fetishizing disability through their discursive and representational practices. Drawing on observations from three years of ethnographic fieldwork in an animal shelter and with animal rescues, as well as from public media volunteers and rescuers post online, I adopt an intersectional analysis that attends to inequalities of species, ability/disability, and gender in the context of contemporary American capitalism. I show how members of the animal rescue community—who are all women, almost all white, and none of whom identified themselves as disabled—reject the shelter's practice of fast-tracking some types of disabled dogs for shelter killing and assert instead the right of disabled dogs to live. At the same time, rescuers talk about and represent disabled dogs as infantile, remarkable, and in need of saviors to help them. Ultimately, rescuers' representations of disabled dogs work to expand capitalist beliefs of companion animals as lively capital by showing that disabled dogs have value as companions, in large part through an assertion of dogs as family members.

Facial Disfigurement, Madness, and the Royal Touch in Early Modern Britain: Reconsidering Arise Evans

Emily Cock — 2023-06-12

No abstract available.

Disability, Race, Class, and Gender in Seventh-day Adventist Health Publications, 1880-1910

Talea Anderson — 2023-06-12

This article examines discourses in early Seventh-day Adventist health publications with particular attention to the ways that disability played into discussions of vegetarianism. In the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, the Adventist church was at the forefront of conversations in western countries about the value of a meat-free diet. During this time, Adventist health publications made or echoed a variety of arguments in support of vegetarian eating. Pervasive in these arguments were ableist tropes calculated to show how vegetarianism equated to youth, physical stamina, beauty, and intellectual superiority. This rhetoric effectively used disability to craft a vision of vegetarians as white, upwardly mobile people who conformed to traditional gender roles. Disability thus served to demarcate insiders from outsiders by underlining perceived differences between genders, races, and classes of people.

Dramatic Prosthesis: Embodying Disability in Lear

Cameron Hunt McNabb — 2023-06-12

No abstract available.

“Your request is touching”: Marginalization, weakness, and liminality experienced by disabled graduate students in Israel

Nomy Bitman — 2023-06-12

Academic neoliberal ableism has considerable negative implications for all disabled academics, but specifically for the marginalization, liminality, and weakness of disabled graduate students. This is particularly true for the understudied and underrepresented disabled graduate students who are not native English speakers and who live in regions that are geographically and culturally distant from the English-speaking academic hegemony. This article addresses this gap by presenting a collaborative autoethnography of two disabled Israeli doctoral students. The analysis raised two themes. The first includes the complex aspects of learning to perform new academic roles – teachers, conference presenters and researchers – as disabled academics. The second includes our marginality in two contexts, namely our studied disciplines, which fail to see disability as a critical object, and the developing Israeli community of disability studies in which disabled scholars are underrepresented. On the basis of these themes, we identify four combined environments that mirror the intersection between global neoliberal ableism and the specific ableist culture found in Israel, which exacerbate our weakness, marginality, and liminality: The Israeli Disability Studies community, our discipline, the Israeli academy, and the English-speaking academy.

‘A consciousness of unknown things – of reason overthrown’: Epilepsy and the Unreasoning Body in Edward Lear’s Nonsense Poetry

Hazel Mackenzie — 2023-06-12

No abstract available.

Disability Studies, Inclusive Pedagogy, and Universal Design for Learning: A Faculty Pilot Experience

Michelle Jarman — 2023-06-12

This essay documents the process of a year-long faculty pilot group in a western U.S. state university that applied disability studies scholarship to collaborative implementation of universal design for learning (UDL) and inclusive practices in teaching. In addition to faculty, library instructors, disabled student representatives, diversity and equity administrators, and disability support staff were involved in this group. The goals were to deepen knowledge about disability history, exclusions, and current innovations from disability communities; to increase knowledge and skills in accessible pedagogies, specifically in UDL; and to expand commitment and community among faculty participants in order to scale up efforts in our institution beyond the pilot group. This essay documents the experiences of the learning group, which consist of an overview of the curricular framework, a discussion of qualitative research from focus group interviews with faculty participants, and insights gained from the process, including unexpected collaborations, community building, and innovative ideas for institutional support and transformation.

Competing (ac)counts of disability: situating prevalence studies in Zambian disability policymaking

Shaun Cleaver — 2023-06-12

Research is a critical starting point for public policy. For disability policy, the calculation of prevalence – the percentage of persons with disabilities in a population – has attracted significant attention. Multiple disability prevalence studies have been conducted in Zambia. We used data from semi-structured interviews about research and the policy process with twelve Zambian disability policy stakeholders to explore perspectives about disability prevalence research and policymaking. Policy stakeholders, disability advocates and policymakers, expressed more interest in prevalence than in other types of research. Participants perceived prevalence research according to three competing priorities: inclusion (‘Involve us [for] good results’), pragmatism (‘We have to use that [number]’), and granularity (‘We need details’). Participants discounted the value of prevalence research that conflicted with their priorities. Better understanding of stakeholder perspectives of disability prevalence can illuminate ways that these perspectives influence the use of research evidence in disability policy making.

Pedagogies of lived experience: The perspectives of people with disabilities on their educational presentations about disability topics

Oscar Hughes — 2023-06-12

Disability Studies in Education (DSE) scholars have described the importance of centering the lived experiences of disabled people in order to understand the complex and context-specific nature of living with a disability and to advance justice and inclusion for disabled people. Researchers have yet to explore the perspectives of disabled people on the potential significance of learning about disability topics from people with disabilities themselves. For the current qualitative study, I interviewed nine people with disabilities who had delivered presentations on personally relevant disability topics in a college course to examine their perspectives on teaching from their lived experience and on the potential broad impacts of opportunities to learn about disability from disabled people. The participants believed that learning from people with disabilities contributed insider perspectives and meaningful interactions to the study of disability topics. They hoped that their presentations would teach students to recognize the capabilities of people with disabilities and to see them as individuals. They believed that learning about disability from disabled people has the potential to improve access to communication and community participation for disabled people. These findings contribute important implications and directions for future research.