Courses at other colleges/universities

Students in the DDHS program can request a course substitution from another college or university. DDHS students are not given priority registration into these courses, so please be mindful of prerequisites and other restrictions.

Please visit the Five College Course Schedule for up to date information about offerings at Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke, Smith College and Amherst College.

HOLYOKE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Deaf Studies Program

  • DFS 101(C) – Introduction to Deaf Studies
  • DFS 104(C) – Deaf Culture
  • DFS 108(C) – Deaf History
  • DFS 205(C) – Deaf Literature

HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE

Look Ma, No Hands (Interdisciplinary Arts 0130)
An introductory design class focused on assistive technology: We will learn about some of the practical and ordinary problems faced by individuals who do not have full use of their hands or arms, then design, fabricate and collaboratively design assistive devices. Projects may be for children, or adults with temporary injuries/conditions or ongoing physical disabilities. We will also examine the concept of “Universal Design” – designing in a way that gracefully accommodates the range of human experience. Students in this class will develop problem solving, visual communication skills and a wide range of fabrication skills. There will be opportunities to work with the full range of materials and tools available in the Center for Design shop – such as metals, plastics and basic electronics. The curriculum will include weekly design assignments, guest speakers, readings, film viewings, discussions about the design process itself, as well as a major project. Keywords: problem solving, fabrication, accessibility, disability, design.

MOUNT HOLYOKE

Disability and Religion (CST-249DR/RELIG 209)
What do religions say about disability? How do people with disabilities engage with religious texts, images, practices, and communities? Drawing on different religions and cultures, the course explores the challenges and resources disability offers to religious communities. We study religious narratives that link disability to sin or karma and alternative narratives that reimagine the divine as disabled; access to worship spaces and rituals; ways healthcare professionals can support the religious needs of disabled clients; and the Disability Justice movement, which foregrounds the interlocking oppressions of disability, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.

Queer and Trans Disability (GNDST 204DA)
This course investigates the historical imbrication of modern concepts of “disability,” “queer,” and “trans.” First, we trace the circulation of ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and disability within institutional medicine in the late 19th and early 20th century. Following this, we explore the individual experiences and political movements of people hailed under the categories of “disabled,” “queer,” or “trans” from the 20th century to the present. In resisting a reification of disability, queer, and trans as discrete fields of study, this course asks how we understand these categories in the present, while leaving room to imagine otherwise.

Feminist, Queer, Trans Disability Studies (GNDST 204FT)
This course introduces Disability Studies concepts and discussion from a feminist, queer, and trans perspectives, specifically centering on Black, Indigenous, People of Color disabled people. Through this, we’ll see the differences in disabled communities, the tensions within the field, and learn to center the most marginalized. Here, the focus is on scholarship, activism, and arts that center disabled people, their histories, struggles, and dreams. We’ll also discuss the differences between the Disability Rights and Disability Justice movements and how they represent the demands and needs of disabled communities.

Music and Disability (Music 371MD)
In this seminar, we encounter foundational texts, methodologies, and case studies in the field of Disability Studies in Music. Grounded in a music-historical approach (but incorporating other music studies methods), we trace how musicking across a range of time periods and traditions both represents and constructs the cultures, policies, and tropes of bodymind difference and normativity. We center music, performance, and scholarship by disabled individuals and collectives, and emphasize the intersectional nature of disability justice, while also interrogating ableism in the music industry and the academy, as well as our own embodied positionalities as music makers, scholars, and consumers.

SMITH COLLEGE

Race Disability and Illness (CST-349BT)
This course examines the intersections of race, disability, illness, and health using literature and culture as primary sites of engagement. Looking to writers like Audre Lorde, Anna Deavere Smith, Mia Mingus, Harriet Jacobs, and Indra Sinha, it asks how structures of racial, environmental, and economic inequity transform the category of disability, which critics have primarily defined in terms of whiteness. It also considers alternate conceptions of health–models that do not align with mandates of productivity or normative embodiment–offered by the texts under consideration, and asks what political/ social liberation might look like when able-bodiedness is no longer privileged.

Introduction to Disability Studies (AMS 240)
This course serves as an introductory exploration of the field of disability studies. It asks: how do we define disability? Who is disabled? And what resources do we need to properly study disability? Together, students investigate: trends in disability activism, histories of medicine and science, conceptions of “normal” embodiment, the utility of terms like “crip” or “disabled” and the representation of disability in culture. Enrollment limit of 20.

Feminist & Queer Disability Studies (SWG-227)
In the essay “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer,” writer-activist Audre Lorde forges pioneering connections between the work of social justice and the environmental, gendered, and healthcare inequities that circumscribe black and brown lives. Following Lorde’s intervention, this course examines contemporary feminist/queer expressive culture, writing, and theory that centrally engages the category of dis/ability. It will familiarize students with feminist and queer scholarship that resists the medical pathologization of embodied difference; foreground dis/ability’s intersections with questions of race, class, and nation; and ask what political and social liberation might look like when able-bodiedness is no longer privileged. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Enrollment limited to 20.

Disability in Popular Culture (AMS 241)
From butt-kicking warriors like Imperator Furiosa, to state leaders like New York governor David Paterson and former president FDR, to ultra-glamorous models like Jillian Mercado and Nyle DiMarco, images of and persons with disabilities have shaped the discourse of American popular culture. Though popular literary genres have long framed disability as tragic or pitiable, disabled writers have successfully appropriated popular, commercial styles to leverage critiques against dominant conceptions of disability. The purpose of this course is to investigate what arguments these popular texts make, whether implicitly or explicitly, about disability. Enrollment limit of 20.

Disability and Difference (ANT 353DD)
Disability is both a universal human reality and a profoundly embodied, contested, and situated experience. This course explores this tension from a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on innovative ethnographic work. Our approach will be insistently transnational and intersectional, taking into account how disabled selves and communities are shaped by geographical and historical context, racial and ethnic identity, class background, gender, and sexuality. We will consider concepts and themes such as embodiment, citizenship and belonging, access and visibility, creativity, medicalization and diagnosis, politics and advocacy, and virtuality and technology. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

UMASS LOWELL

Concentration in Disability Studies – some of these courses are available online


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