Disability Studies

Disability Studies and Assumed Interdisciplinarity

An essential feature of disability studies is its commitment to interdisciplinarity, particularly in the humanities. Critical explorations of disability in literature and in the arts, cultural studies, anthropology, economics, critical legal studies, geography, women's studies, ethnic studies, race studies, film studies, and theater studies represent but a sample of the critical analyses that constitute disability studies in the humanities. The multiple locations that inform disability studies research and scholarship suggest the relevance for multicultural educators committed to a more rigorous exploration of diversity and the pursuit of social justice. Disability studies moves beyond a normative that explains difference by race, class, gender, and disability and beyond the simple dichotomies these categories suggest in education. Linda Ware has characterized humanities-based disability studies as an approach made up of recovery, reclamation, and reimagining the value of disability as an unequivocal part of the human experience. Because disability is central to the human experience, it has always been included in the literary and historical record; however, as a unit of analysis, it was often unexplored or underexplored until the emergence of disability studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This “recovery” of extant work on disability has resulted in the “reclamation” of disability and disability-related themes in literature and history that, in turn, enabled new discussion and complex analyses that conveyed a more imaginative approach to understanding disability.