In This Issue

Fall/Winter 2005
Volume 1 • Issue 2

Professors Receive
Allan Meyers Award

Director’s Corner

UM Students Receive
National Award

Center Updates Acronym

Prevention Center
of Excellence

$2.9M Reading Program Grant

Director Named
AUCD President

New Leadership for CAC

Search Tool Facilitates
Access to MEC Training

Grant to Increase Access
to Volunteer Opportunities

Intervention Methods
Subject of Conference

Screening Instrument
Under Development

Co-Instructional Model
Developed by CCIDS

Center Staff Star in
New Video

Guest Column:
CAC Member Tours
South Africa

Brain Research Informs
Best Practice

Partnership for EC
Health Formed

Presentations & Publications

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Professors Receive Allan Meyers Award

Imagine a world in which cognitive or physical disabilities are perceived as part of the fabric of human diversity and variation. This is the vision of Drs. Stephen Gilson, and Elizabeth DePoy, professors of Interdisciplinary Disability Studies and academic theorists with The University of Maine Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies.

Gilson and DePoy’s theoretical stance and its application to social justice have attracted the attention of national and international researchers in the field of disability studies, and the pair was recently named to receive the 2005 Allan Meyers Award presented by the DisAbility Forum of the the American Public Health Association (APHA).

The award, named for the late Dr. Allan Meyers, a professor in the Boston University School of Public Health, is given to “individuals who effectively combine research, service, and advocacy to advance the status of people with disabilities,” according to the award letter from Dr. Don Lollar, chair of the APHA DisAbility Forum. In the case of Gilson and DePoy, this ambitious combination of efforts comes in the form of advocating, not just for systems change but in the application of their work to educating Interdisciplinary Disability Studies students to advance social change.

DePoy, who serves as Coordinator of Interdisciplinary Disability Studies for the Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies, is quick to credit the support of the Center and Center Director, Dr. Lu Zeph, “for providing a supportive environment” and “an opportunity to pursue sound, scholarly application” of her and Gilson’s work in a “vigorous academic exercise, based around social justice and disability rights.”

“What the Center provides is the opportunity to pursue sound translation of traditional, scholarly-based inquiry into the social action process,” DePoy stated. “It means we have the ability to engage in scholarly-based social change. The fact we won this award speaks to the excellence of the Center.”

Through their work in the field of Interdisciplinary Disability Studies, Gilson and DePoy promote the replacement of medicalized views of disability with the concept of disability as human diversity. “Disability should be included in discussions, theory, research, and action that inform all diversity discourse,” DePoy said.

This perspective, encapsulated in DePoy and Gilson’s 2004 book, Rethinking Disability, is the foundation of their original “Explanatory Legitimacy Theory,” which proposes a re-structuring of the conceptualization and terminology used to classify and discuss human diversity, including disability from multiple perspectives.

The Allan Meyers Award has been presented annually by the APHA DisAbility Forum since the year 2000. Previous award winners include Harlan Hahn, David Pfeiffer, and Bobby Silverstein. Gilson and DePoy received the award at the 133rd Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association in Philadelphia.