Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Our Body-Minds Are Not Apologies: How Systemic Oppression, Beauty Standards & Desirability Politics Impact The Body-Image & Sex Lives Of Trans & Non-Binary People With Physical (Dis)Abilities, Elm L. Mack

University Honors Theses

Due to the ableism, whiteness, and cisgender-heteropatriarchy in the US, people who are marked by racial, physical, neuro, and gendered differences are stereotypically considered to be less desirable. By applying a perspective informed by Disability Studies, Trans Studies, and Queer of Color Theory (including scholars like Eli Clare, Robert McRuer, Sonya Renee Taylor, Audre Lorde, Sami Schalk, Chris Finley, and Alicia Cox), I investigate how societal norms, beauty standards, and systemic oppression have disproportionately impacted the body-images and sex lives of trans and non-binary people with physical (dis)abilities. This thesis aims to shed light on the variety of ways in …

“Vacation, All I Ever Wanted?” A Qualitative Analysis Of Travel Narratives From Interabled Families, Mary Heather Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study researched and investigated the travel narratives of 13 interabled families through qualitative research methods of thematic and contrapuntal analysis. Participants were parents who have at least one dependent with a disability in their family unit. Theories used to guide this study include narrative theory, family systems theory, and relational dialectics theory. Narrative theory laid the groundwork for understanding how stories function to communicate and construct identity. Family systems theory provided definitions and terms for how to understand dynamics within families. Relational dialectics theory guided the understanding for what tensions are at play for interabled families and how …

Neurodivergence In Dance Performance: A Thesis, Alannah Martin

Dance Written

Does neurodivergence have any effects on dance performance? The goals of this research project are to reflect, analyze, and understand how individual neurodivergence impacts creativity, identity, and the choreographic process. The intersection of dance and disability studies is an ever-growing area of research that is in conflict because of the societal nature of the two concepts. Within the disability studies field, neurodivergence and neurodiversity are relatively new and undeveloped ideas that primarily interact with dance studies as pedagogical areas of interest. There is little attention on the impacts of neurodivergence in dance makers and their creative products in performance. The …

The Meaning Of A Choice, Julie-Louise Zeitoun

Masters Theses

If you are disabled or disadvantaged, you will be dismissed and stifled. Few people will actively care for your struggles. As a person with autism, I was deeply fearful of the persecution I had faced throughout my life; it was a fear that followed me with terrifying determination. I desperately wanted to blend into society. So I designed myself to be devoid of any weakness, and productivity was the way I chose to conceal any difficulties I faced. It was a way to measure my success — a way to measure my normalcy.

Standard medical textiles are generic, cumbersome devices. …

Gender And Disability: An Exploration Of Reflective Practice For Protection And Access Amid Complex Emergencies, Lindsey A. Mandolini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gender and Disability: An Exploration of Reflective Practice for Protection and Access Amid Complex Emergencies is a qualitative research project exploring under what conditions and in what ways disabled persons’ organizations (DPOs) effectively protect and provide access to women and girls with disabilities amid complex emergencies. The study upheld a participatory approach and rights-based framework, emphasizing that authentic inclusion requires centering disabled voices in research. Drawing on extant research, grey literature, and data collected from online practitioner questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, the study conducted a multi-phased reflexive thematic analysis. The research findings culminate in a composite narrative that brings to …

Circumventing Ableism: A Grounded Theory Study Exploring Caregiver Strategies To Promote A Positive Identity, June Furr

All Dissertations

This qualitative research study explores how caregivers and persons with disabilities navigate the rhetoric of disability and caregiving through the interviews of fifteen caregivers and fifteen persons with disabilities using the lens of grounded theory and Burke’s (1952) dramatistic pentad. Significant findings describe how focused disability description can circumvent ableism when rhetorical resources that assist caregivers and persons with disabilities to navigate the rhetoric in disability descriptions are provided. Disability description theory includes the three stages that define, collaborate and revise, and practice and apply a disability description. This qualitative research offers an introduction into the phenomenon of …

Dissecting The Musical Body: Analyzing The Influence Of Body Norms On Musical Discourse, Lauren Del Rosario '23

