Interdisciplinary Disability Studies

Celebration of Achievement
April 30, 2009

Welcoming remarks from Dr. Elizabeth DePoy, Professor and Coordinator of Interdisciplinary Disability Studies

Welcome, everyone. Each year, I approach this celebration with ambivalence. I am always delighted to celebrate the achievements of the students who have completed the concentration. Our courses require intellectual rigor, rethinking perspectives or what we call flipping your brain, and a significant amount of academic effort. On the other hand, I miss the students who have studied with us, as each has left a mark on my life and my thinking.

So rather than telling you about the students’ work, I will let them tell you themselves through sharing some of the excerpts from their assignments in DIS 450.

“Biology is a discipline of science that discovers and defines how life works. The field of biology is very broad and covers a wide spectrum of living organisms; all of which live, reproduce, and obtain energy. On the other hand, disability studies covers many aspects of human diversity including human values, traits, and even policy. This field helps to redefine disability to incorporate the typical with the atypical. With disability growing as a larger movement, equity and equality are starting to become more of a realization instead of being hidden away. By reshaping and defining disability, intellectual advancement can occur for many disciplines.”

“The semester began with discussion, which included disjuncture theory, which was defined as the following: “The focus of this explanatory theory of disability is on the disjuncture between embodied experience and environments.” This statement had me thinking from the start. Ideas of particular people in their environment rather than the population as a whole came to mind. I thought about how everyone must be just as capable when trying to access different things, whether they have a disability or not. Until this first discussion, I was borderline oblivious to certain things which now stand out.”

“From what I have learned thus far, I believe that disability can be understood though a number of perspectives, including morals, medicine, values and beliefs, law, social models, research, etc.”

“If I go into Structural Engineering, I will use my insight into universal design and universal access to design buildings and other types of infrastructure that are designed to be accessible to all people and designed on the interior to be accommodating to all of the different types of people that could need to enter the building. If I was to go into Transportation Engineering, I would be able to provide insight into things that we could bring into our roads, interstate highways, planes, parking lots, and other areas of transportation.”

“If an area is not made universally designed, it is infringing on the civil rights of many individuals.”

“As a social worker, I now have a fundamental understanding that external forces will primarily be the main reason for my clients’ disabled statuses.”

“When I become a teacher, I want my students to understand the meaning of being an individual.”

“By allowing the use of a cherry picker to all lighting designers, it doesn’t matter that the one designer cannot climb a fifty-foot ladder.”

“We do not recognize that by having special inclusion programs for the disabled we really are excluding them. Having this knowledge will greatly help me in my work as an educator.”

“Providing tools and techniques that all can better understand, helps not only the student who solely needs the help, but also the students around who would like to try something another way.”

Hopefully, these short excerpts have left a mark on your lives as well as mine. Our students come into our curriculum expecting to learn about diagnoses or what we refer to as body booboos. They leave with a solid and profound grounding in disability as diversity, human rights and fashioning physical, social economic, political, technological, spiritual and expressive environments to promote equality of access and opportunity for all.

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