Despite legal advancements recognizing the rights of individuals with disabilities, societal barriers are still arising from the medical model of disability. These obstacles have resulted in marginalizing and isolating practices, in turn leading to the underrepresentation of individuals with disabilities in the workforce and, by extension, in leadership positions. Grounded in the frameworks of critical pedagogy and critical disability studies, this autoethnographic study examines, using my personal experiences as contextual evidence, the determining factors underlying the struggle for equity and leadership, within the hegemonic society that people with disabilities must navigate. The study further explores the issue of empowerment and raised consciousness among people with disabilities, as afforded by blending the tenets of critical pedagogy with a critical social model of disability. Based on the autoethnographic analysis, the study proposes future research and makes recommendations for inclusion of individuals with disabilities, educators working with people with disabilities, and institutions committed to inclusiveness of leaders with disabilities.

In the present era of inclusion, special schools increasingly serve as spaces for the delivery of supplementary education and rehabilitation services for mainstreamed disabled children. A history of segregation and institutionalization weigh heavily on the sector, prompting many special educators to advocate for students' continued mainstreaming (often against students' wishes) through mastery of the necessary compensatory techniques and technologies that promise to help them attain equality with their non-disabled peers in mainstream schools. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research, including bi-weekly in-person participant observation and semi-structured interviews with educators and parents, in a public special school for the blind and visually impaired in southern France, this dissertation explores the narratives and practices that maintain educators in a deficit mindset vis-à-vis disabled lives, a mindset from which it becomes difficult to see the potential of visual impairment to contribute to an enacted, non-representational epistemology in an education system based on ocular-centric objectivism. Nevertheless, students harness being together disabled at the school to make sense of the world through their unique phenomenologies in which sight often plays a surprisingly important part. Engaging anthropology, embodied cognitive science, and critical disability studies, I argue that sight shows up for the children as a tool of playful curiosity for learning in an always emergent present, a disposition I call "sight as question" that stands in contrast to the objectivist "sight as power" standard in mainstream schools. In re-conceptualizing the special school as understated space of embodied knowledge creation, my dissertation makes three primary contributions. First, I show how the French state's race to mainstream all students has exacerbated reactionary approaches to educating disabled children, a reality now hidden behind an innovative facade of assistive technology. Second, I document how such situation continues with the full compliance of otherwise progressive-minded educators because of a historical cultural context wherein national public education is instilled with the status of meritocratic authority responsible for vetting all children for epistemic conformity as a matter of égalité. Finally, I offer an alternative perspective for repurposing special schools to spaces of phenomenological potential led by members of the disabled community and explore what, as such, they might contribute to teaching and learning in an age of artificial intelligence.

Is it possible for a playwright to authentically capture the disabled experience without it becoming privy to stereotypes or utilized as a catalyst for the plot? The thesis aims to challenge the prevalent notion that making the disability intrinsic to a theatrical plot is essential for authentic representation, and instead asserts that authentic portrayal of the disabled experience can exist independently of making the disability a central plot device. To support this claim, In Chapter One, I engage with relevant work in the field of playwriting and narrative media studies, such as the workshop "Inaccessible: Writing Plays with Characters who are Differently Abled" led by Jef Peterson. In Chapter Two, I analyze a range of contemporary American and English scripts from the 21st century featuring characters with disabilities, including Simon Stephen's A Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time. My research converges with creative practice in Chapter Three, with an autoethnographic analysis of my own experience writing an original, full length script entitled When it Rains, which centers on a character living with a disability. In exploring multiple scripts, engaging with academic texts, and reflecting on my own creative process, my research thereby advocates for a more diverse and inclusive portrayal of disability in theatrical narratives.

In youth theatre spaces, it is up to the facilitators to discover and create new ways to include more students, especially those who previously didn't have a seat at the table. Making rehearsal spaces inclusive and accessible to all starts by establishing inclusion as an innate practice integrated into every step of the process. This thesis focuses on creating inclusive and accessible rehearsal spaces outside of the traditional classroom for young people ages 8-22, specifically in community theatre and collegiate spaces. The director's role is explored in two projects: Home of the Brave, a Theatre for Young Audiences production performed by college students, and Alice in Wonderland, a youth community theatre production. In examining each project, I apply disability, educational, and inclusion theories to my work. Through the process of examining theory and my own practice in theatrical spaces, I advocate for embedding inclusive practices from the start of a rehearsal process and articulate effective strategies for creating inclusive and accessible rehearsal rooms.

