Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 …

“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 …

Autism And The Body Of Christ: Understanding, Accommodating, And Accepting Autistic Believers In The Church, Kaitlyn Cook

Senior Honors Theses

Autism is a neurotype that causes a different set of strengths and weaknesses and thus should be embraced and accommodated within the church. Not only are autistic believers able to grasp Christian concepts, but they also have different perspectives and skills that can be instrumental in building up the church. Promoting a correct view of autism and accommodating neurodiversity within the church will allow autistic believers to follow God’s command to be part of a body and build up the church. The church can employ several strategies to create an accessible environment for believers on the spectrum, including creating sensory-safe …

Education For Sustainable Development Competencies In A Community-Engaged Art Workshop, Amy J. Schmierbach

SACAD: John Heinrichs Scholarly and Creative Activity Days

Arts participation can expand empathy and cognitive growth capacity while creating a social bond and communal meaning (McCarthy et al., 2004). As an art instructor for over twenty years, I have witnessed the bonds that can be created through collaborative art experiences. These bonds are nurtured from a space of equity and inclusion. Teaching a community-engaged art course can bring these qualities into the community, allowing university students to use their art skills in real-world applications to impact society through experiential learning art practices. Making art with others will enable us to help others build empathy and social bonds that …

“You Take My Place; Let’S Switch!” What It Means To Be A Woman Powerlifter In Parasport, Aaron Carl S. Seechung, Maria Luisa M. Guinto

The Qualitative Report

Gendered disability in elite sport has emerged as a pertinent area of inquiry in sport psychology. However, qualitative research aimed at amplifying the voices of marginalized subgroups is notably sparse. Employing a phenomenological approach, we examined the lived experience of a Filipina para powerlifter, probing the intersection of gender, disability, and socioeconomic status in shaping how the participant made sense of life and identity, both within and outside the realm of sport. Three personal experiential themes were generated from the interview data's interpretative phenomenological analysis: “survival of the fittest,” “the voices in my head did not allow me to give …

Disclosing A Disability At Work: Respect, Discrimination, And The Ethics Of Informal Attitudes, Honors College, Department Of Philosophy

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Adam Cureton is an internationally recognized disability scholar and activist who specializes in ethics and the philosophy of disability. His books, which draw on his own experiences as a legally blind person, include Disability and Disadvantage, Disability in Practice, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability, and the forthcoming Respecting Disability. He founded and served as president of the Society for Philosophy and Disability and helped to create the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Disabled People. He is a Rhodes Scholar and currently serves as the Lindsay Young Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee.

Falling Into Action, Kent Hoffman

The Goose

Kent Hoffman explores human movement, his own mobility, and how it influences the way he moves on land. This personal essay, told through the lens of disability and accessibility, outlines his experience of living with Becker muscular dystrophy. Hoffman's approach to walking and mobility is heavily influenced by a fear of falling. As his mobility is changing, he's adapting and seeking out new ways to move on land. Different modes of mobility determine the way we experience personal movement, but accessibility determines who is welcome in spaces in the first place. Accessibility in the form of providing equal access is …

The Spiritual Impact Of Disability On Parents And Caregivers, Grant Azbell

Discernment: Theology and the Practice of Ministry

This study was designed to examine the impact of disability on the faith and faith communities of parents and caregivers of persons experiencing disability. This study proceeded by asking nine parents or caregivers of persons experiencing disability a series of seven questions to evaluate the impact of disability on their faith and on their relationship to their faith community. The interviews were conducted on Zoom and the recordings were transcribed and coded to observe discernable patterns and themes amongst the participants. What emerged from the data is important for ministers, church leaders, and anyone wanting to know more about the …

The Impact Of Preaching The Image Of God As Disability-Inclusive, Laurie E. Thompson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

According to Howard (2010), the North American Mission Board (NAMB) considers the disabled community in America to be unreached by the church. Hardwick (2021) also writes, “The disability community is the most unique community, the largest minority group in the world” (p. 12). This quantitative descriptive research study explored the frequency of preaching the biblical principle imago Dei, found in Genesis 1:27, in a way that includes the disabled, and how this preaching may impact disability-inclusivity in the church. The Word of God states, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them” …

Spatial Disaggregation Of Poverty And Disability: Application To Tanzania, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

Estimating poverty measures for disabled people in developing countries is often difficult, partly because relevant data are not readily available. We extend the small-area estimation developed by Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw (2002, 2003) to estimate poverty by the disability status of the household head, when the disability status is unavailable in the survey. We propose two alternative approaches to this extension: Aggregation and Instrumental Variables Approaches. We apply these approaches to data from Tanzania and show that both approaches work. Our estimation results show that disability is indeed positively associated with poverty in every region of mainland Tanzania.

Improving Communication Access With Deaf People Through Nursing Simulation: A Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration, Jamie L. Mccartney Ph.D., Tracy Gidden, Jennifer Biggs, Kathy Geething, Karl Kosko Ph.D.

