Joseph N. Straus, City University of New York
Guest Contributor

This entry is part of a collaborative series on disabilities between the Federation’s Equity Issues Portfolio and the Canadian Disability Studies Association/ Association Canadienne des Études sur l’Incapacité.

People usually think about music and disability in medical terms.  Music therapists, as healthcare professionals, use music as a palliative against various forms of illness and disability.  Medical doctors, increasingly aware that musical performance can be a dangerous business, particularly as a cause of stress injuries, have begun to attend to the disabilities particular to musicians.  And psychologists and neurologists often study the musical abilities and behavior of people with cognitive, intellectual, or sensory impairments.

In contrast to these medicalized approaches, the new interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies imagines disability not as a medical pathology requiring study and cure, but as a social and cultural practice inviting acceptance, accommodation, and appreciation.  Within this new social and cultural model, disability is understood as an aspect of the diversity of human morphology, capability, and behavior: a difference, not a deficit.  Moving away from medicine’s long-standing paradigm of deficit and repair, a new generation of disability activists has begun to claim disability as a positive political and cultural identity, rejecting regimes of normalization.

In that spirit, I want to talk briefly about three sorts of disability-related ways of making music: autistic music-making, deaf music-making, and mobility-inflected music making. The goal will not be the cure, remediation, or study of medical pathologies, but rather the appreciation the sorts of musical activities that disability enables. (I am not suggesting that all people who are autistic, deaf, or mobility impaired make music in the ways I describe and I am not suggesting that to make music in these ways one needs to be autistic, deaf, or mobility impaired. The disability-inflected music-making I describe here is a matter of elective affinity, not essential identity.) (more…)

Emily Hutcheon, University of Calgary
Guest Contributor

This entry is part of a collaborative series on disabilities between the Federation’s Equity Issues Portfolio and the Canadian Disability Studies Association/ Association Canadienne des Études sur l’Incapacité.

It is well known that disabled individuals face physical, social, and emotional barriers in their post-secondary education. These barriers include: lack of financial support, difficulty seeking accommodations, and outright discrimination such as lack of access to and within built structures. Some barriers represent more subtle obstructions to full participation, such as lack of awareness of faculty and peers, lack of participation in academic and lay discourse, and strain on time resources. These barriers are especially problematic given that post-secondary experiences (both educative and social) shape students’ beliefs, self-concept, and identity, and impact health and further opportunities.

There are practical occupational advantages for disabled individuals to complete post-secondary education, including more flexible employment and better income. Experiences in post-secondary education also provide a means for the disabled to participate in knowledge-production and policy development, which reflects their own perspectives.

Disabled students, however, are largely absent from discourse in the domains of higher education scholarship, research, creative activity and practice, and are under-represented in higher education faculty.  (more…)

Gregor Wolbring, University of Calgary
Guest Contributor

This entry is part of a collaborative series on disabilities between the Federation’s Equity Issues Portfolio and the Canadian Disability Studies Association/ Association Canadienne des Études sur l’Incapacité.

The theoretical framework and analytical lens of Ableism is a gift to the social sciences and humanities community from disability studies and the disabled people rights movement.

Among the different social groups seeking equitable treatment and the different academic social groups covering studies fields in existence at universities, the disabled people movement and the academic field of disability studies are relatively invisible. Furthermore, people with disabilities and disability studies scholars are fairly invisible in many discourses around contemporary challenges faced by society and in discourses dealing with emerging societal challenges, despite the reality that people with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by these challenges.

Beside the stakeholder argument I could list many arguments why the visibility of people with disabilities and disability studies scholars should be higher. However, here I focus on increasing the visibility of the concept of ableism, which originated with the disabled people rights movement. Ableism is one of the pillars of the academic field of disability studies. It is a concept I see as the greatest gift from the disabled people rights movement and disability studies to the social sciences and humanities community, the policy community, and the like.

The term ableism evolved from the disabled people rights movements in the United States and Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.  (more…)