Days and Times: Tu 1:00-3:55pm
Room: 1414 Cathedral of Learning 
Instructor: Ronald J. Zboray (with Mary Saracino Zboray)
This course is a pre-approved elective for Fall Term 2019.

Disability, Media, & Culture addresses advances in cultural approaches toward understanding disability in light of mediated communication.  How has media opened spaces for too-often silenced people with disabilities, past and present, to be “heard” broadly beyond their communities?  In what ways has media provided cultural access to people with disabilities, and in what ways has media limited their cultural horizons and sense of social participation and inclusion?  Finally, how has media, over time, represented people with disabilities, negatively or positively, and how have those people represented themselves through media?  How have such representations played with or against the conspicuous “able-ism” that has abounded in media cultures?

The course has two major goals: 1) to provide a critical overview of the history of these mediated representations and of the agency of people with disabilities in shaping them; and; 2) to survey through media sources the degree of social, cultural, and political viability that people with disabilities have achieved in different times and places—ever keeping in mind the value of attending to their self-representation across intersecting axes of other forms of social difference, including race, class, gender, and sexuality. 
 
The course addresses the longstanding tension in disability studies between, on the one hand, its history in medically-circumscribed concepts of impairment that underscore claims to public entitlements and other benefits, and, on the other hand, its embrace by people who emphasize disability as a sociocultural construction over it being a limiting condition, and hence seek cultural parity with “abled normals” - not as a lesser, more constricted form of human existence, but merely a different one.