List Descriptions and Rationale:
In my dissertation project, I intend to study the history of disability administration in the CUNY system, particularly in relation to cognitive disabilities like Learning Disabilities and ADHD. In addition to recovering important institutional history, I hope to conduct original research about the current state of disability administration, particularly now as CUNY and other institutions undergo massive structural changes.
My first list provides an overview of interdisciplinary disability studies in the humanities. It explores methodological approaches used by historians, literary critics, and cultural theorists whose work examines disability from a social and cultural perspective. These scholars reject the notion that disability is a purely medical concern, arguing instead that cultural beliefs about normalcy, health, and disability have profound influences on society. Drawing upon the insights of disabled cultures and lived experiences, they uncover the hidden forces of ableism that shape contemporary society and offer models for building a future in which all human capacity may be valued equally.
My second list attempts to define a specific disability category I am calling “academic disability,” which is exemplified by such named cognitive impairments as learning disabilities, ADHD, and Autism Spectrum Disorder. This umbrella term will allow me to investigate instances where cognitive difference manifests as an impediment to the cultivation of normative “academic ability.” I will examine how developments in scientific knowledge about the brain have influenced the ways we teach academic literacy and think about students as learners. Not wishing to privilege medical definitions, I will draw extensively from the memoirs and life writing of disabled people, especially in examining the social and cultural factors that contribute to academic disability.
I imagine my final list as a toolkit for implementing institutional reform of higher education in a way that would respect the presence of cognitive diversity in academia. I will study how writing program administrators have conducted research within universities and how they have engineered institutional change through the programs they design. I will especially look to the Open Admissions movement and work that emerged as a result of integrating marginalized populations into disabling education systems. To help me imagine literacy education for the coming decades, I will look to two discourses emerging within writing pedagogy: On the one hand, I examine the way multimodal and new media composing challenges traditional notions of academic ability; on the other hand, I will draw together performance-based pedagogical theory to imagine how students might perform their identity as both disabled and as students simultaneously.
List A: “Disability Studies in the Humanities”
Advisor: Joseph Straus (Music, CUNY Graduate Center)
1. Telling Disability History
Baynton, Douglas C. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 17 – 33.
Ben-Moshe, Liat. “‘The Institution Yet to Come’: Analyzing Incarceration Through a Disability Lens.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 132 – 145. Print.
Emens, Elizabeth F. “Disabling Attitudes: U.S. Disability Law and the ADA Amendments” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. 42 – 59.
Hubbard, Ruth. “Abortion and Disability: Who Should and Should Not Inhabit the World?” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. 74 – 86.
Lewis, Bradley. “A Mad Flight: Psychiatry and Disability Activism” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. 115 – 131.
Longmore, Paul. Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Print.
Longmore, Paul and Lauri Umansky. The New Disability History: American Perspectives (History of Disability). New York: NYU Press, 2001. Print.
Stiker, Henri-Jaques. A History of Disability (Corporealities: Discourses of Disability). University of MI Press, 2000. Print.
Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Trent, James W Jr. Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Print.
2. Theorizing Disability
Brown, Lerita Coleman. “Stigma: An Enigma Demystified.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 147 – 160. Print.
Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness. Gallaudet University Press, 1999. Print.
—–. “An Enabling Pedagogy” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. 317 – 336. Print.
Davis, Lennard. Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions. New York: NYU Press, 2002. Print.
—–. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York, Verso, 1995. Print.
—–. The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 263 – 277. Print.
DePoy, Elizabeth and Stephen Gilson. “Disability, Design, and Branding: Rethinking Disability for the 21st Century.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 485 – 495. Print.
Groffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Touchstone, 1986. Print.
Kleege, Georgia. “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account.”The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 447 – 455. Print.
—–. “Disabled Students Come Out: Questions without Answers.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. 308 – 316.
Lukin, Josh. “Disability and Blackness.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 308 – 315. Print.
Murray, Stuart. Autism. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Price, Margaret. “Defining Mental Disability.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 298 – 307. Print.
Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. U of Michigan P, 2011. Print.
Puar, Jasbir K. “The Cost of Getting Better: Ability and Debility.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 177 – 184. Print.
Samuels, Ellen. “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming Out.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 316 – 332. Print.
Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. University of Michigan Press, 2010. Print.
Shakespeare, Tom and Mairian Corker. Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. Continuum, 2002. Print.
Swan, Jim. “Disabilities, Bodies, Voices.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. 283 – 295. Print.
Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Wilson, James C. and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. “Constructing a Third Space: Disability Studies, the TEaching of English, and Institutional Transformation” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. 296 – 307. Print.
3. Disability and Representation
Barounis, Cynthia. “Cripping Heterosexuality, Queering Able-Bodiedness: Murderball, Brokeback Mountain and the Contested Masculine Body. The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.
Bauman, H-Dirkesen and Joseph J Murray. “Deaf Studies in the 21st Century: ‘Deaf-Gain’ and the Future of Human Diversity.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 246 – 262. Print.
Cassuto, Leonard. “Oliver Sacks and the Medical Case Narrative.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. 118 – 131.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print.