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

An “Other” Experience Of Videogames: Analyzing The Connections Between Videogames And The Lived Experience Of Chronic Pain, Gracie Straznickas

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue for the connections between the lived experience of chronic pain and videogames, exploring what interacts with and influences them. To answer this, I draw on cripistemology as I engage in autoethnography, close-reading and close-gameplay, restorying, mixed methods design, formal interviews, surveys, and inductive coding. I further argue for pushing back against the unhelpful binaries that define the “human” and a false idea of “universal” experience or ability, instead pointing to the intersectionality that better reflects the biopolitics of disability, including both debility and capacity. I engage with these methods in three specific projects that consider …

Examining Ableism In Music Therapy Education And Clinical Training: Student And Educator Perspectives, Rebecca Warren

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

Ableism is the discrimination against disabled people and favoring of nondisabled people. Ableism can pervade societal expectations, medical systems, educational systems, and culture. Within higher education, ableism can prevent disabled students from succeeding in programs with unique requirements, like music therapy. College music therapy programs combine aspects of music, psychology, and clinical training. While music therapy students frequently will work with disabled clients, there is a lack of consideration for disabled music therapy students and disabled music therapists. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine ableism in music therapy education and training. Participants completed a creative writing response …

Treatment Of The Differently Abled: Representations Of Disability From Victorian Periodicals To Contemporary Graphic Narratives, Rachelle Echevarria

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In recent years, a number of efforts have been made to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in academic institutions, the workplace, and to examine and analyze representations of marginalized populations in a variety of literary and cultural contexts. These efforts usually acknowledge past mistakes, emphasizing the idea that history shall not and should not repeat itself. While analyzing the representations of disability is important in its own right, it's also important to understand why these perceptions exist. This thesis suggests that when the representations of disabilities from different mediums and from different time periods are examined in relationship, readers may …

Moments Of Excess: Type 1 Diabetes And The Myth Of Control In Adolescent Fiction For Girls, Michelle E. Legault

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis is the first academic work to analyze the stories of the Type 1 diabetic teen girls of adolescent fiction. In novels for adolescent readers, these girls are often White, female, heterosexual, and middle class—resulting in a collective disability narrative that portrays an “every girl” and lacks cultural or political dimensions. This thesis explores the narratives of five fictional teen protagonists with Type 1 diabetes. They are: Stacey McGill from the Baby-Sitters Club series by Ann M. Martin, Rachel Deering in Lurlene McDaniel’s Will I Ever Dance Again? (1982), Mackenzie “Zie” Clark in Sarah White’s Let Me List the …

The Social Ontology Of Psychiatry: Psychiatric Diagnosis As An Ontogenetic, Interpellative Speech Act, Ashton Sorrels

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Psychiatry is the study, evaluation, and treatment of mental disorders – disorders that affect the behavior and cognition of individuals and which are associated with underlying dysfunctions in the brain and nervous system. Though psychiatry is a medical and scientific discipline, it also takes place within a social context that modifies its effects, particularly in its application of diagnostic categories to individuals. In this thesis, I argue that, because of this context, psychiatric diagnosis can be modeled as an ontogenetic, interpellative speech act. A speech act is an utterance or sign that constitutes an action through its performance, called an …

Chronic Poetics: A Waiting Room Of One's Own, Madeleine Simmons

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This article explores chronic poetics, through my personal lens I take readers on a walk- through of poetry and the discussions surrounding chronic illnesses. I examine the current state of chronic illness and the nuances to its discussion. I analyze chronic illness in the context of disability studies, and touch on the tensions of categorizing chronic illness as a disability. As well as how to best navigate reading chronic poetics, as poets engage in new territories as they form a new language to describe their circumstances. While analyzing multiple poems from different authors, I explore why specifically the vessel of …

Epistemic Injustice, Endometriosis And Dance/ Movement Therapy: An Autoethnographic Investigation, Kevana West

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

As the field of dance/ movement therapy evolves to meet the demands of a rapidly changing social landscape, it is imperative that clinicians think critically about the degree to which our work is steeped in oppressive frameworks and ideologies. This investigation uses testimony to explore epistemic injustice as it relates to the author’s experience of living with endometriosis and the pursuit of professional licensure. Considering the limited amount of research on the condition, along with the perceived absence of literature within the field of dance/ movement therapy, further study is warranted. The experimentation phase of this research incorporated the use …

