Beauty defined by nonvisual means is an area of exploration long overdue. The question on what or whom is considered beautiful or attractive is often left up to each individual, and dependent on the culture in which said beauty is visually seen. This research identified the physical characteristics of Western standards of beauty among women who are visually impaired. The main objective was to explore how women who are visually impaired or blind defined both physical and non-physical beauty, in addition to how they navigated ocularcentric standards of beauty. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 women who are visually impaired or blind that live within the United States. Their interviews were transcribed and analyzed to critique the components of beauty within the cultural lens of women who are visually impaired or blind. What was taken from the data was then used to consider ways in which women can empower themselves without using visual means to define and describe who they are.

No description available.

No description available.

Enactment of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 expanded and clarified the rights of students with disabilities in higher education (Connor, 2011; Pena, 2014; Troiano, 2003). In the past three decades, the enrollment rate of students with learning disabilities (LD) in higher education has tripled. However, the magnitude and quality of scholarship addressing the experiences of students with disabilities (including LD) does not reflect this exponential shift. While existing literature addresses dancers with physical and developmental disabilities (Kuppers, 2004; Sandahl & Auslander, 2005; Whatley, 2007, 2008) and children with learning disabilities (Cone & Cone, 2011), research on dancers with learning disabilities in postsecondary settings is nil. Research that includes the voices of identifying dancers with learning disabilities in higher education is necessary in order to discover more effective pathways and approaches to interventions and learning strategies. This qualitative study examines the perceptions of six dance majors and minors with learning disabilities (LD) in higher education dance programs from five universities located in the New York/New Jersey/Eastern Pennsylvania and Midwest regions of the United States. The purpose of the study is to privilege the voices and perspectives of an underrepresented population in dance in order to illuminate challenges, learning strategies, and experienced meanings within creating, learning, and performing dance in higher education. Qualitative sources of data include in-person interviews, non-participant observations, and participant reflective journals. Several rounds of coding and data analysis generated a multifaceted and nuanced portrait of six dancers with LDs’ challenges, strategies, and experienced meanings, both individual and composite, in higher education dance. Several described self-determined approaches through agentic acts of learning individualized to their unique LDs. For all dancers, emotional states undergirded challenges, strategies, and relationality in higher education dance. Further, descriptions of visibility, acceptance, and affirmation by peers and instructors in technique and composition classrooms illuminated the value of relational authenticity for these dancers. Research findings suggest areas in need of reformed practices while also illuminating extant teaching practices that effectively meet the needs of students, including the transparent integration of ameliorative strategies into higher education dance. Findings related to emotional challenges point to the importance of emotional support as a priority in higher education dance programs, a need that I suggest has become increasingly critical for all university dance students during this period of global pandemic. The study offers insight into the ways dance in higher education can be more accessible and inclusive by privileging the authority of the individual student and enabling authentic engagement with self and a broader relationality to different others. / Dance

The United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has been shaped by the country’s pre-existing narratives around disability. The master narrative of disability presents disability as a static condition that inherently lowers a person’s quality of life. This creates bias in physicians dealing with disabled patients, since under the master narrative’s logic disability is a negative trait that must be eradicated or cured. This troubling view has wider ramifications during a global pandemic as well. The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped everybody’s relationship with time, bringing even nondisabled people closer to the experience of disability. However, the federal government and many state governments adhered as closely as possible to able-bodied conceptions of time. This has hindered the United States’ pandemic response by misprioritizing “reopening the economy” even at the expense of people’s lives. This creates a cycle, because this mismanaged response has led the country into even greater uncertainty about the pandemic, which moves everybody even closer to disabled conceptions of time. Had the master narrative not been so powerful, perhaps the United States could have responded more effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic. / Urban Bioethics