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

Baccalaureate nursing and sign language interpreting students participated in a pediatric discharge simulation with a deaf person playing the role of the baby’s parent. At the conclusion of the simulation, participants were emailed a consent letter and a link to a 17-item questionnaire developed by the authors. Responses were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, whereby nonparametric statistics were calculated to examine Likert-scale items. A Mann-Whitney test statistic was calculated, instead of an independent samples t-test, given the smaller sample in the current study (n = 26). A question was posed to participants that evaluated their self-perception of the effectiveness of …

“She Was No Taller Than Your Thumb. So She Was Called Thumbelina”: Gender, Disability, And Visual Forms In Hans Christian Andersen’S “Thumbelina” (1835), Hannah J. Helm

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

This article explores representations of femininity and disability in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “Thumbelina” (1835) and select examples of his paper art. In this article, I argue that, on one level, the fairy tale and Andersen’s own paper cuttings uphold feminine and ableist norms. However, on another level, these literary and visual forms simultaneously work to destabilise social prejudices and challenge bodily normativity. I explore how characters and themes associated with the fairy tale and paper art can be (re)read in strength-based ways. In the story, Thumbelina experiences the world through her smallness, and key themes including accessibility, physical …

Enigmatic, Tragic, Crip; Or, Crip Time In Sophocles’S Oedipus And Aristotle’S Poetics, Maxwell Gray

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

Tragedy represents a classical literary genre the field of disability studies often prefers not to approach too closely, lest disability also be called a tragedy by association. At the same time, my thinking is organized around my personal experience of chronic illness, pain, and disability that appear in early adulthood, when it’s maybe least expected and most difficult to comprehend; or, in a word, tragic. I turn to the literary genre of classical Greek tragedy to think about/with more enigmatic and tragic forms of disability and crip temporality. In particular, I read Sophocles’s classic tragedy Oedipus and Aristotle’s foundational interpretation …

Judging The Body: Disability, Class And Citizen Identity—A Case Study From An Ancient Greek Lawcourt, Justin L. Biggi

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

This paper aims to showcase how one person's disabled identity—that of the unnamed defendant of the legal speech Lysias 24, who was accused of faking his disability to obtain social security payments—interacted with wider conceptions of citizen identity and citizenship in 5^th century BCE Athens. This paper brings a much-needed intersectional approach to the speech: by viewing the speaker's disabled identity as shaped by his economical status (and vice-versa), this in turn shapes the way we can interpret his experience of citizen identity, as well as his sense of belonging to a citizen body. Recent approaches in critical theory …

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 …

Emerging As A Scholar-Advocate Amid The Covid-19 Pandemic, Isabelle Hoagland

International Journal on Responsibility

No abstract provided.

Dismodernizing The Working Class And Social Reproduction, After The Pandemic Lumpenproletariat: Towards An Autonomist Disability Perspective, Arianna Introna Dr

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

Capitalism establishes a fundamental connection between the constitution of society and the sphere of production. Whether in the form of direct participation or indirectly through the performance of social reproduction, the working class is expected to be working. The universals of capitalist society as a work-based society revolve around the material and symbolic centrality of the working class, its struggle and its social reproduction. This association is reinforced by the othering effect that the definitional politics of the universal working class has on subjects defined by their non-relation to the sphere of production, but also by the categories we …

Hailey's Hearing Aids, Hailey Marie Garcia

Whittier Scholars Program

Individuals from the deaf and hard-of-hearing community are likely to experience more anxiety and depression due to defective cognitive, social, communicational, and emotional skills (Azizi et al., 2019). The word “disability” is embedded with historical negative connotations with phrases such as “deaf and dumb” because if they were deaf or mute then they were automatically labeled as inferior (Horovitz, 2007). Since the 18th century, the DHH community has been seen as incapable, even inhuman, hence the development of emotional deficiencies that bleed into one’s perception of society and their self esteem (Gallaudet, 1886).

How do you navigate a hearing world …

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

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 …

Thinking And Designing Beyond The Jig-Seating Reimagined, Lily Watson

Poster Presentations

Most chairs aren’t designed to serve human bodies. Enter, the impaired body, not simply as a source for treatment and revision but as a challenge to standard design. This poster presents an innovative chair redesign project. The effort was intended to enhance comfort and functionality as well as aesthetics of seating in public spaces.

Inhabiting "Sore Butt Cracks": Queering The U.S. Long-Term Care System, Alison Lawrence

Women's and Gender Studies: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

In the face of a failing long-term care system, the author positions a queer theoretical lens as a potential source of creativity and empathy to help us build a care system that supports the dignity and personhood of all patients. The comedic work of a long-term care patient, Youtuber Clay-The-Comedian, is analyzed through a queer-theories lens as a new approach to long-term care that celebrates the personhood of all types of bodies, while also never diminishing the often difficult reality that folks in need of care face. This queer rhetoric engages with the messy, embodied experiences of patients to develop …

Paths To Equity: Parents In Partnership With Ucedds Fostering Black Family Advocacy For Children On The Autism Spectrum, Elizabeth H. Morgan, Benita D. Shaw, Ida Winters, Chiffon King, Jazmin Burns, Aubyn Stahmer, Gail Chodron

Developmental Disabilities Network Journal

Racism and ableism have doubly affected Black families of children with developmental disabilities in their interactions with disability systems of supports and services (e.g., early intervention, mental health, education, medical systems). On average, Black autistic children are diagnosed three years later and are up to three times more likely to be misdiagnosed than their non-Hispanic White peers. Qualitative research provides evidence that systemic oppression, often attributed to intersectionality, can cause circumstances where Black disabled youth are doubly marginalized by policy and practice that perpetuates inequality. School discipline policies that criminalize Black students and inadequate medical assessments that improperly support Black …

When Sexuality Becomes Healing: An Interview With Elsbeth Fraanje On Her Documentary Sexual Healing, Johan Roeland

Journal of Religion & Film

This is an interview with Elsbeth Fraanje, the director of Sexual Healing.

Sexual Healing, Johan Roeland

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Sexual Healing (2022) directed by Elsbeth Fraanje.

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 …