It's Just Caring: Improving The Museum Experience For Visitors With Autism Through Social Narratives, Reagan R. Stone

Honors Theses

This project explores how museums can improve the visitor experience for visitors with disabilities, more specifically for visitors with autism. In general, museums are environments that have a specific set of rules, guidelines, and built-in social interactions that visitors are expected to understand and follow. These guidelines, as well as the sensory overload that exists within a new environment, can make visiting the museum a stressful, and even negative experience for individuals with autism and their families. A social narrative, a simple written and visual guide that explains characteristics of new environments and various aspects of social situations, is a …

Inclusive Pedagogy: Connecting Disability And Race In Higher Education, Meredith Persin

All Theses

Higher education was never made for marginalized people. The academy was created based on the privileged white, able-bodied, males who preoccupied higher education for the longest time. While that has certainly changed over the years, the institution itself is still in the past resulting in BIPOC students and disabled students continuing to struggle within higher education. While instructors have begun to take interest in the need for inclusive pedagogy within the last decade, it still has a far way to come in order to help the marginalized students with intersecting identities and students who may not benefit from a one …

Facultas Marginem: Assessing Disability Data And Public Aau Universities’ Affirmative Action Plans For Systemic Barriers Facing Faculty With Disabilities, Joseph Carlton Barry

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

This dissertation contributes to education equity scholarship produced by academics seeking to develop understandings of disability, Persons with Disabilities (PWD), and how both are situated amongst faculty in institutions of higher education. As such, this dissertation centers on a study of public US universities belonging to the Association of American Universities (AAU). This study looks for institutional level associations between respective rates by which college and university faculty with disabilities (FWD) are employed, certain aspects of disability policy drawn from each institution’s 2020 Affirmative Action Plans (AAP), and various other instances of empirical disability data (EDD).

While this study contributes …

The Lived Supervision Experiences Of Disabled Music Therapists, Emma Martin

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Within and outside of the music therapy field, there has been a recent push for more conversations and literature on social justice. However, disability has been largely left out of this dialogue. Disabled individuals have unique worldviews, and their voices as individuals and practitioners should be an integral part of social justice within music therapy. This study examined disabled music therapists' supervision experiences. All music therapists receive supervision during their education and clinical training, and many go on to supervise. Supervision therefore presents an opportunity to advance the profession by striving to understand disabled music therapists’ perspectives. The purpose of …

Afflictionary: Defining Disability And Chronic Illness Through Poetic Dictionary Entries, Jaime Chernoch

Graduate Masters Theses

Afflictionary, Defining Disability and Chronic Illness Through Poetic Dictionary Entries is a poetry collection that uses the format of a dictionary to explore individualized experiences of both medical and non-medical words. The definitions and reference quotes that come before the poems come from the Oxford English Dictionary and various medical journals. The quotes act as a prompt or framework that helped shape the personal entries. They may echo the content in the poems, be placed in opposition, or complicate our understanding of the word. Some of the words list multiple years of personal entries which shows the chronic and recurrent …

Accessibility For All: Digitization In Museums, Shayna Diamond

Museum Studies Theses

The role museums have in society is an ever-changing one. As institutions of knowledge, culture, and humanity, they are subject to the same evolutions as the people they represent, educate, and serve. Thus, as digitization movements have swept the world, efforts to bring museums into the digital age have increased. This paper discusses digitization in the museum context, addresses the digitization of collections and exhibitions, and examines how digitization tools open those resources for public access – in particular for people with disabilities. The aim of this topic is to demonstrate how said digitization can best be utilized for the …

Exploring Tactile Art-Making With Deafblind Students And Their Families: An Opportunity For Creative Play, Alice Rodgers

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

The impact of a deafblind diagnosis on an individual’s mental health and the well-being of the family involved can be profound. However, current research and available literature for the mental health treatment and therapy practices of deafblind persons and their families is limited (Kyzar et al., 2016; “WFDB Global Report 2018,” n.d.). This thesis used the Leeds Family Psychology and Therapy Service principles (Leeds FPTS) and the Expressive Therapies Continuum with established deafblind teaching strategies to facilitate an original arts-based community project entitled: “Things We Like.” This project provided an opportunity for deafblind students (ages three to 22) and their …

