Instructor: Juliet Ellinger
Online WF 12:30 PM – 1:50 PM
This course begins from two key understandings: disability is both a common human experience that touches every life and a cultural idea shaped by the stories, language, and images we use to describe it. Together, we will explore what “disability” means and how its meanings shift across history, politics, art, literature, activism, and everyday life. Students will examine how disability rights movements have challenged dominant narratives, how built environments can exclude or include, and how rhetorical choices affect public attitudes and lived experiences.
Using literary texts as a foundation, we will engage memoirs, essays, life writing, scholarship, film, and poetry through a rhetorical lens to examine real-world debates about access, inclusion, and representation. We’ll connect theory to lived experience, considering disability as identity, culture, and political force. Students will also take part in a collaborative project that connects course concepts to practice by developing a call-to-action around disability and access.
Course readings may include but are not limited to Lennard Davis, Sarah Novic, Lucy Grealy, Riva Lehrer, Audre Lorde, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Tobin Siebers, Jay Dolmage, Eli Clare, Sami Schalk, Melanie Yergeau, and others.