—–. Staring: How We Look. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: NYU Press, 2006. Print.
Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Corporealities: Discourses of Disability). University of MI Press, 2001. Print.
—–. Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Print.
Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Print.
Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. University of Michigan Press, 2008. Print.
Snyder, Sharon, L, ed. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Modern Language Association of America, 2002. Print.
Straus, Joseph N.. “Autism as Culture.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. 460 – 484. Print.
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List B: “Defining Academic Disability”
Advisor: Jason Tougaw (English, Queens College)
1. Writing Studies Turns to (and from) Cognitive Science
Barbetta, Patricia M. and Linda A. Spears-Bunton. “Learning to Write: Technology for Students with Disabilities in Secondary Inclusive Classrooms.” English Journal 96.4 (March 2007): 86—93.
Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
Flower, Linda. The Construction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing. Carbondale and Edwardsvill: Southern Illinois UP, 1994.
Flower, Linda and John R. Hayes. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” College Composition and Communications, 32 (1981): 365-87.
Jurecic, Ann. “Mind Blindness: Autism, Writing, and the Problem of Empathy.” Literature and Medicine 25 (2006): 1 – 23.
—–. “Neurodiversity” College English 69.5 (2007), 421-442
Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia; Jay Dolmage; Paul Heilker “Two comments on ‘Neurodiversity’” College English 70.3 (2008), 314-321
Lewis, Lesle and Peg Alden. “What we Can Learn about Writing Blocks from College Students with Output Problems, Strong Writing Skills, and Attentional Difficulties,” Journal of Teaching Writing (2007) 23.1. 115 – 146.
Rose, Mike. “Part 1: The Cognition of Composing, 1980 – 1985” and “The Language of Exclusion” in An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity. Boston, MA: Bedford / St. Martin, 2006. Print.
2. Scientific Perspectives on Cognitive and Literacy-Related Disabilities
Rapp, Rayna. “A Child Surrounds this Brain: The Future of Neurological Difference According to Scientists, Parents and Diagnosed Young Adults,” in Martyn Pickersgill, Ira Van Keulen (ed.) Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences (Advances in Medical Sociology, Volume 13): Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2011.3-26
Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Vintage, 2012. Print.
—–. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales. New York: 1998, Touchstone. Print.
Vygotsky, Lev. The Fundamentals of Defectology (Abnormal Psychology and Learning Disability). Springer, 1999. Print.
West, Thomas. In the Mind’s Eye: Visual Thinkers, Gifted People with Dyslexia and other Learning Difficulties, Computer Images and the Ironies of Creativity. New York: Prometheus Books, 1991 and 1997.
Wolf, Maryanne. “Part III: When the Brain Can’t Learn to Read” in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. 165 – 229.
Wong, Beatrice Y. L. Learning about Learning Disabilities. 3rd Edition. San Diego: Elsevier, 2004. Print.
3. Social Definitions of Literacy-Related Disabilities
Carrier, James G. Learning Disability: Social Class and the Construction of Inequality in American Education. New York: Greenwood P, 1986. Print.
Coles, Gerald. The Learning Mystique: A Critical Look at “Learning Disabilities.” New York: Pantheon, 1987. Print.
—–. Reading Lessons: The Debate over Literacy. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. Print.
Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia. “Rethinking Rhetoric through Mental Disabilities.” Rhetoric Review 22.2 (2003): 156 – 67.
Kintgen, Eugene R, Berry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, editors. Perspectives on Literacy. Southern Illinois UP, 1988. Print.
Martin, Deirdre. Language Disabilities in Cultural and Linguistic Diversity. Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2009
Williams, Bronwyn T. Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education. Utah State University Press, 2006. Print.
4. Cognitive Disability Memoir
B. Frank. Epileptic. New York: Pantheon, 2006.
Couser, Thomas G. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Print.
Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from my Life with Autism. New York: Vintage, 1996. Print.
Mooney, Jonathan. The Shortbus: A Journey Beyond Normal. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2008. Print.
Mooney, Jonathan and David Cole. Learning Outside the Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools for Academic Success and Educational Revolution. New York: Touchstone, 2000. Print.
Prince-Hughes, Dawn, ed. Aquamarine Blue 5: Personal Stories of College Students with Autism. Athens, OH: Swallow/Ohio UP, 2002.
—-. Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism. New York: Harmony, 2004.
Schultz, Philip. My Dyslexia. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. Print.
Soliday, Mary. “Translating Self and Difference through Literacy Narratives” College English 56, 5 (Sep., 1994):511 – 526.
Tougaw, Jason. Selections from The One You Get: A Neurobiography. Forthcoming.
Ziminsky, Paul C. In a Rising Wind: A Personal Journey through Dyslexia. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1993.
5. Cognitive Disability and/in Higher Education
Avinger, Charles, Edith Croake & Jean Kearns Miller. “Breathing Underwater in Academia: Teaching, Learning and Working with the Challenges of Invisible Illnesses and Hidden (Dis-)Abilities.” Vance, 201-215.
Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, Linda Feldmeier White, Patricia A. Dunn, Barbara A. Heifferon, & Johnson Cheu. “Becoming Visible: Lessons in Disability.” College Composition and Communication 52 (2001): 368-98.
