Session 8a: Disability, Scholarship and Inclusion

David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder - Out of the Ashes of Eugenics: The Making of a Disability Minority in the US 1848-1930
Program in Disability Studies, Department of Disability and Human Development, University of Illinois at Chicago

No abstract is presently available.

Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller - The Scholarship of Blindness and the Blindness of Scholarship
Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia Canada V6T 1Z1

When the Modern Languages Association established a committee on disabilities issues in the profession, one of the purposes was to promote awareness of disability issues in both teaching and scholarship among its members, encouraging reflection on how they interact with students and scholars with disability in their own institutions. The question that often arises in this context is this: Is disability in the university community an access issue or a cultural issue, or is it not both? I will contend that this reflection becomes all the more urgent when it concerns the relationship between blindness and scholarship.

In this paper, I will attempt to outline and discuss the major issues that arise when scholarship in the humanities involves a blind person as the principal researcher. On the institutional level, these issues include a politics of assumption and cultural barriers to communication and integration; the role of non-verbal, visual and iconic communication in the dissemination and reception of information. On a more the cognitive level (the interdependence of the two levels will become more and more manifest as they are elaborated on), the central issues include: verbal processing of information as opposed to a combined verbal and visual processing of concurrent semiotic codes (for example the use of tables, graphs, maps, icons and images to understand various primary and critical texts); problems and (de)constructive responses by the blind to the contemporary evolution of cultural studies, with their increasing emphasis on film studies, photography and iconography, vision-based technology (for example the famous "windows") and the study of non-verbal communication; and the relationship between text, voice and interpretation through oral reading.

By combining references to semiotic theory and theoretical writings on and through blindness with the "insight" of personal experience, I will bring out the complexity of the intellectual, cultural and social issues involved. Ultimately I hope to suggest some particular strengths that blind scholarship may offer for the advancement of knowledge and understanding.