Race + Disability
This page features a small selection of UConn library and external resources to support learning and research pertaining to Race & Disability Studies. This list is meant to be exploratory and is not a comprehensive representation or list of the library's holdings.
For additional assistance, please contact Samuel Boss, at samuel.boss@uconn.edu.
From the Collection
Black Madness : mad Blackness by
In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781478005506Publication Date: 2019
Blind Tom, the Black Pianist-Composer: continually enslaved by
This study investigates the issues of race and racism that marked America after the Civil War. Blind Tom, born into slavery in 1849, was a musician of skill but who, like other black performers, had to face racism and, in his case, disability.
Call Number: ML417.B3 S68 1999ISBN: 0810835940Publication Date: 2002
Bodyminds Reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women's speculative fiction by
In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds--the intertwinement of the mental and the physical--in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson--where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic--destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler's Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.
Call Number: PS153.N5 S33 2018ISBN: 9780822370734Publication Date: 2018
Crip Theory: cultural signs of queerness and disability by
A bold and contemporary discourse of the intersection of disability studies and queer studies Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other. Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.
Call Number: HV1568 .M37 2006ISBN: 9780814757123Publication Date: 2006
DisCrit: disability studies and critical race theory in education by
In this groundbreaking volume, scholars examine the achievement/opportunity gaps from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as the overrepresentation of minority students in special education and the school-to-prison pipeline. Chapters also address school reform and the impact on students based on race, class, and dis/ability and the capacity of law and policy to include (and exclude).
Call Number: LC4031 .D57 2016ISBN: 9780807756676Publication Date: 2016
The Pedagogy of Pathologization: dis/abled girls of color in the school-prison nexus by
WINNER OF THE 2019 AESA CRITICS' CHOICE BOOK AWARD WINNER OF THE 2018 NATIONAL WOMEN'S STUDIES ASSOCIATION ALISON PIEPMEIER BOOK PRIZE Linking powerful first-person narratives with structural analysis, The Pedagogy of Pathologization explores the construction of criminal identities in schools via the intersections of race, disability, and gender. amid the prevalence of targeted mass incarceration. Focusing uniquely on the pathologization of female students of color, whose voices are frequently engulfed by labels of deviance and disability, a distinct and underrepresented experience of the school-to-prison pipeline is detailed through original qualitative methods rooted in authentic narratives. The book's DisCrit framework, grounded in interdisciplinary research, draws on scholarship from critical race theory, disability studies, education, women's and girl's studies, legal studies, and more.
Call Number: LC3731 .A76 2018ISBN: 9781138696891Publication Date: 2017
Race, Ethnicity, and Disability: veterans and benefits in post-Civil War America by
Using data from more than 40,000 soldiers of the Union army, this book focuses on the experience of African Americans and immigrants with disabilities, investigating their decision to seek government assistance and their resulting treatment. Pension administrators treated these ex-soldiers differently from native-born whites, but the discrimination was far from seamless - biased evaluations of worthiness intensified in response to administrators' workload and nativists' late-nineteenth-century campaigns. This book finds a remarkable interplay of social concepts, historical context, bureaucratic expediency, and individual initiative. Examining how African Americans and immigrants weighed their circumstances in deciding when to request a pension, whether to employ a pension attorney, or if they should seek institutionalization, it contends that these veterans quietly asserted their right to benefits. Shedding new light on the long history of challenges faced by veterans with disabilities, the book underscores the persistence of these challenges in spite of the recent revolution in disability rights.
Call Number: UB373 .L64 2010ISBN: 9780521516341Publication Date: 2010
Why Are So Many Minority Students in Special Education? understanding race & disability in schools by
This powerful book examines the disproportionate placement of Black and Hispanic students in special education. The authors present compelling stories representing the range of experiences that culturally and linguistically diverse students are apt to face in school. They examine the children's experiences, their families, interactions with school personnel, the teachers, and schools' estimation of the children and their families, and the school climate that influences decisions about referrals. Based on the authors' work in a large, culturally diverse school district, the book concludes with recommendations for improving educational practice, teacher training, and policy renewal.
Call Number: LC3981 .H36 2006ISBN: 0807746258Publication Date: 2006