With a background of Swedish welfare studies about how disability hinders individuals in their daily live, this essay analyzes swedish schoolbooks through qualitative content analysis in regards to how they present and teach about human functionality, disability, and norms surrounding functionality. It uses Crip theory and the english social method to analyze how the books perpetuate knowledge about disabled people and what disablity looks like. The study uses qualitative content analysis as a method to analyze the content of the textbooks. It focuses on Biology and Social studies as the core subjects, and the results find a lack or an underrepresentation of discussions about functionality, despite being mentioned to a smaller degree in all the books. The study shows how the biology books have a tendency of assuming a high level of ablebodiedness in the reader, and the social studies textbooks have a tendency to forget disability when discussing human identities and minorities.

abstract: Medical policies, practices, and definitions do not exist solely in the clinical realm; they show up in the lived experiences of patients. This research examines how people with the chronic illness called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) define their own illness experiences. They have situated knowledge about their illness onset, search for care, and clinical encounters. Their knowledge complicates and challenges the existing norms in clinical practice and medical discourse, as the experience of searching for care with ME reveals weaknesses in a system that is focused on acute care. Patient narratives reveal institutional patterns that obstruct access to medical care, such as disbelief from clinicians and lack of training in chronic illness protocols. They also reveal patterns in physician behavior that indicate the likelihood of receiving effective care. These patient narratives serve as a basis for continued examination of ME as well as further reconstruction of medical practice and procedure. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social Justice and Human Rights 2019

The purpose of this thesis was to explore socially constructed discursive barriers to physical activity for people with physical disabilities. This research was informed by a critical disability studies framework. Eight interviews were conducted, split between end-users and stakeholders. The end-user article discusses their perspectives with regard to their own PA participation, their use of PA resources, and their views of how disability is constructed. The stakeholder article deals with their views with regard to Canada’s progress in creating inclusive PA guidelines, the research process as it effects people with physical disabilities, and how disability is constructed. The results showed awareness among both groups of the social model of disability, but that the medical model is still firmly rooted. Work is needed to create inclusive promotional materials and disseminate them effectively. An effective advocacy and lobbying effort was suggested as one avenue towards a possible solution to this issue.

This thesis analyses the representation of so-called human curiosities in recent visual art, by drawing a connection to historical practices of exhibiting 'monstrous' and deformed bodies within institutions such as freak shows, anatomical collections and medical museums. The last two decades have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in the histories of these institutions, particularly through the work of Robert Bogdan, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rachel Adams, Richard Sandell and Samuel J.M.M Alberti, whose research can be situated in interdisciplinary humanities fields such as disability studies, museology, history of science and literary and visual studies. Concurrently, a remarkable number of contemporary artists have also turned to the history and imagery of these spaces to explore the politics of display in exhibitions of non-normative bodies. This study addresses the critical gap between these two parallel domains of inquiry, drawing upon recent studies concerning historical exhibitions of monstrous bodies to analyse how contemporary artists have simultaneously confronted and extended these traditions through their artworks. In order to show that the very notion of 'monstrous bodies' is inextricably bound up in the curious display practices that frame them, I analyse the representation of human curiosities in the work of Zoe Leonard, Joanna Ebenstein, Diane Arbus, Mat Fraser, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Marc Quinn and John Isaacs. Each chapter examines a distinct institutional context – the anatomical collection, the freak show, the art gallery, and the contemporary medical museum – to investigate how these artists challenge the meanings conferred upon extraordinary bodies within each space, bestowing new significance upon these forms within the context of their various art practices. I argue that, by doing so, artists themselves can take on roles like curious collectors, freak show talkers and teratologists, revealing the potential for 'art' to act as yet another display framework that imposes a particular set of meanings onto anomalous bodies.

The magical fictional setting of the Harry Potter novels is not one separated from our own. It features the same nations and the same history as the real world. Its society is parallel to ours due to similar traditions and hierarchies, such as heteronormativity, ageism, racism, and fascism. Some of these are clearly problematised in the novels, others are not. While issues of racism and blood status are clearly at the forefront of the story of Harry Potter, there are layers to the conflict which reveal that there is more to the discriminatory dilemma than the issue of blood purity. This essay aims to investigate how teachers can use J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series to lead a discussion about othering and discrimination, focusing on the issue of ableism in particular. The goal when studying processes of othering in Harry Potter is not necessarily for the reader to identify with the protagonists. Instead, textual silences will be interpreted to investigate whether the othering of people like the readers themselves, an othering the reader partakes in when empathising with the protagonists, can be compared to ableism in the real world, and how teachers can use Harry Potter as means to introduce the idea of able-bodiedness as a social construct. By applying crip theory to the text, it can be stated that the division between the protagonist and his non-magical Other is based on ableist ideologies, which result in a positioning of the non-magical as disabled in the magical society. This position is maintained by naturalising the link between impairment and character flaws.

