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Cripping Technology

This guide is intended as a companion for the Cripping Technology: Humanities Lab.

What is disability studies?

Disability Studies is interdisciplinary, examining the experience of disability from a spectrum of “truths”. However, people living with disability and their experiences are integral to what we learn and understand. Disability Studies scholars are lawyers, philosophers, social workers, medical professionals, public health officials, educators, artists, anthropologists, architects, and more. Scholars are encouraged to think inclusively and creatively. The deconstruction of assumed knowledge, stigma, and bias are integral to the field with a focus on unraveling the boundaries between “normal” and “abnormal” and what these terms actually mean. Disability is understood to be conditional to environmental and social factors as well as physical, cognitive, and mental factors (Adams, Reiss, & Serlin, 2015). The term “disability” has not remained stable throughout history and will likely continue to change. This is an important facet of disability.

Research opportunity

Why is Disabilities Studies Research Challenging?

The interdisciplinary nature of disability studies

  • Disability Studies is interdisciplinary.
  • You will need to learn to distinguish between medical, scientific, historical, and sociological treatments of disability, and find sources that fit in with your research framework. This can take some experience.

Terminology may be offensive and inaccurate

  • Current and historical research may use outdated terminology.
  • Research, especially books, may be cataloged using outdated and/or biased terminology.
  • Some terminology may be considered politically incorrect, hurtful or even triggering.
  • Although you may want to avoid outdated terminology in your own research, you might need to use them as search terms if you want to be comprehensive, especially when searching historical materials and primary sources.

Historical Lack of Cataloging

  • Until relatively recently, disability studies material may not have been identified with relevant subject headings and tags.
  • Historically, some subject headings and tags did not exist.

Text for this section courtesy of Stacy Reardon and Jennifer Dorner from the UC Berkeley Libraries. 

Lennard Davis | Disability Studies Across the Disciplines: Theory & Praxis

This talk was the keynote address in the Disability in the Disciplines Conference, facilitated by FHI's Health Humanities Lab at Duke University. The field of disability studies suggests that our vulnerabilities and weaknesses are what make us human. Starting from the essential perspective that disability rights are human rights, the study of disability helps us to realize that difference is, perhaps paradoxically, the one thing we all have in common. How do our definitions of “health” shift when we accept that there is no “normal”? How does the centering of disability alter our disciplinary assumptions, and enrich our educational, medical, civic, and artistic practices?

The ASU Library acknowledges the twenty-three Native Nations that have inhabited this land for centuries. Arizona State University's four campuses are located in the Salt River Valley on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Indian Communities, whose care and keeping of these lands allows us to be here today. ASU Library acknowledges the sovereignty of these nations and seeks to foster an environment of success and possibility for Native American students and patrons. We are advocates for the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge systems and research methodologies within contemporary library practice. ASU Library welcomes members of the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh, and all Native nations to the Library.