This summer, I had the distinct pleasure of designing a new graduate seminar with support from Humanities Engage. I am currently in the second week of teaching that course, called Critical Disability Studies, which examines canonical and emergent lines of Black, trans, and queer analysis within the field of disability studies while also foregrounding access as an ethic, episteme, and method. Humanities Engage provided crucial resources that provided the freedom to work through pedagogical questions that had been at the forefront of my mind for quite some time. Having had the benefit of this experience, I look forward to seeing how I might import the success of Critical Disability Studies to future courses.
Allow me to start by situating myself as a scholar and teacher. My research focuses on the cultural and theatrical history of disability in the United States. In this formulation, “disability” signals doubly. It highlights my attention to the contributions of people who avow disability as a cultural, political, or social identity. It also suggests my attention to disability as an administrative category that animates perceived physical, mental, and sensory differences to organize ideals of work, welfare, dependence, independence, deservingness, autonomy, and belonging. Any disability specialists reading this blog entry might observe in what I just described a combination of what is now typically understood as “disability studies” (the study of the cultural, political, and social contributions of disabled people—somewhat proximal to LGBTQ+ studies) and “critical disability studies” (the study of the practices, discourses, and institutions that organize people according to perceived ability of body and mind—somewhat proximal to queer theory). These dual commitments structured my first book, Disability Works: US Performance After Rehabilitation (out from NYU Press in July 2024) and ongoing research toward my second book, Supporting Actors: A Disability History of Theatrical Welfare in the United States, for which I recently received an NEH Summer Stipend.
In my work, I find myself increasingly drawn to (typically, archivally-intensive) methods capable of operating at the competing scales that disability studies and critical disability studies demand—methods that can account for how large-scale administrative structures of disability are lived, enacted, practiced, and resisted at the intimate level of a life. This has drawn me, in turn, to an interest in (following Rachel Corbman) “biography as method” for doing disability studies. Toward that end, I am in the early phases of drawing on some of the same research I have conducted for Supporting Actors as the basis for a third book, The Guests, a group biography of five women who lived at The Actors Fund Home—a retirement residence currently located in Englewood, New Jersey—over the course of the twentieth century. This turn toward biography has invited me to reflect upon the goal of writing for public audiences, or lay readers beyond the university, within my own research practice. Hold that thought.
Disability has also been central to my teaching at Pitt. In addition to the Critical Disability Studies graduate seminar I designed through Humanities Engage, I am currently offering Disability and Performance, an online undergraduate course in the Department of Theatre Arts that contributes to Pitt’s new Disability Studies Certificate. (I previously taught this as a special topics class as a HyFlex seminar early in the Covid-19 pandemic). I also include units on disability and access in introductory classes that—on the surface—have nothing to do with disability, such as Enjoying Performances (our introductory performance studies class). At the graduate level, I had the pleasure of teaching Queer and Feminist Disability Studies during my time as a Faculty Fellow in Pitt’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. That class attuned me to the significant interest in disability studies among graduate students across the arts and humanities at Pitt.
In the Department of Theatre Arts, though, I hadn’t yet taught a disability studies seminar at the graduate level. A confluence of developments—including a critical mass of our doctoral students working in or adjacent to disability studies, and the field’s flourishing (even in the face of profound marginalization and inadequate resourcing)—made this an exciting time to devise a critical disability studies seminar in my home department. The opportunities afforded through Humanities Engage, and my own reflections about the role of public writing in my future work as a disability performance historian, only made this all the more energizing. I should mention, too, that our department has significant support for students interested in public humanities work. One of the key components of our PhD program is the Immersive Practice Credential, which affords students the opportunity to specialize in an area of artistic practice (preparing them for hybrid artist-scholar faculty jobs, which prevail in our discipline) or in areas such as public humanities and community engagement (preparing them for diverse careers beyond the professoriate). What’s more, our PhD students have been among the most active participants in Humanities Engage’s Immersive Summer Fellowships, and my colleague Kathy George recently had great success with a new class she designed with the Summer Stipend for Curricular Innovation.
These circumstances coalesced to create the perfect moment in which to design a new seminar focused on critical disability studies. Going into the research and design process, I had two primary commitments. The first was to design a course that would work through some of the (inter)disciplinary tensions and ambivalences that attend designing a disability studies seminar from the perspective of performance studies. I’ve long observed a curious way in which, even though performance has been central to the evolution of disability studies—at once object, method, and paradigm—much of disability performance research has developed to the side of performance studies’ most generative theoretical and methodological insights. Similarly, more often than not, performance studies scholars have failed to take critical cues from disability scholars. To resolve these tensions, I abandoned any hope of the seminar foregrounding “coverage,” in the sense of introducing students to archives of the artists and objects that have garnered the prevailing critical attention of disability performance researchers. Instead, I began thinking of the course as Critical Disability Studies…For Performance Studies, that is, as a course focused on disability studies scholarship that engages questions of embodiment, worldmaking, and affect—questions central to performance studies’ critical imagination—even when these texts were not framed as inquiries in performance research as such. (I hoped that this breadth would also make the course’s focus on critical disability studies, and its perhaps latent performance theories, particularly useful for graduate students from other departments, such as those enrolled from English and Communication).
