Colleges Offer Programs In Disability

Alice Thomas, Dispatch Higher Education Reporter
The Columbus Dispatch
February 4, 2002 Monday, Home Final Edition
(reprinted with permission)

Black studies, gender studies and women's studies have a new academic cousin on the cutting edge of cultural analysis: disability studies.

Professors are giving a scholarly second look to a group that's been around for ages (think The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and is now a hot topic in movies and books (think A Beautiful Mind).

The University of Toledo is creating an undergraduate major in disability studies. The Ohio State University plans to offer it as a minor. Both schools will join a growing number of colleges around the country in offering the subject as a course of study.

"What we are seeing is a rise equivalent to what we saw in the women's movement 20 years ago," said Patricia Murphy, a visiting professor of disability studies at Toledo.

As the women's movement did, disabilities are making a splash in mainstream culture. There are best- selling memoirs, movie plots and even a Barbie who uses a wheelchair.

"Autobiography is a kind of first genre," said Brenda Brueggemann, an associate professor of English and comparative studies at OSU. Mainstream memoirs presaged the development of both black studies and women's studies as majors, she said.

The box of books atop a desk in her Denney Hall classroom last week further attested to the trend. She had rounded up more than 20 books about deafness for her Representations of Deafness in Literature and Film class— enough so each student had a different book.

Brueggemann, who has taught at OSU for 10 years, is herself an example of the current shift in how intellectuals—and the disabled—view themselves. The students pay no attention to her hearing loss, which is severe, and the focus of the class isn't about "fixing" deafness or other medical aspects.

Instead, Brueggemann, who reads lips, probes students to look for the perspective brought on by deafness as she sheds light on the deaf culture.

This class, the students compared two books, one written by a child of deaf parents and one by a deaf woman, and debated whether the two belonged to the same "nation" of deafness, or group that shares a similar identity.

Several students said they weren't interested in studying disabilities until they met Brueggemann while taking one of her writing classes.

"She's outstanding. Anything she talks about is interesting," said Lauren Kelley, a junior English major who wants to pick up a minor in disability studies.

At Toledo, the program will focus on culture, Murphy said.

"We're looking at this from a humanist perspective. That's a very different thing than doing physical therapy or special education or a rehabilitation program."

The program will go deeper than just reading popular fiction.

Academics interested in disabilities are retracing history with a fresh set of eyes, scouring stories for nuggets to interpret. They've found some fodder in medieval tales of witchcraft, where witches in writings from the period were described as "lame, bleair-eyed, old," Murphy said.

"It gets to the whole business of what's normal is constructed by the society you live in. At the time, witches were considered abnormal," she said.

In the United States, with baby boomers aging and the Americans with Disabilities Act in its 11th year, the notion that the disabled are deviants is being turned on its head.

"You could argue that disability is a naturally occurring phenomenon that everybody is going to experience in life," said Gary Albrecht, a professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois in Chicago, which has one of the few Ph.D. programs in disability studies. "Either you die young or you're going to have a stroke. Or a heart attack. Or osteoporosis. Or a bad back.

"Anything that prevents you from functioning at a full capacity is a disability."

The job market may be ripe for graduates of disability studies.

One in five Americans—54 million—has a disability, said L. Scott Lissner, Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator at OSU.

Some large companies have disability coordinators. Human-resources departments often provide accommodations and medical benefits and make sure federal law is followed.

OSU senior Julia Heiberger said Brueggemann's class already has been helpful to her in her job as an executive secretary at Nationwide Insurance, where "diversity is a really big thing."

Fellow student Kelley compared studying disabilities to another hot academic topic: "I think it's like minoring in Spanish. There are so many more Spanish speakers in the workforce. It's learning a new language and culture."

top of page