First-Year Writing Seminar: Disability Arts & Culture

Catalog description

The last few decades have seen the emergence of disability as a game-changing social analytic. By foregrounding the generative possibilities of non-normative forms, disability studies has offered profound insight into long-held conceptions of time, space, environment, and difference. Activists and academics alike have drawn upon disability art and culture in order to expand the category and shift towards a focus in self-representation. In this course, we will understand writing as a form of access and we will use many forms of disability art (visual, textual, performative, digital) to develop key modes of textual expression (personal, descriptive, analytical, critical). Over the course of the semester, students will develop complex ideas about disability through a series of essays while also having the opportunity to produce and reflect on their own creative work. In the course, we will engage with the art of Judith Scott, Sins Invalid, Alice Sheppard, Lucy Grealy, the Deaf Poets Society, as well as many theoretical and scholarly texts.