Since its beginnings in the 1970s disability activist movement, disability studiesscholarship has traditionally focused on physical disability and, in working to deconstruct the figure of the “cripple” as a symbol of pathos, has shied away from close examinations of pain, suffering, and dependency in favor of a focus on disability pride, agency, and community. As the field has grown, however, it has made room for investigations into these more difficult considerations, and in particular into how these affective states cluster around mind-related disability. Feminist philosopher Eva Kittay’s 1999 book, Love’s Labor, reexamines social contract theory in terms of what she calls the “dependency relation” and its attendant ethics of care. Bringing together mental disability with an analysis of both gender and race, Kittay’s work undergirds my own project’s intervention into readings of American literature between the Civil War and World War II, along with recent debates (for example, in the work of Licia Carlson, Nirmala Erevelles, Rachel Adams, among others) about the gendered, raced, and classed structures of care and dependency that are particularly evident in the case of mind-related disability. With a few notable recent exceptions, scholarship into the history of psychiatry has largely ignored the early and sustained imbrication of race in the origins of the American asylum movement and its widespread — and long-lasting — cultural impact. My project seeks to intervene into this history by examining the works of American writers who deploy representations of dependency and mind-related disability, and, in so doing, also critique, and sometimes reinscribe, assumptions of racial and gendered Otherness. I argue that mind-related disability produces strong cultural anxiety reflected in these writings precisely because it threatens the illusion of raced-and-gendered autonomy, an American ideal that has never been possible but has loomed large since the earliest days of the republic. Working from Ato Quayson’s insight that attention to disability, like the sublime, activates aesthetic instability in the structures of representation and an ethical core in literary interpretation, I offer textual readings that show that dependency, coded as weakness and vulnerability, was conceived as a condition categorically apart from white male-independence, coded as strength and autonomy. As such, the focus on independence as the organizing principle of a just society — rather than on distributed responsibility and nonhierarchical interdependence — easily survived the shift from antebellum sentimental protection to modernist scientific persecution. Focusing my inquiry on dependency and care, in my second chapter, “The Mad History of Asylums and Abolition,” I show how the early asylum movement and abolitionists produced and responded to oppressive rhetorics of race and madness that could be generative for resistance nonetheless. To that end, I examine the writing of asylum-movement reformer Dorothea Dix, in which we see the strained attempt to advocate for insanity as a specifically white condition that was tied to the vigor of civilization and progress. I then turn to the writing of abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglass, who sought to establish the capacity of black Americans to suffer mental anguish or “madness” under slavery and yet also to invert mainstream rhetoric such that madness adhered not to the abolitionist but to the slaveholding society of which he was critical. In my third chapter, “The Traumas and Delusions of the Civil War,” I reveal the mutual dependency of race and mind-related disability in representations of the Civil War and its traumas. Mind-related disability, instantiated in the individual body, becomes a potent metaphor for the social trauma of the war and the trauma of slavery, both of which are repressed in the post-Reconstruction narratives of white national fraternal healing. I focus specifically on the sentimental novella, For the Major, by Constance Fenimore Woolson, and on the genre-bending work, Specimen Days, by Walt Whitman, to show how otherwise promising models of care are profoundly compromised by their erasures of race and/or mind-related disability. In my fourth chapter, “The Medical Gothic: The Medical Gaze and Monstrous Care,” I show how after the war, the consolidation and assertion of medical authority produced a medical gaze defined by empiricism and scientific objectivity, a gaze that was critiqued by several late nineteenth-century writers by figuring the monstrous results of such medical care. I examine the doctor-patient relationship at the heart of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the ethical medical dilemma at the center of Stephen Crane’s novella, The Monster, to analyze the harmful care that produces social death under asymmetrical conditions of power. Despite these critiques of medical authority, the degeneration theories of the finde-siecle and the shift towards biological determinism engendered the rise of eugenics and an especially virulent abjection of mind-related disability. In this context, my fifth chapter, “Eugenic Time, Eugenic Death,” examines how community care could not help but fail and survival itself emerges as a kind of violence, as Charles Chesnutt’s story, “Dave’s Neckliss,” and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s story “Old Woman Magoun,” confirm. Throughout the dissertation, I show how the fantasy of American autonomy and rationality relies on racial and gendered hierarchies to sustain it, with often brutal consequences in the care of the dependent mentally ill/disabled. / English

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In the United States, the number of visually impaired and blind Americans will rise drastically as the population continues to age; and, yet little is known about how the impact of blindness affects an individual when it comes to the experience of food provisioning and preparation. This thesis presents the study of how the blind and the visually impaired experience food provisioning and preparation. It explores how modern technology and sensory training help these groups of people traverse kitchen and grocery store environments. In thematically organized chapters, this thesis examines sensory education, nutrition and food related obstacles. This is the first study in the United States in which the experience of food provisioning, preparation of food, and consumption of food are described from the perspective of Blind and Visually Impaired Americans. In this qualitative study, food experience and the eating choices of the blind and visually impaired Americans were examined. Influential factors on the experience of food were also explored.

For approximately the last 45 years, researchers have examined a standardized pathway for an individual’s life course, involving leaving the parents’ home, building a stable career, getting married, having children, followed by retirement and death. Contrary to what was been previously discovered, the life course is no longer considered as linear as it was once thought to be. This statement has been further investigated and proven more specifically among families of children with special needs. This Master’s thesis reviews the perspective of 11 (eleven) fathers of children with cerebral palsy located in Canada and in the United States. Fathers voluntarily participated in a qualitative 90-minute qualitative structured interview, followed by the construction of a historical timeline of key events pertaining to their journey to becoming a father. Qualitative analyses consisted of a content analysis to investigate how fatherhood is constructed and the experiences of being a father to a child with cerebral palsy consist of. In essence, becoming a father to a child with cerebral palsy is an extremely emotional experience as complex and continuous feelings emerge in those transitioning into fatherhood.

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