Cvetkovich, Ann. “Writing Depression: Acadia, History, and Medical Models.” Depression: A Public Feeling. Duke UP, 2012. Print.
Dunn, Patricia A. Learning Re-Abled: The Learning Disability Controversy and Composition Studies. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1995. Print
Dunn, Patricia A., & Dunn De Mers, Kathleen. (2002). Reversing notions of disability and accommodation: Embracing universal design in writing pedagogy and web space. Kairos, 7(1). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/7.1/binder2.html?coverweb/dunn_demers/index.html
Loewestein, Andrew Freud. “My Learning Disability: A (Digressive) Essay” College English (2004) 66.6. 585 – 602.
Longo, Judith. “The Learning Disabled: Challenge to Postsecondary Institutions.” Journal of Developmental Education 11 (1988): 10 – 14.
Luna, Catherine Elizabeth. “Otherwise qualified: An action-oriented study of the experiences of learning disabled labeled undergraduates at an Ivy League university” (January 1, 1997). Dissertations available from ProQuest. Paper AAI9800895. http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9800895
Robertson, Scott M. and Ari Ne’eman. “Autistic Acceptance, the College Campus, and Technology: Growth of Neurodiversity in Society and Academia.” Disability Studies Quarterly 28.4 (2008).
Schwarz, Patrick. Disability as Possibility: The Power of Inclusive Classrooms. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006.
Vance, Mary Lee, ed. Disabled Faculty and Staff in a Disabling Society: Multiple Identities in Higher Education. Ed. Mary Lee Vance. Huntersville, NC: AHEAD, 2007.
Yergeau, Melanie, Elizabeth Brewer, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Sushil K. Oswal, Margaret Price, Cynthia L. Selfe, Michael J. Salvo, Franny Howes. “Modality in Motion: Disability & Kairotic Spaces” [webtext] Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. 18.1. Web.
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List C: Toolkit for a Crip WPA Critique of Higher Education
Advisor: Mark McBeth (English, CUNY Graduate Center)
1. Performing Otherness in Academia
Bartholomae, “Inventing the University” in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Edited by Victor Villanueva. 2nd Edition. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003. 623 – 654. Print.
Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing,” in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Edited by Victor Villanueva. 2nd Edition. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003. 697 – 716. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press, 2005. Prints.
Horner, Bruce; Min-Zhan Lu Representing the ‘other’: Basic writers and the teaching of basic writing (Refiguring English studies). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999.
Otte, George and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk. Basic Writing. West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2010. Print.
Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
—–. “Diving in: An Introduction to Basic Writing” in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Edited by Victor Villanueva. 2nd Edition. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003. 311 – 318. Print.
2. Performing Critique in/of Academia
Atwill, Janet M. “Rhetoric and Institutional Critique: Uncertainty in the Postmodern Academy.” JAC 22.3 (2002): 640 – 45.
Balester, Valerie M. Cultural Divide: A Study of African-American College-Level Writers. U of Michigan, Boynton/Cook, 1993. Print.
Carroll, Lee Ann. Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers. Carbonedale and Edwardsville, IL: NCTE, 2002. Print.
Grabill, Jeffery T., James E. Porter, Stuart Blythe, and Libby Miles. “Institutional Critique Revisited.” Works and Days 21.102 (2003): 219 – 37.
Lamos, Steve. “Institutional Critique in Composition Studies: Methodological and Ethical Considerations for Researchers.” Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies. Ed. Lee Nickoson and Mary P. Sheridan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2012. 158 – 70.
Miller, Richard E. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Print.
Porter, James E., Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeffery Y. Grabill, and Libby Miles. “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change.” CCC 51.4 (2000): 610 – 42.
3. Performing Otherwise in Academia
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd edition. Harvard University Press, 1975. Print.
Davidson, Cathy N. and David Theo Goldberg. The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. The MIT Press, 2010. Print.
Davidson, Cathy N. Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.
Dunn, Patricia. Talking, Sketching, Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing. 2001. Print.
Gardner, Howard. Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons. Basic Books, 2006. Print.
Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press Books, 2011. Print.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Kutz, Eleanor, Suzy Q. Gorden, Vivian Zarnel, eds. The Discovery of Competence: Teaching and Learning with Diverse Student Writers. U of Michigan P, 1993. Print.
Myers, Miles. Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy. National Council of Teachers, 1996. Print.
Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press Books, 2003. Print.
Selfe, Cynthia L. Multimodal Composition: Resources of Teachers. Hampton Press, 2007. Print.
Shor, Ira. When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Print.
Sommers, Nancy and Laura Saltz, “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 56, No. 1. (Sep., 2004), pp. 124-149.
Strickland, Donna. The Managerial Unconscious in the history of Composition Studies. Southern Illinois UP, 2011.
Strickland, Donna, and Jeanne Gunner, eds. The Writing Program Interrupted: Making Space for Critical Discourse. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 2009. Print.
Young, Connie S. “Uncovering multiple intelligences: A spatial perspective in the writing classroom.” Journal of Teaching Writing (1996) 15.2: 235-57.
