Our research indicates that these courses include critical disability studies perspectives in their curricula, listed in numerical order. If you are an instructor/faculty and would like your upcoming class included on this list, please contact us.
Summer 2023
GEOG 3381W: Population in an Interacting World (82159)
Monday and Wednesday 6 to 8:40 pm, In Person
This course is oriented around the concept of ‘population’ as a site of ongoing political contestation, and it traces two, interacting stories that inform conflicting definitions and functions of this concept. The first is the story of how the state has developed and deployed techniques of counting and categorization in order to define populations along gendered, racialized and national lines. The second is the story of how various social movements have formulated radically different notions of population to name shared political interests, identities and experiences in order to make claims against state oppression in the name of the rights of their ‘population’ group. Being included in a particular ‘population’ recognized by the state can provide access to necessary resources but may also require tradeoffs that foreclose more radical political and liberatory aims. We will analyze and think through this dual nature of population and ask how and where resistance movements define population markedly differently from the state. Our subject material examines sites where 'population' is revealed to trouble the definitional boundaries of territorial and/or political concepts such as nation, state, community and identity.
The course is divided into three units structured around three distinct but overlapping sites of contestation: ‘Race, Big Data and the Carceral State;’ ‘Land, Nationhood and Settler Colonialism;’ and ‘‘Trans Politics, Disabled Politics and the Medical ‘Norm.’
Your primary responsibilities are:
1) do the readings, roughly 40 pages a week
2) come to class ready to ask questions and discuss them
3) complete three 1 to 2 page reading responses
4) develop and execute an 8 to 10 page final paper that focuses on a topic within one of the three structuring sites of the course
5) provide peer feedback for another student on a draft of their final paper
There are no final exams for this course. Because it is only an 8-week class, your reading responses will also be a place where you can work out ideas for your paper. This course meets the Liberal Education requirements of Global Perspectives (formerly International Perspectives), Social Sciences, and Writing Intensive.
30% Reading Responses
30% Class Participation
40% Final Paper
Fall 2023
FRENCH 1501/1502: Gateways to French Studies: Race, Sexuality and Disability
- Instructor: Professor Jennifer Row
- T/Th 2:30 to 3:45 PM
- Twin Cities campus
Fulfills LE requirements for Arts and Humanities and Global Perspectives. Featuring theater activities, film, graphic novels, podcasts and invited guest lectures focusing on race, disability and sexuality from the early modern to the present.
Image descriptions: Black female or femme actors and film-makers raise their fists in the Black Power symbol at the Cannes International movie festival; the film poster for Petit pays with a young African boy looking intently at the camera; actor Emmanuelle Laborit signs in French Sign Language; graphic novel panel with eyes looking at a sad figure. [End ID]
ENGL 3461: Disability Narratives
- Instructor: Professor Molly Ubbesen
- T/Th 4:00 to 5:15 pm Central
- University Square ITV Room 398, Rochester campus; Remote
- The course uses a critical disability studies lens to explore disability narratives including literature as well as multimodal texts. Exploration of texts, identities and embodiments, experiences with disability, and the relationship between disability and the health sciences through weekly writing, discussion, and collaboration. Final projects include analyzing additional disability narratives related to students' area of study and/or reflecting on their own identity and positionality in their area of study/profession.
FREN 3650: Topics in French/Francophone Cultures: Disability and Medicine in French Graphic Novels
Image description: Two graphic novel panels of a sad person out in nature looking at a lake and asking themselves, "Why do people talk about an attack...When it was actually a massacre?" FREN 3650 Disability & Medicine in Graphic Novels. Exploring care, disability identity, trauma and mental illness, disability and medicine through visual and written media (bande dessinées) in French. FALL 2023 T/Th 1 to 2:15, Prof. Jennifer Row. [End ID]
- Instructor: Professor Jennifer Row
- T/Th: 1:00 to 2:15 pm
- Nicholson Hall 315, Twin Cities campus
- Disability identity can sometimes be at odds with clinical, medical representations of bodymind differences. These books from people living with epilepsy, cancer, PTSD, down's syndrome, autism and depression allow for an exploration of how art and literature allow for powerful self-representation, care, healing, and community. How do comics or graphic novels (visual and written art forms, together) -- the French tradition of bandes déssinées (BD) -- expand our knowledges of disability and medicine and the possibilities of disability gain?
HSPH 5001: Disability Justice and Cultural Heritage
Putting disability studies on the map.
Image description: A map of the United States with cities marked in dots and all of the course information in black, white, and gold. [End ID]
This course is designed to prepare advanced undergraduates and graduate students to more effectively utilize a critical disability lens in architectural history, historic preservation, and public history.
Students will prepare a case study of a site significant in US disability history informed by the latest scholarship in the field.
- Thursdays 5:30 pm to 7:50 pm Central
- Online and Synchronous
- Open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students.
