- Using Google Scholar or Google Books to search for an author or topic.
- Scouring professors' syllabi to see what others have taught and to then pick one of those readings.
Strategy #1:
We'll start with the Google Search engines. I imagine that you're all familiar with these resources from your work on the Sophomore Symposium. If you're searching for topics ("asylums," "deafness," "autism culture," etc.), then putting those into the search field and adding applicable modifiers (date range, names of historical periods, regional limitations, etc.) will hopefully yield some worthwhile results.
We'll start with the Google Search engines. I imagine that you're all familiar with these resources from your work on the Sophomore Symposium. If you're searching for topics ("asylums," "deafness," "autism culture," etc.), then putting those into the search field and adding applicable modifiers (date range, names of historical periods, regional limitations, etc.) will hopefully yield some worthwhile results.
Google Scholar, however, has some neat features that might help you based if you want to build on some of the material we've already read this semester.
For instance, you might have found Dea Boster's article about slave resistance particular interesting and hoped to explore some other aspect of the intersection between disability, race, and slavery for your review assignment. Go ahead and enter Boster's name into Google Scholar and you'll get pertinent search results:
As you can see above, I've circled a link that will take you to all the other publications that have cited these original sources. This information can help you understand how influential particular scholarship is, but will also point you to scholarship that drew on the original article you found interesting. Boster's work, as you can see, doesn't have a ton of citations, in part because it's relatively recent scholarship.For the sake of comparison, drawing on earlier scholarship from someone like Foucault will give you more options of other sources that cited the original book or article.
As you can see, in Foucault's case, there are many more options. He is, after all, a pretty big deal.
(and he had a spectacular hairstyle sensibility)
Strategy #2:
Scouring syllabi from professors who teach disability history courses is another great way to see how others structure these courses as well as find some potentially interesting readings.
One starting point might be the faculty page for my advisor, Dr. Sarah Rose, at the University of Texas at Arlington. Under the "Teaching Tab" you can find all of her syllabi and download them as MS Word files.
Similarly, the Disability History Association has put together a nice collection of disability history related syllabi from some very prominent scholars in the field such as Douglas Baynton and Susan Burch.
Professor Beth Linker at the University of Pennsylvania has also posted some of her syllabi for courses such Disability: History and Theory and one for a Freshman Seminar entitled, "Disability Matters."
Searching on Google for "Disability History Syllabus" can yield other finds, such as these:
- Stuart and Festle, "Disability Past and Present," Elon University
- Lubet, "Foundations of Disability Studies," University of Minnesota
- Goldberg, "Disability and the Body," University of Washington
Strategy #3:
Come and talk with me! We can discuss what you might be interested in and I might also have some suggestions for you. If you'd like to talk, however, let's do it soon as you need to make a selection (and post your choice in the comments of the previous blog post) by Wednesday, Oct. 7.
I hope these suggestions prove useful for you. If you encounter an article or book chapter that looks interesting, I might be able to hunt down a copy of that reading for you; please be in touch and let me know. Good luck!
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