Stranger Compass Of The Stage: Difference And Desire In Early Modern City Comedy, Catherine Tisdale

Doctoral Dissertations

In periods of social and political upheaval like ours, it is more important than ever to interrogate constructions of identity and difference and to understand the histories of alterity that separate us from one another. Stranger Compass of the Stage: Difference and Desire in Early Modern City Drama reimagines the cultural and social effect of alien, foreign, and stranger characters on the early modern stage and re-envisions how these characters contribute to, alter, and imaginatively build new epistemologies for understanding difference in early modern London. Resisting the field’s current critical inclination toward English identity formation, this project works intersectionally to …

“We Already Look Amazing, We Just Need Designers To Jump On Board”: Designing For Female Consumers That Use Mobility Aids Based On Satisfaction With Retail Selection And Garment Design Characteristics, Mackenzie L. Miller

Honors College Theses

One in 4 people (85 million) in the United States has been diagnosed with a form of a disability, with 13.7 percent (44 million) having a mobility-related disability (CDC, 2020). Despite being the largest disability minority group in the US (CDC, 2020), the availability of clothes for pets is larger than the selection for people with disabilities (Ryan, 2018). The purpose of this qualitative study is to evaluate satisfaction of ready-to-wear and adaptive clothing among female consumers who use mobility aids. Fit issues, lack of availability, and lack of consideration for disability needs were found as overarching problems in both …

Artistic Expressions Of Vegan Women With Disturbed Eating Behavior And Body Image Distress, Lee Ann Thill

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

This research explores the experience of women who are vegan, and have disturbed eating behaviors (DEB) and body image distress (BID). Four participants completed a series of three art-making sessions. Participants were invited to visually explore their experience as a vegan woman with DEB/BID. They made a mixed media collage with an emphasis on layering in each session. They engaged in discussion about their process, and the final art piece’s meaning. Between sessions, researcher response art pieces were created for each participant piece, with accompanying journal reflections to engage with the ideas they explored. All participant sessions were video and …

Care Ethics, Disability, And Public Policy, Piper Gibson

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Intersectional Perspective On Women And Girls With Disabilities: A Comparative Analysis, Kathryn F. Guzmán

Dissertations and Theses

People, including women and girls with disabilities have faced oppression and exclusion in society for centuries due to negative beliefs, stereotypes and attitudes that have led to stigma, discrimination and lack of support for them. For women and girls in particular, having a disability has historically meant that they were no longer considered beautiful and were seen as being incapable of meeting social and cultural expectations like marriage and motherhood. In recent decades, however, some progress has been made towards combating disability-based discrimination and promoting inclusion and full participation in society. Additionally, the adoption of the United Nations Convention on …

Instructing Normalcy, Anna R. Derosa

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

Modeling Disability: Softly Making The Invisible Visible, Libby Evan

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

“I am not asking for pity. I am telling you about my disability.” -Eli Clare

In the following Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis statement, you will not find someone overcoming their disability. You will not find a tale of inspiration. You will not find a cure for ableism. You simply will find an individual's experience of disability— my experience of disability.

My invisible disability puts the medical model and social model of disability in constant tension as I navigate everyday life living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and severe arthritis. Both models seek to find blame for disability, whether in searching …

Can You See It?: Providing Visual Arts Access To Audiences With Visual Impairment And Blindness, Rowan A. Puig Davis

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Health In The Musical Profession: A Human Rights Investigation At The Intersections Of Identity, Reputation, And Resources, Jillian P. Reed

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This project investigates the effects of illness, injury, and disability on professional musicians. Issues of the musician’s identity, importance of reputation, and disability stigma are explored through firsthand accounts of 15 musicians who faced health challenges during their careers. My original research also includes the data from 200 responses to my musicians’ health survey. The patchwork of resources available to these musicians is examined through the lenses of human rights claiming and humanitarian charity, with a focus on healthcare, interpersonal accommodations, and the currently insufficient legal protections for this population.

On a micro scale, this paper is about the experiences …