Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T00:11:44.943Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Compulsory Feralization: Institutionalizing Disability Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David T. Mitchell
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago
Sharon L. Snyder
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago

Extract

While disability studies has opened up new discursive spaces for revising cultural attitudes and beliefs about disability, its increasing legitimation in the contemporary academy comes with conflicts. The university as a research location cannot merely divorce itself from the ethical and restrictive practices that have characterized the past two centuries. In fact, it does so only at its own risk and, even more important, at the risk of further entrenching disabled people in its institutional grounding. The institutionalization of disability studies is just that—a formal cultural ingestion process that churns out knowledge about disability while resisting reflexive inquiries about whether or not more detail is inherently better. More knowledge is inherently better for the institution because it keeps the research mill active, but here we want to contemplate the degree to which generating more professionally based data about disability threatens to reproduce some of the problems that have characterized the study of disability to this point in history.

Type
Conference on Disability Studies and the University
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Clell, Madison. E-mail to the authors. 6 Feb. 2004.Google Scholar
Cliff, Michelle. “Journey into Speech.” The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-cultural Literacy. Ed. Simmonson, Rick and Walker, Scott. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1988.Google Scholar
Dunn, Katherine. Geek Love. New York: Warner, 1990.Google Scholar
Martin, Douglas. “Disability Culture: Eager to Bite the Hands That Would Feed Them.” New York Times 1 June 1997, late ed., sec. 4: 1. 23 Feb. 2004 <http://barrier-free.arch.gatech.edu/Articles/nyt_doll.html>.Google Scholar
Newton, Michael. Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. New York: St. Martin's, 2002.Google Scholar
Shattuck, Roger. The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron. New York: Farrar, 1980.Google Scholar
Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back. Dir. Snyder, Sharon and Mitchell, David. DVD. Brace Yourselves Productions, 1996.Google Scholar