- Instructors:
- Gail Dubrow - UMN, School of Architecture and Department of History
- Laura Leppink - UMN, School of Architecture
- Chelsea Wait - University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
- Additional instructors TBA.
- For more information contact Laura Leppink at [email protected]
ARTH 5576 - Schedule Builder Link
Image description: ARTH 5576 Outsiders in American Art, Tuesday/Thursday 2:30 to 3:45 pm, 3 credits. Surrealist art includes a train going through insectide layers, a black figure bending over backwards, and rainbow insects with human eyes facing each other. [End ID]
- Professor Jennifer Marshall
- T/Th 2:30 to 3:45 pm
Get to know the “outsiders” -- people who spent their lives making art without an interest in the mainstream art world. Study visionaries like Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, Vivian Maier, Daniel Johnston, Clementine Hunter, and Martín Ramírez. Dive into environments like Dr. Evermore’s Forevertron in Wisconsin and The Orange Show in Texas. Our goal in this class is to look at non-traditional art made between 1900 and today, in all regions of the U.S., and to ask questions about the various factors that lead to its marginalized status in the art world.
In learning about so-called outsider art, we will use methods drawn from art history, cultural geography, religious studies, folklore, ethnomusicology, race and disability studies, and museum studies. Throughout the semester, you will learn the skills of visual analysis, archive- and object-based research, and writing for public audiences. The final project involves conducting original research on an artist or artwork of your choosing, and communicating your findings in a final project that will take the form of your choice (e.g., podcast, online exhibition, visual artwork, traditional academic paper, etc.).
LAW 6909: Abolition & the Carceral State
Image description: Fall Course. Abolition & the Carceral State, Law 6909 Fall 2023 Susanna Blumenthal Tuesdays, 4:05 to 6:05 pm, Using the lens of abolitionist thought, this course will explore the past, present, and future of the carceral state. It will place the present-day movements to abolish police and prisons in historical perspective and explore the ways history has been used by activists in pursuit of racial justice and social equality. The work of the course will include archival research and students will have the opportunity to engage with scholars, advocates, and community organizations as they formulate and carry out their projects. Open to Law and Graduate Students. Contact [email protected] with questions and to obtain permission number. With white writing, white circles and red background [End ID]
- Instructor: Professor Susanna Blumenthal
- T 4:05 to 6:05 PM
- Open to Law and Graduate Students
- Mondale Hall 15, Twin Cities Campus
- Contact [email protected] with questions and to obtain permission number.
Using the lens of abolitionist thought, this course will explore the past, present, and future of the carceral state. It will place the present-day movements to abolish police and prisons in historical perspective and explore the ways history has been used by activists in pursuit of racial justice and social equality. The work of the course will include archival research and students will have the opportunity to engage with scholars, advocates, and community organizations as they formulate and carry out their projects.
Spring 2023
FRENCH 1501/1502: Gateways to French Studies: Race, Sexuality and Disability
Instructor: Professor Jennifer Row | T/Th 2:30 to 3:45 PM | Twin Cities campus
Fulfills LE requirements for Arts and Humanities and Global Perspectives
Featuring theater activities, film, graphic novels, podcasts and invited guest lectures focusing on race, disability and sexuality from the early modern to the present.
Image descriptions: Black female or femme actors and film-makers raise their fists in the Black Power symbol at the Cannes International movie festival; A theater scene, with the actors in modern dress, shown from the audience's perspectives; a woman signs in French Sign Language. [End ID]
ENGL 3090: Reframing American Eugenics
Instructor: Professor Jessica Horvath Williams | MW 4:00 to 5:15 pm | Twin Cities Campus
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, BIPOC, disabled, and elderly people were treated as sacrificiable in the name of a “functioning” society—their deaths were unfortunate but tolerable. Young, white, abled people were seen as crucial to future of the United States—their survival was imperative, so their deaths were tragedies. Many named these sociocultural logics “soft eugenics” or, in activist circles, #ICUgenics—invoking the period from 1880-1950 when science, technology, and public policy targeted “the perpetuation and perfection of the race.” Yet ideas about whiteness, disability, and national futurity predated historical eugenics by nearly 60 years, and thus, are deeply embedded in American culture. In this course, we’ll read a variety of texts—classic, contemporary, or little-known—and visit local archives and collections to understand how the ideas of 1820 produced the reality of 2020.
ENGL 3461: Disability Narratives
Instructor: Professor Molly E. Ubbesen | MW 4:00 to 5:15 pm | Rochester Campus
Uses a critical disability studies lens to explore disability narratives including literature as well as multimodal texts. Exploration of texts, identities and embodiments, experiences with disability, and the relationship between disability and the health sciences through weekly writing, discussion, and collaboration. Final projects include analyzing additional disability narratives related to students' area of study and/or reflecting on their own identity and positionality in their area of study/profession.
