Including Difference

Catalog description

Disability is normal. Ableness is temporary. However, social stigmas, misunderstandings, and notions of "normal" exclude students and adults with disabilities. How have artists with disabilities offered worldviews that decenter normal? To pursue decentering normal, students in the course explore the creative practice of contemporary artists labeled by society as disabled to understand how their viscerally empowered art can function pedagogically to decenter notions of normal. Decentering notions of normal begins with identifying and challenging social systems that-through visual, lingual, and technological cues-communicate which traits are considered normal and which are not. While the analysis of linguistic and visual representations is instructive for articulating identity construction and its relationship to power and privilege, these lines of inquiry within disability studies overlook the realities of embodied difference that are a part of many people who live with disabilities. Notions of a normalized body frame certain patterns of behavior, cognition, affect, and physicality from which bodies are measured as either within or outside of the frame of normalized learning spaces such as schools. The Feminist Disability Studies and Disability Justice readings in the course go beyond labeling difference and invest in articulating and understanding difference as interconnected relationships in which inclusion may be fostered.