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HUMANITIES GROUP PLANS SUMMER DISABILITY SEMINAR

November 30, 1999

The National Endowment for the Humanities has added an institute on disability studies to its annual summer education program for teachers. The institute, open to college and university teachers, will examine disability as "an interdisciplinary category of analysis similar to race, gender, and ethnicity," according to directors Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Paul Longmore. Over five weeks, 25 attendees will work with the faculty to develop strategies and identify resources to help integrate disability studies into their schools' undergraduate programs.

Garland-Thomson, associate professor of English at Howard University, and Longmore, professor of history at San Francisco State University and director of the school's Institute on Disability, argue the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 has helped change the way people think about disabilities. This institute, they say, will push those conceptions to evolve further. "Colleges and universities have begun to understand disability as a diversity category, a pedagogical issue, a field of study, an identity and a civil rights mandate," Garland-Thomson and Longmore say in a letter to prospective institute participants. "The emergence of 'Disability Studies' is prompting teachers, administrators and students to recognize the pedagogical, scholarly and practical implications of integrating disability fully into all aspects of academe. In response, disability as both a concept and a constituency is entering the classroom."

This new category of Disability Studies is "a way of thinking about bodies rather than as something that is wrong with bodies," Garland-Thomson and Longmore said. "Just as the cultural presence of what we now think of as the social construction of race and gender was either invisible or imagined as narrow, marginal concerns in the academic world prior to the 1970s, disability is still often considered a specialized area or a medical issue peripheral to the humanities."

The program, one of 22 offered by the NEH next summer, is open to any faculty members who teach American undergraduates. The institute runs next summer during July and August in San Francisco. In addition to Garland-Thomson and Longmore, the faculty consists of veteran specialists and new practitioners in humanities-based disability studies, the directors said. Joining 10 college professors from around the country will be Judith Heumann, director of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services for the U.S. Department of Education, and Katherine Ott, who directed the National Museum of American History's two-day conference on "Disability and the Practice of Public History" last May.

The NEH describes its institutes as "national, residential, & rigorous, designed to strengthen the quality of the humanities teaching and scholarship." The institutes need not be as taxing on attendees' wallets, however, since the NEH offers scholarships of $2,800 for four-week sessions, $3,250 for five weeks and $3,700 for six weeks. The money is intended to help cover attendees' travel costs, living expenses, books and miscellaneous needs. The application deadline to attend any of the NEH's Summer 2000 seminars is March 1.8