Who is Disabled?

Catalog description

How are our views of health and disability socially and culturally conditioned? This course provides students an opportunity to reflect on their own experiences of health, the role that health plays within their understanding of their own wellbeing, and their personal, professional, and civic responsibilities toward persons who are disabled. Students will explore a number of intellectual arguments about how health is constituted and what counts as a disability, and participate in assignments that consider how academic discussions of disability intersect with current events and public policy measures and with art and literature. We focus in particular on how health and disability are understood in the Christian theological tradition, both in historical Christian thought and in contemporary theologies of disability, and on the ways that Christianity has both influenced and been shaped by broader cultural attitudes toward disability.