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Disability studies scholar named
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“Disability studies is incredibly important because it takes the focus off of changing the ‘disabled’ individual and places emphasis on changing the larger social, political, cultural and economic environment.”
The Center for Disability Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, founded last April with the mission of encouraging the study, teaching and accurate representation of disability and of individuals with disabilities, is moving forward with the hiring of its inaugural visiting scholar.
Michael Rembis, a visiting scholar in the departments of History and American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, will be in residence at UB for the spring 2010 semester. A historian who specializes in the history of disability and the history of eugenics from 1859 to the present, Rembis describes his teaching and research interests as focusing on “the contested nature of socially constructed discourses of disablement and the material history of individuals perceived to be disabled.” He says his work “emphasizes and analyzes the intersections among gender, class, race, sexuality, citizenship and disability.”
While at UB, Rembis will teach a course in the history department on the history of eugenics from the mid-19th century to the present. Although the course focuses on the United States, he says there will be a strong comparative component, as well as a strong focus on the importance of changing notions of disability.
His duties also include helping to plan the Disability Film Festival that is held each fall. He hopes to use the film festival to explore the history of eugenics, “both as a powerful rhetorical device and a system of ‘human breeding’ that directly affects the lives of disabled people.”
In addition, he will work closely with staff at People Inc. to develop a new exhibit on the history of psychiatry and mental illness for the agency’s Museum of disABILITY History, located at North Forest and Maple roads in Amherst, as well as a new “wing” of the museum’s online virtual museum.
His plans include continuing work on his own research, which, he notes, “fits very nicely with the museum project.”
He is in the early stages of a book project that he describes as “a history of self-advocacy among a population that today we would consider mental health consumer/survivors” in pre-1960s (1790s-1950s) America.
“This study will do much more than uncover a scantly articulated past,” Rembis says. “By exploring the relevant primary and secondary sources, I will make a nuanced analysis of the importance of gender, class and race/ethnicity, and explore the changing role of the state, religion, capitalism, urbanization and emerging ‘medico-scientific’ discourse in advocacy work.”
Rembis explains that disability studies is a relatively recent research interest of his, spurred by work begun in 1997 on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Arizona, where he later served as a visiting assistant professor of history and co-founder and director of the university’s Disability Studies Initiative.
“I have always been interested in the history of science and the social construction of what some scholars might call systems of knowledge and power,” he says. “When I started the PhD, I decided to focus my research on the intersections among the history of eugenics, psychology and psychiatry, which in the late-1990s was a relatively new field of interest among historians.
“My work focused specifically on the changing relationship between what was considered mental or psychological ‘defect’ and juvenile delinquency. It’s funny, actually; colleagues had to tell me that I was doing disability studies research,” he notes. “I thought I was writing a history of science and juvenile delinquency. Once I began reading the disability studies literature, which was sometime around 2000, I found it very helpful in my own thinking and research.”
He defines “disability studies” as the study of disability and the material reality of disabled people from a social, cultural, legal, artistic and historical perspective.
“It’s incredibly important because it takes the focus off of changing the ‘disabled’ individual and places emphasis on changing the larger social, political, cultural and economic environment,” he says. “Disability studies is also critically important because it sheds light upon the lived experience of disabled people themselves, who historically have been silenced or hidden away, often through violent and oppressive means.”
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