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.

In the months since the emory conference, my relation to disability studies has changed. I attended the conference as a spectator, eager to probe the shape and problems of the field. My PhD is in medieval studies, and I was beginning a project on historical representations of disability, deformity, and miraculous healing. Now, as a member of the MLA's Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, I am involved in the post-conference evaluatory process and in other disability-related professional initiatives. Each stage of this journey has been informed by a growing awareness of what might in other contexts be articulated as a problem of field identity. When I read the conference title—Disability Studies and the University—and looked through the program, I found myself imagining conversations between the theme and the paper titles. That there was such a difference between what I envisioned and what I saw might be an index of my interpretive skills, but it might also indicate the challenges of defining and recognizing disability studies.