Deaf Studies: Disability Studies Perspective and Controversy

Disability Studies is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary academic field that focuses the social phenomenon of disability and its lived experience. This field seeks to understand and document historical and current contexts in which disability resides and attempts to understand and ameliorate the oppression that people with disabilities experience. As much as it is an academic field, Disability Studies is also political and promotes the inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of social, economic, and cultural life, with an emphasis on people with disabilities’ shared experience of oppression. Disability Studies closely aligns with feminist, queer, race, and other minority studies and uses similar theoretical perspectives to understand and study disability. For example, the oppression women have experienced and the historical view of women as ...