“Collective Bodies and Collective Change: Blindness, Pilgrimage, Motherhood and Miracles in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature” examines Mexican literature from 1940 to 1980. It analyzes representations of collective bodies and suggests that these bodies illustrate oppression and resistance in their historical context, which coincides with the beginning of a period of massive modernization in Mexico. I aim to develop a reading that interprets this imagery of collectives, unusual bodies, and blindness as more than symbols of oppression. By examining this imagery alongside representations of pilgrimage, alternative modes of motherhood, and experiences such as miracles that figuratively connect bodies, I propose that these images challenge their historical context, and can be read as a gesture towards resistance. Novels and short stories by José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos and Vicente Leñero present collectives, blindness and unusual bodies. My reading of their works connects these textual bodies to oppression within their historical context, in particular, by the government, intellectuals, the medical system, the Catholic Church, family structure, the landholding system, and the land’s heat, wind and drought. These representations de-individualize characters, and, as such, destroy the ideal of the modern subject who would effect change through individual agency. Thus, when I argue that these same bodies act as a metaphorical collective subject whose actions, such as mass murder, and participation in religious revival and radical political movements, can point out social change, they challenge the ideal of an individual subject. By reflecting on the connection between literature that represents unusual bodies, a historical situation of oppression, and the potential for resistance, this analysis of literary texts provides a lens through which we can examine the stories’ historical context and ideas of individual and collective agency.

This dissertation brings together a variety of interpretive theoretical perspectives born of the fields of disability studies, critical race theory, cultural studies and queer and feminist studies to analyze the social significance and productive effects of cultural representations of autism. Specifically, this work addresses contemporary enactments of autism advocacy as found in the mass media, education literature and policy as well as in fundraising campaigns. In response to a global/izing economy that privileges the fast, efficient exchange of information and knowledge, I attend to how autism appears in the field of autism advocacy as an abbreviation; its multiple meaning distilled down to a series of ‘red flags’ in awareness campaigns, bulleted ‘facts’ in information pamphlets, statistics in policy reports. I analyze the relationships between these fragmentary enactments of autism and trace their continuities so as to make legible an underlying logic: a powerful and ubiquitous logic that casts autism as a pathological threat to normative life, and advocacy as that which must eliminate this threat, thus, limiting the role of the ‘good’ autism advocate to one positioned ‘against’ autism. This dissertation shows how dominant, contemporary discourses of autism advocacy that narrate autism as some ‘thing’ to be ‘fought’, ‘combated’, or ‘warred against’ function to shape ‘life’ as conditional and cast autism as (one of) its condition(s). As autism is discursively and ideologically made separate from the vital category of life itself, and as bodies and minds of living people are relentlessly divided up into vital and non-vital parts, individual and collective life ‘with’ (the condition of) autism becomes life that is conceptualized as ‘almost living’ or ‘mostly dead’. I demonstrate how such an understanding of the conditionality of life is a necessary pre-condition for normative acts of violence – violence enacted in the name of securing the norm and violence that is normalized as necessary.

This thesis examines the role of international organisations in disability mainstreaming policies in Turkey. Turkey is a particularly interesting case study, as it combines traditional values coupled with ambitions to be an internationally respected European state. International organisations include the European Union, the World Bank, the International Labour Organization, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Children’s Fund and Organization of Islamic Cooperation. A multidisciplinary approach was taken which involved social policy, history, disability studies, international relations, and politics. The research used a case study based on analysis of 275 policy documents, 47 semi-structured and two focus group interviews. The participants have all been directly involved in decision-making processes at international and/or local level. The thesis argues that disability mainstreaming is partial and selective as a result of the interaction between the traditional values and structures in Turkey and the aims and practices of international organisations.

