Welcome to the course website for our hybrid elective, "Disability in the Past"! I'm looking forward to seeing you all in class in a few weeks and having the opportunity to learn with you as we explore a variety of disability history topics. We'll begin with the conceptual, then move through historically beginning in the Enlightenment, and finally explore some contemporary issues that touch not only on disability history but also on ethics.
This webpage will be the hub for essentially everything we do related to the course. I'll have a future post about how to stay updated about new posts and comments so that you can respond and contribute in a timely manner and see what your classmates have to say when they make new contributions to our online discussions.
Check out the sidebar, which is where you can find the Syllabus, Disclosure Document, Blogging Rubric, and other pertinent links that should prove helpful throughout the course of the semester.
At the bottom of the page, you can see the Collaborative Timeline of Disability history that we'll build over the course of the semester. Once we're in class, I'll share the Google Spreadsheet with you that I've used to create that timeline and during one of the weeks of the semester you'll be in charge of adding at least five events to that timeline that relate to important developments in the history of disability.
I'll leave you with a few short videos that serve as a nice introduction to the course and some of the conceptual approaches we'll take as we study the changing nature of disability in the past:
The first is a short clip we'll watch in class on the first day's meeting (Wed., Sept. 9) about the "social model of disability"—a concept that has been hugely influential in creating and shaping the fields of disability history.
Finally, here's a video from Stella Young that is one of our texts for the first week and is something we'll discuss along with the Linton and Adams/Reiss/Serlin readings on Wednesday, Sept. 16.
