All: I'm posting this great good news on behalf of Sue Schweik. I stand
happily corrected about my alma mater. J
We do have a growing disability studies program at Berkeley now. We've been
working closely with World Institute on Disabilities and are now offering a
regular Intro to Disability Studies course and a Women and Disabilities
course, both taught by Marsha Saxton, a public policy course taught by Fred
Collignon and three courses in the English dept. being periodically taught
("Discourses of Disability," "Disability and Literature," and a creative
writing/digital storytelling workshop on disability arts being co-taught by
Neil Marcus and me next fall). We're planning the development of an
anthropology course and working hard to get a history course and future
FTE. University of California systemwide just granted the Berkeley campus a
90,000$ grant (the Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education) for the
development of disability studies. We're just developing a faculty board,
having a big lecture series (with Tom Shakespeare and we hope Simi Linton
as initial speakers), establishing a website, we have a newsletter and an
office now (464 Wheeler), and we'll have a halftime staff person for the
next year working to analyze how to make disability studies work on this
campus. We're just at the very beginning of the process of establishing a
full major and/or minor taught by full-time disabled faculty who are
experts in the field, but we expect to make that happen within five years.
I've been lurking on the disability research list for a while and for some
reason have had technical trouble getting through the few times I've tried
to make a comment. Devva Kasnitz is a key member of our DisC (Disability
Studies at Cal) group and maybe she'll respond on the loistserve, but I
wondered if you might be willing just to follow up your message about the
failed impulse toward disability studies at Cal with a correction? (I've
already written to D. Lang about U of Wash separately, we should defintely
pool info and resources between our two institutions.)
Johnson Cheu
[log in to unmask]
http://people.english.ohio-state.edu/cheu.1
The Ohio State University
Dept. of English
421 Denney Hall, 164 W. 17th. Ave.
Columbus, OH 43210
(614) 292-1730 (Office); (614) 292-6065 (Dept.); (614) 292-7816 (Fax)
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