Submitted by Drielly Teixeira Lopes Silveira (driellylopess@gmail.com) on 2018-07-30T05:23:22Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DDrielly_part1 (1).pdf: 1880333 bytes, checksum: 31028c6d7e1ebb39cf89aa52be3cd3af (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Aline Aparecida Matias null (alinematias@fclar.unesp.br) on 2018-07-30T11:09:39Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 silveira_dtl_me_arafcl.pdf: 1880333 bytes, checksum: 31028c6d7e1ebb39cf89aa52be3cd3af (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-30T11:09:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 silveira_dtl_me_arafcl.pdf: 1880333 bytes, checksum: 31028c6d7e1ebb39cf89aa52be3cd3af (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-05-03 / A experiência transexual é uma temática de especial evidência no contexto acadêmico contemporâneo, sendo descrita como um fenômeno complexo, que pressupõe uma incompatibilidade entre gênero e sexo biológico. Por interrogar o modelo binário sexo/gênero, permite que se questione os discursos científicos envoltos em pressupostos de naturalização dos corpos. A deficiência, fora dos modelos reabilitativos, representaria per si um transgressão da “ordem anatômica”, ainda que seja reconhecida pelo modelo biomédico como o resultado de uma falha, congênita ou adquirida, que afetará o funcionamento “normal” do corpo ou de algumas de suas partes. A percepção de ambos os corpos recebe novos contornos quando de encontro à leitura de Judith Butler, para a qual, o lugar de patologização e abjeção conferido a estas experiências são resultado de práticas discursivas que estabelecem relações de poder que incidem sobre os corpos. Refletindo sobre as múltiplas possibilidades de experiências compreendidas a partir do feminino e considerando a posição de subalternidade conferida a esses corpos diante das normas hegemônicas, este trabalho se propõe a oportunizar um espaço de narrativa e análise para uma experiência pouco explorada academicamente: a experiência subjetiva de mulheres trans deficientes. Focalizando em especial os disability studies e suas possíveis interlocuções com a Teoria Queer como aporte teórico, foram realizadas entrevistas com três mulheres trans deficientes, sendo elas: duas portadoras de deficiência física e uma sensorial. Utilizou-se para a coleta de dados do método de História Oral Temática (Meihy, 1996). As análises de narrativas foram organizadas conforme a metodologia de Análise Textual Discursiva, destacando as categorias que recebem destaque na fala, constituindo 3 eixos de análise: (1) O transito como transgressão: da dificuldade de locomoção ao gênero itinerante. (2) O olhar como fonte de escárnio, reconhecimento e desejo. (3) A mulher como poder. Esta pesquisa possui um caráter qualitativo e exploratório, e tem como pretensão, ampliar e fomentar novas produções e discussões relacionadas às noções de feminilidade, corpo e sexualidade a partir da subjetividade trans em interface com a deficiência. / The transsexual experience is a highlighted theme in the current academic context, being portrayed as a complex phenomenon, which presupposes an incompatibility between gender and biological sex. By questioning the binary sex/gender model, it is allowed to question the scientific speeches wrapped in body naturalization presumptions. Disability, out of rehabilitative model, would represent, per se, a transgressions of the “anatomic order”, even if recognized by the biomedical model as the result of a flaw, either congenital or acquired, that will affect the “normal” functioning of the body or of some of its parts. The perception of both bodies acquire new outlining when facing the reading of Judith Butler, for whom the place of pathologization and abjection conferred to these experiences are the result of speech practices that establish power relations that act upon the bodies. Reflecting upon the multiple possibilities of experiences, understood on the basis of feminine, and considering the subordinate position conferred to these bodies in the face of the hegemonic rules, this work aims to create a space of narrative and analysis for an experience that has been little explored academically: the subjective experience of disabled trans women. Focusing, specially, on the disability studies and its possible interlocutions with the Queer theory as theoretical basis, interviews with three disabled trans women were made, being them: two physically disabled women and a sensorial disabled one. For data collection, we made use of the Thematic Oral History method (Meihy, 1996).The analyses of the narratives were organized according to the Discursive Textual Analysis, highlighting the categories that are prominent in the speech, constituting 3 analysis axes: (1) Transit as transgression: from walking difficulties to the itinerant genre. (2) The eyes as a source of scorn, recognition, and desire. (3) The woman as power. This research has a qualitative and exploratory nature, intending to expand and foment new works and discussions regarding the notions of femininity and sexuality from the interface between transgender subjectivity and disability

