Cultural Studies and Disability Literacies: A Dramatistic-Narrative Perspective

Seminar by Griet Roets & Kris Rutten

Remark: This seminar will be organized twice. Both on 13/07 and 15/07.

Critical disability studies is a recently emerging interdisciplinary academic field in which 'impairment' and 'disability' are related to the dynamic interplay between various aspects of contemporary culture, politics and society (see Corker and Shakespeare 2002; Snyder, Brueggemann and Garland-Thomson 2002; Garland-Thomson 2005; Snyder and Mitchell 2006). In this frame of reference, new modes of theorizing are recognized in an attempt to reassign alternative paradigmatic grounds underlying the majority of public meanings, which predominantly consider 'impairment' and 'disability' as pathology, lack, social death, and tragedy (Davis 2002; Goodley 2011). In critical social theory, it is argued that we need to re-inscribe essentialist and pathological versions of bodies and minds in human language and reinvent social and cultural expressions to transform dominant power constellations (Grosz 1994; Braidotti, 2006). In that light, approaches such as linguistic, cultural, ethnographic, interpretive, semiotic, narrative and rhetorical studies in which the cultural construction of meaning is emphasized seem very relevant for disability studies, as these perspectives in the human and social sciences have stressed that "there is no such thing as human nature independent of culture" (Geertz 1973, 49). These developments have increasingly influenced research in the field of critical disability studies (see Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson 2001).

During the participatory seminar, we introduce a rhetorical perspective into disability studies through exploring the work of Kenneth Burke (1969):

- we focus on how Burke's theory of dramatism can be used in disability research as well as in teaching disability studies, focusing on Burke's dramatistic pentad and the concept of circumference

- we show fragments of the seminal movie One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and deconstruct and analyze the dynamic relationship between 'mental health problems' and disabling society in the film

- we tease out if a rhetorical disability studies perspective can reorient the perspectives and practices of the participants, based on a diversity of social interpretations of 'impairment' and 'disability'