Drawing on and building upon the growing interdisciplinary field from which we take our name, the Disability Studies Working Group provides an opportunity for students and faculty across the university to approach bodily difference, non-normativity, ableism, and other related concepts from a variety of lenses. The group host work-in- progress events, discussions of recent scholarship, and guest speakers. We welcome those working within the field as well as (and especially!) the curious.

In the past two decades, Disability Studies has emerged as a forceful and compelling intellectual and political conversation in the academy and beyond, spanning the disciplines of history, politics, philosophy, science studies, literature, anthropology, and sociology. Working closely with the disability rights movement in Europe and the United States, the field emerged in the late twentieth-century seeking to recognize “disability” as a socially and culturally constructed category of difference, one that merited the kind of attention afforded to intersecting matters of race, gender, and sexuality - and, more recently, geography and citizenship.

In 2015, we founded Princeton’s first disability studies working group in an effort to create a space for scholars and activists from all parts of the university to engage with questions of non-normative (and normative) bodies and paradigms. Over the past four years, the group has organized a host of events in different formats that brought interested members of the Princeton community in contact with one another and folks from other universities as well. This year, thanks to support from IHUM and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, we will continue to engage with a variety of academic and political projects, guest lectures, presentations, and conversations in an informal but critical intellectual community.

Contact: Jiya S. Pandya