Disability Archives - Public Seminar

Disability

Greg Abbott’s Wheelchair

Cripnormativity rewards crips like Abbott for distancing themselves from other disabled people

June 10, 2025 • by Andrew Joseph Pegoda

On July 14, 1984, an 8,000-pound oak tree fell down in the River Oaks suburb of Houston, Texas. The tree stuck a young man out doing one of his favorite pastimes—running—leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. But the young man, who had just received a law degree from Vanderbilt ...

Disability

Shakespeare’s Ultimate Crip Text

In a new Richard III, populism is the pathology

September 10, 2024 • by Antoinette Burton

When I bought my ticket for this summer’s production of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Globe Theater in London, I chose a seat under cover of the rafters rather than a place standing directly in front of the stage—a distinction designed to echo the several ways that Elizabethans could experience ...

Disability

Wilderness, Urban Landscapes, and Biocapacity

In an excerpt from The Architecture of Disability, the author considers the performance of disability in so-called “nature”

October 25, 2023 • by David Gissen

Challenging the physical inaccessibility of national parks might be reimagined as an opportunity to demonstrate the artifice of American nature more broadly. If disability rights are ultimately human rights, then the ideas presented here suggest new, unimagined alliances....

Wilderness, Urban Landscapes, and Biocapacity

Disability

Against Technoableism

In an excerpt from her new book, Ashley Shew rethinks who needs improvement

October 24, 2023 • by Ashley Shew

It should go without saying that we need to center disabled people as experts about disability and technology. Yet if we do, we really trouble some underlying assumptions of the ableist world we’re in. In its simplest definition, ableism is bias or discrimination against disabled people or stigma against the ...

Disability

Who Is Disfigured by a Cleft Lip?

When happiness hinges on having a “normal” face, the many possibilities for human life are narrowed

November 10, 2020 • by Ella Hillström

When my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister, she went to consult a cleft jaw and lip expert in London. She lay down on the examining table, lifted her legs up and peered at the doctor as he glared at the black and white image. She had done these ...

Disability

One Question

May 21, 2020 • by Renée Schultz

When Ian calls from his group home with one question, it usually involves money. Two days ago, when he asked me to buy him a Star Wars DVD, I said “sure.” Even though I don’t want to contribute to the abuse of Amazon warehouse workers, I do want to take ...

Disability

What’s Next for the Health Care Debate?

A Demand for Process and Transparency

August 5, 2017 • by Miranda Yaver

While the Senate was voting on the motion to proceed with the straight repeal plan that would eliminate coverage for millions of Americans, I was in the exam room of my doctor’s office, and using my newly-acquired Medicaid for the first time. How did I feel? Suffice it to say that ...

Disability

The Disability Paradox

Further thoughts on inequality, disability, and the imaginal

October 14, 2015 • by Zachary Sunderman

Do you have a disability? Do you want to work? This seemingly innocent pairing of questions should immediately raise a red flag, for it is technically oxymoronic: in the United States, the disabled, by definition, are those who cannot work, at least in any significant sense. Granted, ...

Disability

Invisible Privilege, Unspoken Racism

From street transactions to the NYSED disability campaign

October 12, 2015 • by Chiara Bottici

I spent most of my summer on the Italian coast, in the little town where I was born, as I do almost every year. The difference, this time, was that I had not been back to my home country for a whole year. This gave me some sort of a ...