This thesis draws on the experiences of 21 young people transitioning from a special school for students with labels of moderate learning difficulty, to further education college. Taking a disability studies approach, that is, viewing disability as a social and political response to human diversity, I examine some social processes through which student identity and agency meanings may be negotiated during transition. Times of change offer circumstances of opportunity in which new identity and agency meanings may be improvised and tested in various forms. Some students found emergent ways to subvert and transgress expectations, given the different labels applied to them. Transition, with its focus on future change, offers limbic moments which appear to support situations for such opportunistic transgression. Of particular interest are the environments and circumstances that support or promote broadening of identity and agency options, because an understanding of these may enable the engineering of such situations. Whilst the students were transitioning to college, my own researcher subjectivities and understandings of ‘knowledge’ were also in flux. I describe the considerable influence these changes had on the research processes and my understandings of identity and agency. I propose that identity and agency meanings, whilst fluid and ever-changing, are linked with particular people and situated in particular social sites. With this in mind, and as a provocation to new ways of thinking I discuss foundation level further education as an ethical project, envisaging circumstances that may support and promote broader, more positive opportunities for identity and agency negotiations amongst young people with labels of learning disability. In this context, further education is re-imagined as an opportunity for potential empowerment, repositioning learning disabled students as agents of social change.

The grotesque has long been utilized in literature as a means for subverting societal constraints and inverting constructions of normalcy. Unfortunately, in many instances, it has been constructed at the expense of disabled characters using their embodiment as metaphorical plot devices rather than social and political agents. Criticism of the grotesque’s use of bodily difference has prompted this analytical project in order to rethink disability as socially and politically positioned within texts, rather than simply aesthetics for symbolic means. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways the literary grotesque can be reread using queer theory and crip theory as frameworks for constructing agential disabled embodiments in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Ultimately, the potential of queer and crip interventions necessitates an examination of the systems of power disabled subjects operate within in these narratives.

This dissertation explores the effects disability had on the aesthetics of American modernist writers like Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Amy Lowell, and Ezra Pound at a time when eugenics' insistence on a superior and uniform humanity dominated social thought and how their writings complicate generalized conclusions espousing ablist tendencies in modernist literature, demonstrating that such generalizations can be complicated with careful attention to a broad range of modernist texts. The introduction highlights important ideas and events in the development of disability studies and applies the theory to Emily Dickinson’s “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” to demonstrate how scholars have largely overlooked even well-known authors’ engagement with disability. The first chapter interrogates Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to demonstrate that, rather than reify disability, Faulkner questions the idea of norms that imply a stable identity by alluding to and investigating ideas relevant to important events and conceptions of the time such as Henry H. Goddard’s The Kallikak Family and the U.S. Supreme court case of Buck v. Bell. Chapter two’s analysis of Langston Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew identifies a tendency in the poetry to enact Tobin Sieber’s concept of disability masquerade to assume but play against the intellectually disabled identity forced on Blacks at the time, rather than attempting to distance himself from the label as disability theorists such as Douglas Baynton posit generally occurs when racialized groups are associated with disability. In the third chapter, Robert McRuer’s concept of compulsory able-bodiedness is identified as a source for Amy Lowell’s fall from popularity and she is considered alongside conceptions of the freak to identify a source for her creativity most evident in the "polyphonic prose" of Can Grande's Castle, her invention to free poets of the restrictions of traditional cadenced verse. The final chapter offers a reading of Pound's Drafts & Fragments that, while highlighting this often neglected collection's importance because of the social awareness brought to it through Pound's twelve and a half years in a mental institution, also explores the limitations of readings that assume that his disabled status guided this poetry. Concluding the dissertation is an analysis of Sherman Alexie's Pulitzer prize winning young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, that demonstrates disability’s continued applicability after eugenics’ fall from grace and highlights Alexie’s use of humor to get readers to stare as a part of considering the serious topics he writes into the novel, instigating what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the "good stare" that welcomes identification between staree and starer. Together, these chapters attempt to further expand the inclusivity of discussions of modernism and complicate long-standing understandings of disability.

