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Compulsory Feralization: Institutionalizing Disability Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David T. Mitchell
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago
Sharon L. Snyder
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago
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While disability studies has opened up new discursive spaces for revising cultural attitudes and beliefs about disability, its increasing legitimation in the contemporary academy comes with conflicts. The university as a research location cannot merely divorce itself from the ethical and restrictive practices that have characterized the past two centuries. In fact, it does so only at its own risk and, even more important, at the risk of further entrenching disabled people in its institutional grounding. The institutionalization of disability studies is just that—a formal cultural ingestion process that churns out knowledge about disability while resisting reflexive inquiries about whether or not more detail is inherently better. More knowledge is inherently better for the institution because it keeps the research mill active, but here we want to contemplate the degree to which generating more professionally based data about disability threatens to reproduce some of the problems that have characterized the study of disability to this point in history.

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Type
Conference on Disability Studies and the University
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005