From Avoidance to Appreciation: The Cultural and Social Values of Disability Studies and Interdisciplinarity

More than half a century ago avoidance was deemed an act of prejudice by social scientists Gordon Allport and Erving Goffman; identified as a problem for the growing disability movement and thus as a fundamental concern for the field of disability studies. More recently I have shown that this avoidance takes many forms in academia, one of which is curricular, whereby a course considers representations of disability that it nonetheless fails to meet with informed critical work. Such critical avoidance is addressed in part by the very acknowledgement of disability studies as an important academic field in its own right but also through its meaningful engagement with other disciplines, an interdisciplinary approach demonstrable in the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies; the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies; the Literary Disability Studies book series; the biennial Disability and Disciplines conference; the Disability Studies MA; and a number of book projects, including the new monograph, Cultural Disability Studies in Education, and multivolume publication, A Cultural History of Disability. The premise of my sustained leadership in this and other such work is that interdisciplinarity enables curricular reform that leads to the recognition of non-normative knowledge, more complex understandings of disability, and changes in social attitudes from avoidance to appreciation