abstract: This study re-frames learning disabilities (LD) through the emotion-laden talk of four Latina/o students with LD. The research questions included: 1) What are the emotion-laden talk of Latina/o students about being labeled with LD? 2) What are Latina/o students' emotion-laden talk of the idea of LD? I identified master narratives, the "pre-existent sociocultural forms of interpretation. They are meant to delineate and confine the local interpretation strategies and agency constellations in individual subjects as well as in social institutions," (Bamberg, 2004, p. 287) within the following literatures to inform my research questions and conceptual framework: a) historiography and interdisciplinary literature on LD; b) policy (i.e., Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)), c) the academic and d) social and emotional dimensions of LD; and e) student voice research with students with LD. Interdisciplinary, critical ethnographic and qualitative research methods such as taking into account issues of power, etic and emic perspectives, in-depth interviewing, field notes were used. Total participants included: four students, three parents and three teachers. More specifically, descriptive coding, identification of emotion-laden talk, a thematic analysis, memoing and intersectional and cultural-historical developmental constructs were used to analyze students’ emotion-laden talk. Emotion-laden talk about being labeled with LD included the hegemony of smartness, disability microaggressions, on the trinity of LD: help + teachers + literacy troubles, on being bullied, embarrassment to ask for assistance from others and help as hope. The emotion-laden talk about the idea of LD included LD as double-edge sword, LDness as X, the meaning of LD as resource, trouble with information processing, speech, and silence, the salience of the intersection of disability, ethnicity and language and other markers of difference, struggles due to lack of understanding and LD myths. This study provides a discussion and implications for theory, research, policy, and practice. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Curriculum and Instruction 2016

abstract: From Impossible Angles Towards Strategic Ones: Narratives of Death, Life, and Disability in La Muerte me Da and El Huesped The glamour of single-handedly overcoming adversity, sidestepping obstacles, or defying the odds makes for great mystery or adventure fiction, but fails to do justice (poetic or otherwise) to lives that are both physically and conceptually "marked" by more complex challenges. From a theoretical view, a similar desire to escape or maintain the perceived "dividing line" between fact and fiction, nature and nurture, mind and body, is confronted by a diverse set of human experiences, all of which have come to be defined, and continue to define themselves, along both sides of such a divide. Disability, typically viewed as an "emerging" branch of literary and cultural critique, is perhaps the most pervasive. Hidden under the covert language of the "grotesque", "monstrous", "doppelgänger", "freak", "eccentric" or "queer", disability has historically represented something other than itself. Two texts that attest to both the real and imagined possibilities of resignification and new modes of articulation surrounding disability are La muerte me da (2007) by Cristina Rivera Garza and El huésped (2006) by Guadalupe Nettel. From different points of departure, both texts offer a narrative approximation towards the disabled mind, body, and perceptual experience. In ways that are both similar and different, these narratives question one's perceived access to that which is otherwise understood to be the physically and conceptually "inaccessible" or "illegible" space of disability. Such approximations towards, and articulations of, the disability experience are processes that move, largely unnoticed, both within and beyond texts. As this construct continues to transform itself from both within and outside itself, disability acquires intellectual and practical value while requiring the "experts" in fields beyond the narrow scope of medicine, education, and rehabilitation to (re)consider their own approaches to, and apprehensions of, disability in order to redefine what or who is accessible or viable for literary and cultural debate. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2014

<p> The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a group art therapy intervention on psychological well-being of Korean mothers of children with disabilities. This study employed a quasi-experimental pre- and post-test research design with non-random assignment of participants to either the art therapy intervention group (AG) or the control group (CG). The present study quantitatively examined the effectiveness of the group art therapy intervention using four standardized measurements (Parental Distress sub-scale from Parenting Stress Index-Short Form, Perceived Stress Scale, Beck Depression Inventory-II, &amp; The Multidimensional Scale for Social Support) assessing parenting stress, perceived stress, depression, and perceived social support. In addition, the Draw-a-Person-in-the-Rain (the DAPR) assessment with numerical scoring system was used to assess the mothers&rsquo; stress. </p><p> A total of 44 participants from multiple regions across Korea were included, and mothers in AG (<i>n</i> = 22) participated in 6 sessions of 100 minutes in length. The results of the statistical analysis showed significant differences between the two groups in parenting stress, perceived stress, and depression with those in the AG reporting a greater decrease in parenting stress, perceived stress, and depression than those in the CG. In terms of perceived social support, no significant difference was found between the AG and the CG. The results of the DAPR-Stress scale showed that stress indicators on the post-drawing assessment decreased significantly compared to the pre-drawing assessment after participating in the art therapy intervention. Thus, the art-based projective drawing assessment (the DAPR) supported the quantitative results of the art therapy intervention on decreasing stress. Overall findings support the effectiveness of the group art therapy intervention in enhancing psychological well-being of Korean mothers of children with disabilities.</p><p>