My second goal was to build upon Humanities Engage’s stated investment in the public humanities and in courses that prioritize “communication to non-specialist audiences” as methods for investigating access. This pedagogical commitment structures all of my teaching, but its centrality as an ethic, method, and subject is necessarily prominent within disability studies courses in particular.[1] That is, I was interested less in staging my course explicitly at the methodological intersection between disability studies and public humanities than in investigating how the very commitments of public humanities work might reinvigorate how teaching (about) access, and producing accessible research outcomes, could shape my course as a whole. In light of the ongoing exclusion of disabled people from the academy, the marginalization of disabled scholars (and disabled ways of knowing) within it, and the instrumentalization of disabled bodyminds by nondisabled academic researchers, the questions of access to disabled knowledge (and disabled access to knowledge) are of paramount concern. As disability historian Jaipreet Virdi writes, “Public scholarship…can act as a form of activism for disability justice,” an intersectional, anti-racist, anti-capitalist political movement that centers disabled, trans, and queer people of color.[2]
But what does “access” mean? I recently had the opportunity to revisit an entry on access that disability historian Bess Williamson wrote for Keywords in Disability Studies.[3] Williamson begins the entry in part by introducing a definition of access she later complicates and challenges: “the ability to enter into, move about within, and operate the facilities of a site.”[4] In many of my courses (and indeed, in Critical Disability Studies), I assign Williamson’s introductory piece alongside other accounts of access, such as performance group Sins Invalid’s discussions of “collective access” as an imperative of disability justice.[5] Part of what I love about the initial definition Williamson provides, although it is limited, as she underscores later, is how it highlights the materiality of access, a materiality that often disappears in contemporary invocations of access as a self-evident good abstracted from systems of material support. It highlights how access is insufficiently realized if one is only ever brought “into contact with someone or something.” More to the point: access also requires making use of that with which one comes into contact.”[6]
This productivist mandate of access gives me pause, for reasons that many disability studies scholars have noted.[7] Still, in undergraduate and graduate classrooms alike, attending to this particular account of usability (whether concerning a dressing room for actors or a theoretical precept) has proven exceptionally generative for students realizing how their own artistic and intellectual work might create more just worlds. Indeed, this emphasis on the relationship between access and usability became key to how I thought about designing a seminar concerned with communicating with both popular and scholarly audiences.
The way that commitments to access and public knowledge structured my class perhaps become clearest if we start, curiously enough, with the middle. The central eight weeks of the seminar would look familiar enough to anyone who has ever taken a graduate seminar in the humanities: each week, students congregate in seminar having read a recent monograph and take turns facilitating our conversations. But the weeks flanking this common pedagogical structure on either end of the semester, as well as the writing assignments that guide our collective reading in those eight weeks, bring the above commitments into high relief.
The first three weeks of the semester consist of a smattering of articles, as students encounter a few key texts (both canonical and contemporary classics)—something of a crash course in critical disability studies. In the second week, we read a collection of essays on “Disability (as) Methods.” And in the third week, our readings concern “Critical Access Studies.” Weeks 2 and 3 comprise the core of our readings most useful for thinking about communicating with non-specialists. Both weeks draw significantly from Mara Mills’ and Rebecca Sanchez’s fabulous recent edited collection, Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (including the above cited Virdi essay in Week 2, and complemented by Williamson’s and Hamraie’s writings, cited above, in Week 3.[1] Other key essays we read in these opening weeks include Kelsie Acton’s writing on plain language, a writing method important for reaching many disabled audiences, and Mel Chen’s essay on the relationship between a dense, theoretical writing style and their experience of brain fog, a piece that challenges our propensity to conflate the lucidity of one’s prose style with one’s accessibility. Additional essays include Teresa Blankmeyer Burke’s “A Philosophical Analysis of ASL-English Bilingual Publishing” and Helen Selsdon’s “Creating a Fully Accessible Digital Helen Keller Archive,” the latter of which convenes the dual relevance of public humanities and digital humanities praxis for disability studies.
