Thank you so much for this book. We’ve both been teaching on Technology & Disability for a few years now, and it’s incredible to see your research in this vein. How do you describe your book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History? Hearing Happiness is both American history and a memoir about what it means to… Read more →
Tag: Disability
Accessibility in America Past and Present
Bess Williamson’s Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design is a thought-provoking and edifying look at the shifting culture around disability and the design of our built environment in the United States from post-World War II to the present. I was interested to read the book both because I have a longstanding scholarly interest… Read more →
Please Touch: 3D Technologies for Accessibility in Museums
In the fall of 2016, students and faculty from Coastal Carolina University attended the annual Reconstructive and Experimental Archaeology Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia. The conference always includes a hands-on component like atlatl throwing, Viking bead-making, or other kinds of experiential learning. At the conference, Dr. Linda Hurcombe from University of Exeter gave a paper on using… Read more →
Civil War Disability in the Light and the Dark: An Interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins
Sarah Handley-Cousins argues in her new book, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North, that the bodies of disabled Union soldiers and veterans “were sites of powerful cultural beliefs about duty, honor, and sacrifice,” yet those ideals became complicated with men who failed to perform the socially accepted role of wounded warrior. Her work… Read more →
Stop Depicting Technology As Redeeming Disabled People
About corn, fancy arms, and the narratives imposed upon me. About a year and half out from my amputation, I visited my local grocery store. I was looking at ears of corn, peeling back the husk a little to see if the corn inside was a winner. Someone sidled up to me, and leaned in…. Read more →
“The Joy of My Life”: Seeing-Eye Dogs, Disabled Veterans/Civilians and WWI
On December 13, 1933, Captain A. J. C. Sington, then Chairman of the British Guide Dogs for the Blind, read a letter from an unnamed veteran of the Great War to the Northern Counties Association for the Blind. In the letter, the veteran described his life before and after receiving his guide dog: The unnamed… Read more →
The Angel of the Workhouse: The Body, and the Body Politic, of Victorian Women with Disabilities
On September 12, 1846, a poet-prince married a “rather plain, thin, faded, hysterical woman [who] was loved for herself as perhaps none of all the world’s famous beauties has ever been.” Perhaps that rather dramatic description is not an entirely fair account of the elopement of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, but their readers’ continued… Read more →
From Mooktie to Juan: The Eugenic Origins of the “Defective Immigrant”
On a Monday in November 1905, a “little deaf and dumb … 10-year old Eurasian girl” called Mooktie Wood arrived in the US on the steamship Canopic. An orphan with no known relatives, Mooktie had been “picked up” by an American Pentecostal missionary, Lillian Sprague, in the wake of one of the many devastating famines… Read more →
It’s (Not) in Your Head: When Bodies Defy Logic
“If you say too little they can’t help you, and if they say too much they think you’re kind of … a mental patient.” Less than five minutes into Jennifer Brea’s stunning new documentary, Unrest, her husband captures this central tension for people with rare or undiagnosed conditions and their loved ones. Brea has myalgic… Read more →
My Experiences with Auto-Immunity and Why I Dislike the Term “Able-Bodied”
I dislike the term “able-bodied.” I see this term used frequently in academic and activist scholarship, as well as everyday language, often without giving the term its due scrutiny. As an academic who studies structural inequalities based on race, gender, and disability, I find that it assumes a binary system structured on ableist ideas. It… Read more →