SCHEDULE OF TOPICS – Winter 2025

Schedule is subject to change - consult the MODULES in Canvas regularly

[Content warnings are in offered on the Canvas site for material that may be triggering - these will be updated periodically in the Home Pages of the Modules]

Week 1

Tues Jan 7 Course Introduction

Film in class: Crip Camp: A Disability Revoluti on (2020) - link
Simi Linton, “Reassigning Meaning,” Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, NYU Press, 1998, pp. 8-17 - link
Watch this week pre-recorded lecture: “Intro to Disability Studies”

Thurs Jan 9 Disability Studies & Disability History

Week 2

Tues Jan 14 Disability and the Justification of Inequality

Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky, New York University Press, 2001, pp. 33-57 - pdf
Kim Nielsen, “Introduction,” A Disability History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2012, pp. xi-xxiii - pdf
Kim Nielsen, “I Am Disabled, and Must Go at Something Else Besides Hard Labor: Institutionalization of Disability, 1865-1890,” A Disability History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2012, 78-99 - pdf
In class: “A vote for ‘Black Disability Politics’,”interview with Sami Schalk on It's Been a Minute, NPR(Nov 8, 2022, 17 minutes) - link
Watch this week pre-recorded lecture: “Disability and Normalcy in Historical Perspective” - link
Optional:
- Sami Schalk, “Introduction: Black Health Matters,” Black Disability Politics, Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 1-17

Thurs Jan 16 Methods and Ethics in Disability History

Penny Richards and Susan Burch, “Documents, Ethics, and the Disability Historian,” The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, Oxford University Press, 2018 (15 pages) - pdf
Susan Lawrence, “Introduction: The Historians, the County, and the Dead,” Privacy and the Past: Research, Law, Archives, Ethics, Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 1-18 - pdf
Susan Lawrence, “Managing Privacy: Historians at Work,” Privacy and the Past: Research, Law, Archives, Ethics, Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 89-113 - pdf

Week 3

Tues Jan 21 Black Disability Politics of Section 504

Film in class: Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (2020) - link
Sami Schalk, “’We Have a Right to Rebel’: Black Disability Politics and the Black Panther Party,” Black Disability Politics, Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 23-47 - pdf
Kim Nielsen, “Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough: The Progressive Era, 1890-1927,” A Disability History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2012, pp. 100-130 - pdf
Watch this week recorded lecture: “Engaging Disability, Empowering History”

Thurs Jan 23 Indigeneity & Disability [facilitation Group A]

Week 4

Tues Jan 28 Canton Asylum & Archival Protocols [facilitation Group B]

Pemina Yellow Bird, “Wild Indians: Native Perspectives on the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians,” National Empowerment Center, n.d. (10 pages) - pdf
David Walker, “Horse-Stealing Mania: The Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians,” Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry, and Social Justice blog, March 14, 2015 (7 pages) - link
“Protocols for Native American Archival Materials,” First Archivist Circle, April 7, 2007 (25 pages) - link

Thurs Jan 30 Remembering

Podcast: Susan Burch, “Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions,” Disability History Association, Episode 32, Dec 27, 2021 - link
Susan Burch, “Continuance” (Ch. 5) and “Remembering” (Ch. 6), Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions, University of North Carolina Press, 2021, pp. 82-107 - pdf

Week 5

Tues Feb 4 Mental Disability History Research

David Wright and Renee Saucier, “Madness in the Archives: Anonymity, Ethics, and Mental Health History Research,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Vol. 23, 2012, pp. 65-90 - pdf

Thurs Feb 6 Black Disability History

Webinar: Patrick Cokley, “We’ve ALWAYS Resisted: The History of Disabled Black Activism” - link
Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley, “Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework,” Gender & Society, Vol. 33, 2019 - pdf
Kim Nielsen, “The Deviant and the Dependent: Creating Citizens, 1776-1865,” A Disability History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2012, 49-77 - pdf

Week 6

Tues Feb 11 Incarceration, Slavery, & Resistance [facilitation Group C]

Micah Khater, “No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical Epistolary of Disability in Early Twentieth-Century Alabama Prisons,” Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 43, Fall 2023(24 pages) - link
Dea Boster, “‘I Made Up My Mind to Act Both Deaf and Dumb’: Displays of Disability and Slave Resistance in the Antebellum American South,” Disability and Passing, eds. Daniel Wilson and Jeffrey Brune, Temple University Press, 2013, pp. 71-98 - pdf

Thurs Feb 13 Saving Black History

Ayah Nuriddin podcast
Patricia Galloway, “Providing Restricted Access to Mental Health Archives within Government Archives: The Subject Stakeholder,” The American Archivist, Vol. 84, 2021, pp. 165-188
Virginia Central State Hospital digital archiving project
Guest speaker at 11:30am: Dr. Lorrie Dong, Archivist/ Preservation Administrator
READ: The Central State Hospital Digital Library & Archives Project - link
- Lorrie received her PhD from UT in 2015. Her dissertation research was on the social ecologies of mental institution records, with a focus on the transition from recordkeeping settings to archival environments. Lorrie was a post-doctoral researcher for an Andrew W. Mellon-funded project at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) to create a digital archives for a historical collection of mental health records. Prior employers include the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the University Library at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Week 7

Tues Feb 18 Visualizing Enslavement & Enfreakment [facilitation Group D]

Ellen Samuels, “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 37, 2011, pp. 53-81 - pdf
Cassandra Jackson, “Visualizing Slavery: Photography and the Disabled Subject in the Art of Carrie Mae Weems,” Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions, ed. Christopher M. Bell, Michigan State University Press, 2011, pp. 31-46 - pdf

Thurs Feb 20 An Archive of Skin [facilitation Group E]

Week 8

Tues Feb 25 An Archive of Kin [facilitation Group F]

Thur Feb 27 Disability Archival Methodology

Gracen Brilmyer, “Towards Sickness: Developing a Critical Disability Archival Methodology,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Vol. 17, 2020, pp. 26-45
Susan Lawrence, “Archivists at the Gates,” Privacy and the Past: Research, Law, Archives, Ethics, Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 65-88 - pdf

Week 9

Tues March 4 Black Disability Politics of Mental Institutions [facilitation Group G]

Vanessa Jackson, “In Our Own Voice: African-American Stories of Oppression, Survival, and Recovery in Mental Health Systems,” International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, Vol. 2002 (37 pages) - pdf
Sami Schalk, “Fighting Psychiatric Abuse: The Black Panther Party and the Black Disability Politics of Mental and Carceral Institutions” (Ch 2), and “Praxis Interlude One,” Black Disability Politics - pdf

Thurs March 6 Disability & Eugenics Oral Histories

Claudia Malacrida, “Contested Memories: Efforts of the Powerful to Silence Former Inmates’ Histories of Life in an Institution for ‘Mental Defectives’,” Disability & Society, Vol. 21, 2006, pp. 397-410 - pdf
Wendy Duff, Jefferson Sporn, Emily Herron, “Investigating the Impact of the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada,” Archivaria, Vol. 88, 2019, pp. 122-161 - pdf
Film: Surviving Eugenics (2015) - link

Week 10

Tues March 11 Memory & Memorialization

TBD

Thurs March 13 Peer Review Workshops