BETH LINKER, Department Chair and Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor in the Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

TOWARD A HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC ABLEISM

In 2009, disability scholar Judy Rohrer wrote that “the understanding of ableism lags far behind public knowledge of sexism or racism.” Part of the reason, she maintains, is that disability remains unproblematized, especially in societies that insist on compulsory able-bodiedness. How, though, did compulsory able-bodiedness come about? What is its history? This paper looks to the 19th and 20th centuries, and traces the rise of the U.S. posture sciences along with the development of commercial fitness goods to uncover how ableism informs everyday products from chairs and undergarments to shoes and personalized bio-monitors.

PATRICK MCKEARNEY, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Universiteit van Amsterdam

VARIABLE DEPENDENCE: DEVELOPING A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY

What challenges does intellectual disability pose to our thinking? My research on the care of adult with intellectual disabilities in the UK and India has lead me to explore what might be distinctive about mental as opposed to physical disabilities. Indeed, it has lead me away from many dominant conceptions of disability as created by universal processes of structural or attitudinal exclusion. Instead, I explore whether and how locally variable relationships of care work interact with variable developmental processes to create the complex dependencies that intellectual disability involves.

ALL WELCOME!