STUDYING DISABILITY
Dynamic Academic Field is a Gateway to Possibilities

We have found one another and found a voice to express not despair at our fate but outrage at our social positioning. Our symptoms, though sometimes painful, scary, unpleasant, or difficult to manage, are nevertheless part of the dailiness of life. They exist and have existed in all communities throughout time. What we rail against are the strategies used to deprive us of rights, opportunity, and the pursuit of pleasure.

-- Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity

The quotation from Linton's book points straight to the heart of what motivates some people toward disability activism and the push for rights for people with disabilities.

Now, at a growing number of colleges and universities, the same motivation can be channeled into an academic effort: pursuing a degree in disability studies.

College students can earn bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in this rapidly evolving, interdisciplinary field that examines the context of disability in our society.

A Brief but Colorful History

Disability studies has emerged over the last three decades along with the disability rights movement and the passage of landmark legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. It can be described as an academic field of study that's also geared toward creating social change.

"The area of disability studies began in the late '70s, and it was very much a kind of cooperative between academics and activists in order to get disability on the map of civil rights agendas in particular," said David Mitchell, director of interdisciplinary studies and disability studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In a nutshell, the field is "an academic effort to move people with disabilities out of their placement within a solely medical predicament," Mitchell said. "In other words, disability is much more complex and larger in a cultural sense than individual impairments."

Generally, the field can be compared to gender and race fields such as women's studies or African-American studies, but with some important differences, said Mitchell, who has spinal muscular atrophy.

Disability studies deals more with structural and cultural access, whereas gender or race studies tend to be more ideological and focused on attitudes, Mitchell said.

"In many ways, people with disabilities have been positioned as the 'other' of race and women's studies, because what you had to do historically to get your agenda on the map as an important political voice is disprove that you were part of a biologically inferior group," Mitchell said.

Scholars examine literature, art, sociology, psychology and other cultural elements that help explain the isolation and stigmatization sometimes experienced by people with disabilities.

Two Approaches

Most disability studies scholars follow one of two basic approaches to their studies. The humanities approach looks at disability in society, often from a personalized perspective, and examines what went into creating stereotypes and oppression of people with disabilities.

In this approach, Mitchell said, he and some fellow scholars are forging a new way to think about impairment. "It matters if you have a disability as to how you understand the world and see yourself within it. That perspective inevitably influences what you say and understand, write about or think about the world you inhabit," he said.

The other approach is a social science perspective, also referred to as a traditional approach, said Glenn Fujiura, associate professor and director of graduate studies in Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"We study disability as a social policy issue," said Fujiura, whose research focuses on demography, social policy and research methods. "We are very comfortable with looking at the problem from a more social and cultural perspective, so our take may be looking at financing or political rights or things like that."

It's the close proximity of these differing approaches that has led to an identity struggle in recent years within the field.

But the blend of perspectives is part of its appeal, Fujiura said.

"It's an area in ferment. It's exciting, it really is," Fujiura said. "Any time you have the nexus of this kind of scholarship and the diversity of perspectives being brought together, it's going to be reallydynamic."

Whatever approach individual scholars may take, disability studies combines a fascinating variety of academic areas and subjects.

A good example is at UIC, home of the world's first Ph.D. program in disability studies. There, a doctoral student works with faculty members from the public health, English, psychology, occupational and physical therapy departments, as well as faculty in the department of disability and human development.

A Growing Field

Disability studies courses are offered at many schools in some form, and degree programs are currently available at a handful of schools across the nation with more on the way.

For example, Syracuse University offers a master's program, the University of California at Berkeley is creating an undergraduate minor program and Ohio State University has been charged to develop a disabilities studies program,said Mitchell, who is also president of the Society for Disability Studies. (The group's Web site, a valuable resource on disability studies,is located at www.uic.edu/orgs/sds.)

Core classes in disability studies center around the "contemporary social situation of people with disabilities in the U.S.," Mitchell said. Students learn to ask pertinent questions about people with disabilities such as: Where are they? Are they employed? What are the institutions that serve and service or even oppress them?

In addition, students take courses like the "History of Disability," "Disability and Culture," "History of Disability in Literature and Visual Art" (a course he teaches) or even "Disability at the Movies."

Some graduate courses listed for UIC's master's program Web site include "Foundations of Disability and Human Development," "Introduction to Disability Policy and Organization" and "Introduction to Assistive Technology: Principles and Practice."

Wanted: Motivated Students

While disability studies, of course, has a special appeal to students with disabilities, the field is open to everyone.

"I think that a lot of people that might be very comfortable in a disability studies program might get the sense that they're not welcome because they either don't have a disability, or don't have an interest in studying it from a narrative, personal perspective," Fujiura said, adding that isn't the case.

On the other hand, Mitchell said, "I think the important thing is to recognize that disability has been largely interpreted and described through the experiences of nondisabled people, and that's incredibly disempowering for people with disabilities in general."

Disability studies is ideal for "the student that is clearly dissatisfied, or feels pigeonholed intellectually by a specific discipline," Fujiura said. "There are students here that have grand visions of what they want to do with their lives. They are seeking to become activists or policy people, or systems-change kinds of people."

Career Opportunities

Conversely, the UIC program also sees students from specific disciplines who will devote themselves to disability within the context of their careers. Examples would be occupational therapists, rehabilitation engineers or physical therapists.

"It opens their eyes to a different world," Fujiura said of such students.

Mitchell and Fujiura agree that there are plenty of career opportunities for which a disability studies background would be appropriate, such as health care, academics, public policy-making and more.

"Why shouldn't people with disabilities be in there designing, imagining and forwarding the agenda of their own social group with the industries that have the most contact with them?" Mitchell said.

And Mitchell had this to say, specifically to people with disabilities contemplating college study: "The university is just a very major and very influential and middle-class institution in the U.S. Pursuing a college degree is extremely important just in a general sense, to have access to the privileges and influence of the institutions that run the country and formulate public opinion.

"We have to learn to figure out how to develop the language and the vocabulary for thinking of disability in very different ways than we've ever thought of it before, instead of some sort of tragic and pathetic existence, as something where you are deterministically situated as one who will never leave your house," he said. "That whole mind set needs to be shifted and revised."