The Sawyer Seminar Presents - Liberating Disability: Stories of Our Past, Present, and Future

The Mellon Sawyer Seminar presents Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation at Rutgers–Newark.

Disability has long been framed as an individualized, bio-medical deficit in need of remediation, control, or erasure. Dominant definitions have deferred to the “expert knows best” over the person themselves. These framings originated from medicalized perspectives that approached illness or impairment as a problem to be solved. In educational spaces, special education classes for students manage and contain perceptions of behavior or communication that fall outside the realm of “normal.”

Carceral spaces, like prisons and nursing homes, sequester and confine testimonies about disabled experience, particularly of adults (as much of the literature and knowledge of disability is focused on young children or youth). From the vantage point of the Humanities, disability studies have pointed out the ways these models and definitions of disability can be reconsidered to better understand disability as an essential part of what it means to be human and a necessary aspect of coalition building.

One of the main contributions disability studies makes to the humanities is expanding conversations about representation. Disability studies continue to influence the understanding of representation by centering disabled individuals as experts (rather than passive objects spoken about by caregivers or medical professionals). The disability rights phrase “nothing about us without us” or the disability justice phrase “existence is resistance” captures the idea that disabled people should be part of creating the literature, art, laws, policies, and history about disability. This simple idea that disabled people are the authority on their own experiences has marked effects on the way disability is represented.