Cripping Human Rights Education with Disability Studies: An Undergraduate Reading List

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16

Reading Lists; Disabilities; Civil Rights; Undergraduate Students; Interdisciplinary Approach; Power Structure; Human Dignity; Periodicals; Equal Education; Electronic Libraries; Databases; Activism; Politics; Social Change; Teaching Methods

10.1080/00131946.2019.1630128

0013-1946

Aiming to place disability studies in conversation with other antioppressive educational frameworks, this article "crips" human rights education (HRE), a field that, by definition, teaches people about equality, dignity, and respect. A theoretical sampling of HRE journals and an online library database uncovers that human rights scholarship largely overlooks disability outside a medical or legal framework, though disability scholars consistently reference human rights in their work. We argue that these absences exemplify the active erasure of disability at the ontological level, and in response we urge scholars to reconceptualize where and how politics, activism, and social change take place. This "visibilizing" project follows Baxi's dictum that HRE must constantly adapt to people's localized experiences and the needs of future generations. We offer a reading list to begin this "visibilizing" project in undergraduate university settings, proposing that teachers use "Disability and Human Rights Praxis: Intersectional, Interdisciplinary Readings for Educators" to conceptualize how they might pair disability studies in education and HRE texts to facilitate interdisciplinary class discussions and student projects.

As Provided

2019

EJ1223751