The Disability Studies Initiative was created in fall 2019 by colleagues from the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We are now working across departments and disciplines. Our main goals are to de-stigmatize impairment and illness by examining the medical, social, and cultural constructions of disability and enhance the knowledge of the complex embodiments of our human condition. We seek to learn from national and transnational perspectives, policies, literatures, cultures, and histories so as to shed light on current ideas of disability within broader contexts. Bringing together faculty, students, and community members, we explore Disability Studies as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of scholarship as well as use our humanistic knowledge to support grassroots and institutional disability activist projects on campus and beyond.
Our work is supported by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Department of English, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Graduate Center for Literary Research at UC Santa Barbara.
Along with UCSB’s Associated Students, we acknowledge that this University system was founded upon exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples, including those on whose lands this institution is located, the villages and unceded lands of the Chumash people. For additional information and mapping, visit the Land Acknowledgement page.