Fall 2008
Rackham 580: Topics in Disability Studies: Disability Rights
“Topics in Disability Studies” provides an interdisciplinary approach to disability studies. This term our focus will be on the law, policy, theory, and social context of disability rights in the contemporary United States. How have social movements for disability rights interacted with formal law, policy, and institutions? How is disability constructed as a civil rights category and as a minority identity? What difference has the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 made in people’s lives? We will investigate the contemporary state of disability rights as well as study various theoretical approaches to disabled identity. Students will have the opportunity to interact with visiting speakers. The course is offered for 1 or 3 credits. Accessible classroom with realtime captioning.
Instructor
Professor Anna Kirkland
Martha S. Jones
Visit Date: October 23rd, 2008
Martha S. Jones is assistant professor in the department of History and Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, and visiting assistant professor in the Law School at the University of Michigan. After a decade as a public interest litigator in New York City with organizations including MFY Legal Services and The HIV Law Project, Jones joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 2001. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and a J.D. from the City University of New York School of Law. Her first book, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African-American Public Culture, 1830-1900, is a intellectual and cultural history of black women's public lives in nineteenth-century America. Her current work explores the relationship of African-Americans in Atlantic World legal culture in the pre-Civil War period.
Visit Date: TBD
Kaaryn Gustafson is the Associate Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. Kaaryn has extensive knowledge of the nation's welfare system and a passion for getting beyond rhetoric to study how welfare functions in practice. Her dissertation, The Morality and Rationality of Welfare: Welfare Recipients' Negotiation of the Welfare System, for which she recently earned a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California at Berkeley, is a sophisticated demonstration, based on countless personal interviews with welfare recipients, of why the rules placed on the books by welfare lawmakers may often bear little resemblance to the system experienced by those we are trying to help. Although her Ph.D. is new, Professor Gustafson comes to us with considerable experience as an instructor in courses at Berkeley, as a litigator at the San Francisco law firm of Pillsbury, Winthrop and as a policy analyst and advocate at the Welfare Rights Education and Advocacy Project of the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland. She has published writings in the American Journal of Legal History and the Berkeley Women's Law Journal and co-authored (with Linda Burnham) a report to the United Nations on U.S. government policy toward poor women and children. A member of the American Sociological Association and active leader in the Law & Society Association, Professor Gustafson holds her J.D. (1997) from Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley (where she was both solicitations and articles editor of the Berkeley Women's Law Journal) and her A.B. magna cum laude in Sociology (1990) from Harvard University.