Submitted by Sara Ribeiro (sara.ribeiro@ucb.br) on 2018-08-08T14:05:28Z No. of bitstreams: 1 AndreLuisNormantonBeltrameTese2018.pdf: 61680547 bytes, checksum: 957b2b86a2ea94d73eeeae718d08c88d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Sara Ribeiro (sara.ribeiro@ucb.br) on 2018-08-08T14:05:36Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 AndreLuisNormantonBeltrameTese2018.pdf: 61680547 bytes, checksum: 957b2b86a2ea94d73eeeae718d08c88d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-08T14:05:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AndreLuisNormantonBeltrameTese2018.pdf: 61680547 bytes, checksum: 957b2b86a2ea94d73eeeae718d08c88d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-06-22 / How, When and Where does leisure for people with disabilities occur? This is the central question of this project, which takes shape in recognition of two central issues that generate its interest: the first, widely publicized and recognized, which marks in national and international reports processes of exclusion of this part of the human race; and the second, regarding the process of material and symbolic organization of the urban space involving the practices of fun games. When attempting to know how they occupy urban spaces and dialogue with their nexuses and contradictions, this thesis intends to think about how the challenge of access and social participation to this phenomenon is framed, considering in the microparticipation scenario (of a Cultural Association, an Educational Project and a Sport Space) the empirical locus of the study among people with physical disabilities (wheelchair users). For the task is sought to cross over into leisure perspective and take on Disability Studies, or better known as theoretical anchoring. The latter, a group of theorists and activists, little studied in national territory, is involved in the most current debates on the Social Model of disability, which recognizes disability as a social and non-biological construction, as is still seen a lot. In this perspective, disability is only one way of being in the world in the face of so many other possibilities and society must be sensitive to it. With a methodological proposal of qualitative approach on an exploratory and descriptive basis, the study operates methodologically through a documental research, bibliographical review, field record and interviews with 22 social actors (12 people with physical disabilities, 5 companions, 4 teachers and 1 manager of the cultural association). The results point to a pleasure experienced in an individualized way, dependent on other people and negotiated in terms of the format for their access. From the point of view of spaces and places, architectural inaccessibility, transportation, difference and prejudice, in addition to the private space, to the detriment of the public, have been reported barriers. And finally, although leisure has at first an idealization of different possibilities in its access two issues mark its impossibility of full experience: the prejudice and the manifestation of the ludic culture alienated to the consumption present in the search and enjoyment of the phenomenon. The study concludes that the disabled person is still the victim of an unequal treatment, which suggests that in some situations, leisure spaces do not have a collective dimension. It is clear from the statement, among other things, that social participation is linked not only to the empirical observation of the individual, but to the social structure and historicity that surrounds it. The difficulty to understand the deficiency, and lack of other opportunities has revealed signs of poor evolution in this sense, especially when we refer to what historically the Medical Model of disability interpretation produced, discriminating institutionally how to recognize these individuals. / Como, Quando e Onde ocorre o lazer para as pessoas com deficiência? Esta é a pergunta central deste projeto, que ganha forma na medida em que se reconhecem duas questões centrais que geram seu interesse: a primeira, largamente publicizada e reconhecida, que marca em relatórios nacionais e internacionais processos de exclusão desta parcela do gênero humano; e a segunda, relativa ao processo de organização material e simbólica do espaço urbano envolvendo as práticas de lúdicas de divertimento. Ao procurar saber como ocupam espaços urbanos e dialogam com seus nexos e contradições esta tese pretende pensar como se configura o desafio do acesso e participação social frente a este fenômeno, considerando no cenário da microparticipação (de uma Associação Cultural, um Projeto Educativo e um Espaço Esportivo) o lócus empírico do estudo junto a pessoas com deficiência física (cadeirantes). Para a tarefa se procura entrecruzar em perspectiva superadora os estudos do lazer e assumir os Estudos da Deficiência, ou Disability Studies, nome mais conhecido, como ancoramento teórico. Este último, grupo de teóricos e ativistas, pouco estudado em território nacional, está envolto nos debates mais atuais sobre o Modelo Social de deficiência, que reconhece a deficiência como uma construção social e não biológica e individual, como muito ainda se vê. Com uma proposta metodológica de abordagem qualitativa em base exploratória e descritiva o estudo opera metodologicamente por meio de uma pesquisa documental, revisão bibliográfica, registro de campo e entrevistas a 22 atores sociais (12 pessoas com deficiência física, 5 acompanhantes, 4 professores e 1 gestor da associação cultural). Os resultados apontam para um lazer experimentado de maneira individualizada, dependente de outras pessoas e negociado em termos de formato para seu acesso. Do ponto de vista de espaços e lugares a inacessibilidade arquitetônica, os transportes, a diferença e o preconceito, além do espaço privado, em detrimento do público, tem sido barreiras relatadas. E, por fim, embora o lazer tenha à princípio uma idealização de diferentes possibilidades em seu acesso duas questões marcam sua impossibilidade de vivência plena: o preconceito e a manifestação da cultura lúdica alienada ao consumo presentes na busca e fruição do fenômeno. O estudo conclui que a pessoa com deficiência ainda é vítima de um tratamento desigual, o que inspira afirmar que, em algumas situações, espaços de lazer não abrigam uma dimensão coletiva. Depreende-se da afirmação, dentre outras coisas, que a participação social não está ligada apenas a constatação empírica do indivíduo, mas a estrutura social e historicidade que o envolve. A dificuldade de entender a deficiência, e falta de outras oportunidades tem apresentado sinais de pouca evolução neste sentido, principalmente quando nos remetemos ao que historicamente o Modelo Médico de interpretação da deficiência produziu, discriminando institucionalmente a forma de reconhecer estes indivíduos.