GWSS 8210: Seminar: Feminist Theory and Practice
Instructor: Professor Erika Rodriguez | T 1:30 to 4:00 pm | Twin Cities Campus
Image Description: There are three black-and-white photographs showing: disabled protestors climb up the steps of the capital, clay figures with eyes turned towards the viewer, police wearing riot gear throwing smoke bombs in a city. [End ID]
How do human rights intersect with historical and neoliberal constructions of health, ability, and productivity? In recent decades, critical disability studies, abolitionist feminisms, and feminist conceptualizations of carework have challenged the cultural logic of social contract theory, as well as the uses and limits of human rights. Students in this class will discuss works by activists/scholars whose theorization of disability, care, and interdependence can transform our understandings of liberalism while revitalizing discussions on democracy and other utopian visions. Our conversations will include topics such as reproductive labor, eugenics, colonialism, enslavement, incarceration and detainment, and environmental crises. Readings will include works by Martha Nussbaum, Sunaura Taylor, Eva Kittay, Marta Russell, Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Liat Ben-Moshe, Robert McRuer, Jasbir Puar, and Susan Antebi.
WRIT 85501: Seminar: Embodied Politics
Instructor: Professor Molly Kessler | T 2:30 to 5:00 pm | Twin Cities Campus
This course will examine core and emergent theories, methodologies, and pedagogies at the intersection of the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and disability rhetorics. This course will not only provide a foundation of RHM and disability rhetorics, but will also aim to grapple with the complex intersections of medicine and disability, and the fraught role of bodies/embodiment in health, medicine, and disability.
AMST 8920: Autoethnography: Feminist, Queer, and Decolonial Approaches
Instructor: Professor Martin F. Manalansan | W 1:25 to 3:30 pm | Twin Cities Campus
Worlds, Worlds, Selves: "Autoethnography is a methodology that allows us to illuminate and speak to larger issues in our communities and in our world [by] writing about our own lives." Authoethnography provides a reflexive approach to being in and apprehending the world simultaneously. It enables critical connections between the authorial self in its varied forms, with multiple worlds through skillful deployment of words. This course explores autoethnography through theory and practice. First, it explores the various approaches to this genre by reading theories and autoenthnographic examples. Second, this is a writing workshop that aims to assist class participants in honing style and voice by submitting weekly writing exercises.
Image description: Top image: A bunch of letters fly out of the back of a pencil with a white background in an image labeled "Words." Middle image: A planet with many lights illuminated is seen as if from outer space in an image labeled Worlds." Bottom image: A white person out in a field and wearing a blouse holds up an old-fashioned mirror in an image labeled "Selves." [End ID]
Fall 2022
LAW 6909: Abolition & the Carceral State
Instructor: Professor Susanna Blumenthal | T 4 to 6 PM | Twin Cities Campus
Using the lens of abolitionist thought, this course explores the past, present, and future of the carceral state. It places present-day movements to abolish police and prisons in historical perspective and explores the ways history has been used to activists in pursuit of racial justice and social equality. The course will include archival research and students will have the opportunity to engage with scholars, advocates, and community organizations as they formulate and carry out their projects.
Open to Law and Graduate Students
Contact [email protected] with questions and to obtain permission number
FRENCH 1501/1502: Gateways to French Studies: Race, Sexuality and Disability
Instructor: Professor Jennifer Row | T/Th 2:30 to 3:45 PM | Twin Cities campus
Fulfills LE requirements for Arts and Humanities and Global Perspectives
Featuring theater activities, film, graphic novels, podcasts and invited guest lectures focusing on race, disability and sexuality from the early modern to the present.
Image descriptions: Black female or femme actors and film-makers raise their fists in the Black Power symbol at the Cannes International movie festival; A theater scene, with the actors in modern dress, shown from the audience's perspectives; a woman signs in French Sign Language. [End ID]
Spring 2022
GWSS 3215: Bodies That Matter: Feminist Approaches to Disability Studies (Twin Cities campus)
Instructor: Qui Dorian
The COVID-19 pandemic has made questions of disability and ableism central and visible for all of us as never before. Dis/ability is not a physical or mental defect but a form of social meaning mapped to certain bodies in larger systems of power and privilege. Feminist approaches explore dis/ability as a vector of oppression intersecting and constituted through race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. The course examines ideologies of ableism and the material realities of such oppression, and works toward imagining and constructing a more just and equitable society. As health care is differentially distributed or limited for people who are sickened by COVID-19, we see that systems of social and economic power determine the life chances of those who claim, or are claimed by disability. Meanwhile, people with disabilities have developed many daily life strategies that can be models for everyone coping with the pandemic.
Special Topics in Design Justice*: Disability, Racism, & The Intersections of Design Justice (Twin Cities campus)
Instructor: Jennifer White-Johnson (Designer & Disability Justice Activist)
