Introduction to Disability Studies in the Humanities

Catalog description

ENGL 228 provides a humanities-based interdisciplinary introduction to Disability Studies. This is one of two paired introductory courses developed as required courses for the Disability Studies minor. (The other is RHS 100 .) Students will have wide exposure to both the lived experiences of disability, past and present, and to the unstable cultural norms that have traditionally stigmatized disability. The course explores valuable varieties of human embodiment and mindedness; it also asks central questions about what counts as "normal," and who gets to say why. Making use of historical tracts, novels, poetry, movies, plays, art exhibits, memoirs, youtube clips, and activist documents, ENGL 228 offers important new dimensions and challenges to traditional accounts of human value and political agency.