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Disability Studies

Description

This IGG is comprised of Faculty and graduate students interested in the interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies. Owing to its profound rootedness in considerations of human life as both embodied and sociocultural, as well as an extraordinary history of combining the contemplation with pragmatism and activism, Disability Studies is intrinsically among the most interdisciplinary scholarly enterprises.  Interest in an interdisciplinary home for Disability Studies at the U of M goes back at least 25 years.  Despite a nearly steady outpouring of administrative, faculty, and student energies toward that end, this project has yet to achieve fruition.  Heretofore, the most formidable challenge appears to have been the project's extraordinary interdisciplinarity, though this has also been its greatest (potential) virtue.

Now as in the past, interested key players, academic administrators, faculty, and students, come from a remarkable collection of academic homes, including CLA, AHC, CEHD, College of Design, and the Humphrey Institute, as well as UM-Morris.   (There are good reasons to engage faculty in IT and Law as well and reason to believe there might be interest.)  While some of the challenges have doubtless owed to radically different perspectives on disability, in particular differences between medical and cultural viewpoints, the hardest problems to solve have been administrative, including an appropriate collegiate/departmental home and revenue sharing in the inevitable and highly desirable potential instances of team-taught courses.  The prospect of a unique program grounded in Minnesota's history of interdisciplinary collaboration.  The goal of the Graduate Group will be to study the history and current state of Disability Studies as an interdiscipline and to assess next steps toward attaining its further grounding as a graduate offering at the University of Minnesota.  The benefit of this effort, like so much of Disability Studies, lies not only in furthering one field, but also in advancing the praxis of interdisciplinarity, negotiating both intellectual and logistical hurdles.

Leadership

The primary contact for this group is Alex Lubet (School of Music). 

Membership

Please direct questions about the new interdisciplinary graduate groups to Vicki Field, Director of The Graduate School’s Office of Interdisciplinary Initiatives, field001@umn.edu or 612-625-6532.