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Minor Requirements and Courses 2004-2005

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The Broader Community

Culture, Power, and Disability
(ANTH course number to be determined)
University of Washington
Course Syllabus

Instructor:
Janelle Taylor, Ph.D
Office: Denny M39
Phone: 206-543-4793
jstaylor@u.washington.edu

This course introduces students to anthropological perspectives on disability, as well as disability perspectives on anthropology. Course readings introduce us to the lives, views and struggles of people dealing with different kinds of disabilities in a wide range of specific social and cultural contexts. Thinking from disability, these readings also offer critical new questions, concepts and perspectives, not only about disability but about the world within which it takes shape.

How does our understanding of disability change when we consider it in light of culture and power? And by the same token, how might attention to disability enrich or expand our understanding of culture and power? These big questions entail other more specific questions, such as: What counts as a disability, and who decides this question? What are the meanings and the social consequences of different kinds of disabilities in different contexts? In societies characterized by stark inequalities, how are people differentially placed at risk of experiencing disability through injuries and illnesses, and differentially empowered to access needed care and assistance to support living with disabilities?

We shall explore these questions through readings that address a wide range of specific topics and contexts living with the stigma of leprosy in India, people seeking official recognition of disability claims upon the state in post-Maoist China and in post-Chernobyl Ukraine .

My goals for students in this course are: 1) to gain an awareness of concepts and perspectives emerging from disability studies and the disability-rights movement; 2) to gain an appreciation of the questions, concepts and methods of sociocultural anthropology; 3) to gain an appreciation of both the significant commonalities and the enormous diversity within the broad category of “disability”; and 4) to develop skills of critical thinking and self-expression that will help us address issues of culture, power, and disability, as we encounter them in our lives and in our world.

Requirements

Class participation: All students are expected to attend class, having prepared the assigned readings in advance, and to participate regularly in class conversation . In addition to reading texts and writing papers, learning anthropology requires listening, reflection, dialogue, and engagement with an intellectual community.  Students who are regularly absent from class cannot regularly participate and therefore cannot cultivate these essential skills.  Persistent absence will therefore result in a lower course grade.

Archive Contribution : As a group, we will be collectively constructing an “archive,” which will ideally be posted on the web, of items relevant to the topic of culture, power, and disability. Your assignment is to find an item that relates in some way to issues of disability as discussed in this course. This “found object” could be a news clipping, or a work of art, or an advertisement, or a material object, or… ?? Along with your item (or, as appropriate, an image or description of it) you will turn in an annotation that includes information about where your item comes from,and (if available) who created it for what purposes, as well as a one- to two-page explanation of how you see this item linking with ideas presented in any of the course materials.

Letter (required but not graded): You are asked to write a letter (1-2 pages) addressed to some audience of your own choosing that you feel could benefit from thinking critically about issues of culture, power, and disability. You are not required actually to send these letters, though you may wish to. In any case you should address your letter to some actually existing party (an individual person, an institution, or a publication) and write it as if to send. Turn in and e-post at url of e-post site . (If the letter you wish to write is one you do not feel comfortable sharing with classmates, please simply let me know this, and refrain from posting it).

Papers: Two papers, ~5 double-spaced typed pages each, due at the beginning of class on date 1 and date 2 , provide opportunities for each student to explore in greater depth and detail lines of inquiry developed through our active and thoughtful collective engagement with the course materials. Papers must be double-spaced, in12-point font, with 1-inch margins, and include a bibliography of works cited.

Section 1: Disability, Culture, and Ethnographic Insight

Ray McDermott, Herve Varenne . 1995. “ Culture as Disability” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 26 (3): 324-348.

Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds White. 1995. “Disability and Culture: An Overview.”

Heidi Kelley and Ken Betsalel . 2004. “ Mind's Fire: Language, Power, and Representations of Stroke” Anthropology & Humanism 29(2): 104-116.

Robert Murphy. 1990. The Body Silent . New York : W.W. Norton. (selections TBD).

Sumi Elaine Colligan . 1994. “ The Ethnographer's Body as Text: When Disability Becomes ‘Other'-Abling.” Anthropology of Work Review Jun 1994, Vol. 15, No. 2-3: 5-9.

Gelya Frank. 2000. Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America . Berkeley : University of California Press.

Section 2: Stigma, Exclusion and Community

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity . New York : Touchstone.

Staples, James. 2004. “Delineating Disease: Self-Management of Leprosy Identities in South India .” Medical Anthropology 23:69-88.

…there are many other possible readings here…

Film: Secret People: The Naked Face of Leprosy in America

Section 3: Disability, Power, and Citizenship

Proctor, Robert. 1995. “The Destruction of ‘Lives Not Worth Living.'” In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture , ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, pp. 170-196.

Nora Ellen Groce , Jonathan Marks “ The Great Ape Project and Disability Rights: Ominous Undercurrents of Eugenics in Action” American Anthropologist Dec 2000, Vol. 102, No. 4: 818-822.

Public Culture 13(3), 2001. Special issue: “The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Reflections on Disability Criticism.” Ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler. Essays by: Eli Clare, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, WJT Mitchell, Wu Hung, Kyeong-Hee Choi, Celeste Langan, Susan Schweik, Alexa Wright, Veena Das and Renu Addlakha, Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg, Eva Feder Kittay.

Schwartzenberg, Susan. 2005. Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of Disability . Seattle : University of Washington Press.

Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl . Princeton : Princeton University Press. (Selections TBD)

Barker, Ho lly. 1997. “Fighting Back: Justice, the Marshall Islands , and Neglected Radiation Communities.” In Life and Death Matters: Human Rights and the Environment at the End of the Millenium , ed. Barbara Rose Johnston. Walnut Creek : AltaMira , pp. 290-306.

Film: “Half-Life: A Parable for the Nuclear Age”

Kohrmann, Matthew. 2005. Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China . Berkeley : University of California Press. (Selections TBD).

Skloot, Floyd. 2004. “A Measure of Acceptance.” In the Shadow of Memory . Bison Books.

Film: “When Billy Broke His Head”

Section 4: Disability in the Age of Medical Miracles

Taussig, Karen-Sue, Rayna Rapp , and Deborah Heath . 2003. “Flexible Eugenics: Technologies of the Self in the Age of Genetics.” In Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science beyond the Two-Culture Divide , ed. Alan H. Goodman, Deborah Heath , and M. Susan Lindee. Berkeley : University of California Press, pp. 58-76

Adrienne Asch and David Wasserman. 2005. “Where is the Sin in Synecdoche?”

Film: “Burden of Knowledge”

Nelson, Robert M. 2000. “The Ventilator/Baby as Cyborg: A Case Study in Medical Ethics.” In Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics , ed. Paul E. Brodwin. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, pp. 209-223.

Lock, Margaret. 2003. “On Making Up the Good-as-Dead in a Utilitarian World.” In Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences , ed. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock . Santa Fe : SAR Press, pp. …

Film: “Breathing Lessons”