US Disability Art & Social Change

In this course we will explore disability art and culture in the United States and the many connections between that art/culture and social change work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will focus particularly on the roles and uses of disability art as we critically engage with wide-ranging examples, including community-based documentary films, dance, memoirs, poetry, blogs, online exhibits, and paintings. We will be asking questions about representation, authority, audience, power, privilege, and marginalization. We will draw our frameworks from a variety of disabled, chronically ill, mad, and neurodivergent artists, activists, and thinkers.