These writings stand on their own, as introductions to how scholars in disability studies have thought about accessible writing within and beyond the academy. But they also come into play later in the semester when students begin working on their independent research, as they structure the third and final element of students’ final research portfolio. This portfolio consists first of an annotated bibliography, in which students conduct independent work in an area of disability studies relevant to their own research—such as “Asian American Disability Studies” or “Early Modern Disability Studies”—and share their findings with their colleagues so they can collectively benefit from one another’s research. The second part of the portfolio consists of a research paper of approximately 3,600-4,500 words (somewhat shorter than the article-length paper that frequently assigned in graduate seminars). The third and final component of this portfolio is an “access plan.” This is a short paper in which students outline how and why they might revise, adapt, translate, expand, or otherwise transform the research conducted for their final paper with questions of access in mind. That is, following Bess Williamson, I ask them: how can you ensure that particular communities can come into contact with and make use of your research? Based on the nature and subject of their research, and the particular questions of access it poses, students might consider, for instance, whether they would ideally translate their research into plain language, adapt it for public humanities programming, etc. To complete this assignment, students revisit our readings (and annotations) from Week 3: Disability (as) Methods and Week 4: Critical Access Studies, and remain in conversation with me about the particular access challenges and opportunities their research demands (or affords).
We are, of course, nearly three months away from encountering these access plans, but I am eager to see how my students build on existing lines of inquiry concerning public humanities and non-specialist communication, expanding the project of disability studies through modalities and methods that understand access not as merely a matter of compliance, or an ethical obligation of scholarship, but as an opportunity for theoretical and methodological ingenuity in their own work. This ingenuity, I hope they find, can both lead them to new genres and can live inside and alongside genres they already know.
In figuring this culminating element of the research portfolio as an access plan, rather than the execution of such a plan, I suppose it may be useful to detail fully my investment in a portfolio-based assessment at the end of the semester. In recent years, I have prioritized final portfolios over the 25-35 page final paper that was the scholarly norm in my own graduate school experience. My experience has taught me that no matter how talented and invested the person, graduate students rarely have the writing time, labor conditions, or distance from the course material they encountered for it to be a reasonable expectation that a seminar paper function as a proto-article draft (even as these longer papers serve an array of other worthy pedagogical functions). The portfolios—with prescribed elements—that I began assigning were my answer to this: an attempt to create the conditions in which students would be best prepared to write an article (or other research product) stemming from their inquiry from my class, even if that meant that article (or now, public humanities project, or translation, or…) emerged outside of the temporal bounds of my class itself.
The other primary writing assignments students pursue throughout the semester—and through which they prepare for the final portfolio—are “theory annotations.” They share this commitment as well. I first learned about a version of this assignment from religious studies scholar Anthony Petro, who in turn learned about it from colleague Jennifer Knust. In this formal writing assignment, completed for the vast majority of our weekly readings (be they articles, essays, or monographs), students synthesize a given reading’s argument, interlocutors, key terms, and questions and share their annotations with their colleagues before class. I’ve used some form of this assignment or another in the seven years I’ve taught graduate students at two different universities, and am constantly reminded of its utility at every turn. The annotations require students to do some considerable heavy lifting (besides reading) before a class meeting and to ground their questions in the specific arguments, archives, and methods of a particular work. They keep our seminar meetings honest—requiring students to be accountable for developing a collective understanding of what a given text accomplishes before prioritizing their own idiosyncratic perspectives on a text. They also help students learn how to take notes in useful ways for later degree milestones, like studying for comprehensive exams, and provide something they can take away from our class and mobilize in later research: detailed but succinct distillations of key texts. Given that the graduate seminars I teach are largely organized around questions of theory and method, these annotations help students not only come into contact with theoretical ideas, but to make use of them—that is, to access them.
[1] “Summer Stipends for Curricular Innovation,” https://www.humanitiesengage.pitt.edu/. Accessed September 3, 2023.
[2] Jaipreet Virdi, “Public Scholarship as Disability Justice.” In Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, 195-202. New York: New York University Press, 2023. For more on disability justice, see Sins Invalid, Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer. 2nd Edition. Berkeley: Sins Invalid, 2019.
[3] This language is drawn from a recent piece. See Patrick McKelvey, “Response: Positions, Episode 2.” Lateral 12.2 (2023: np. (Forthcoming). Bess Williamson, “Access.” In Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, 14-17 at 14. New York: New York University Press, 2015
[4] Williamson, 14.
[5] Sins Invalid, Skin, Tooth, and Bone.
[6] McKelvey, “Response: Positions, Episode 2,” including quotation from Williamson, 14.
[7] See, for instance, Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017
[8] Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, Editors. Crip Authorship: Disability as Method. New York: New York University Press, 2023