| Description | Registration required: https://bit.ly/DS-Feb18 The labor of disability is appropriated by the carceral state to implicate bodies and justify violence against them at the intersections of race, class, gender, and disability. Beginning with historical narratives of black women facing unimaginable violence first within slavery and then via post slavery systems of punishment that included first the convict leasing system and later the chain gang, Erevelles marks the historical continuities/discontinuities with contemporary violent practices of the carceral state against women and girls that now include segregated special education classrooms, alternative schools, juvenile detention homes, and other institutional settings. Drawing on these “scenes of subjection,” Ervelles lecture traces how the socio-political category of disability is utilized to produce the carceral subject and discusses the conceptual as well as material implications when disability is included in this analysis. Nirmala Erevelles is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Alabama. Her teaching and research interests lie in the areas of disability studies, critical race theory, transnational feminism, sociology of education, and postcolonial studies. Her insistence on an intersectional analysis foregrounds the dialectical relationship between disability and the other constructs of difference, namely race, class, gender, and sexuality and its brutal implications for (disabled) students in U. S. public schools and (disabled) citizens in transnational contexts. Her book, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Towards a Transformative Body Politic (Palgrave 2012) was awarded the Critic’s Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript tentatively entitled Cripping Empire: Theorizing Intersectionality as if Black (and Disabled) Lives Matter. This event is part of Building Bridges to Disability Studies, which aims to build connections between the Disability Studies Program and other UW departments that are not currently represented in Disability Studies activities on campus |
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