HAVERFORD, Pa. – Taking full advantage of their final semesters at Haverford, field hockey players Sarah Waldis '16 and Lindsey Lopes '16 capped a four-year project with an independent study that involved both community partnership and disability studies.
In this new course, students engaged with recent work in critical disability studies across a range of humanistic disciplines, including literary studies, visual studies, history, and philosophy. Drawing on these varied perspectives, they explored how disability theory and engaged community practice inform and shape one another.
Along the way, discussions about the historical and theoretical development of the ideas of normalcy and disability; questions around ethical engagement with vulnerable subjects; the neurodiversity paradigm; the growth of disability arts and culture; and the relationship between disability, access, and exhibition practices all took place. The course included a semester-long project in partnership with the Center for Creative Works (CCW), a studio and teaching space in Wynnewood, Pa., for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
"The BioArt project provided an incredible opportunity to engage in a mutually beneficial, interdependent relationship with members of our larger community," explained Waldis. "As a biology major, this collaboration reinforced for me the value that a diversity of bodies and minds can bring to the scientific field."
Disability studies is inherently an interdisciplinary field. The diverse disciplinary backgrounds that students bring to the course enable us to ask how a disability studies perspective reframes questions we are asking across the divisions. Disability studies opens up new ways of approaching everything from neuroscience to ethnography to literary criticism.
The partnership with CCW, which involves weekly meetings in the bio labs at Haverford and the art studios at CCW, has been central to our conversations about creativity, neurodiversity, teaching and learning, identity and community. Students brought questions raised in the course to work in their majors and to their careers in science, medicine, arts and humanities, social work, anthropology, and other fields.
"The "disruptive" nature of the project – whether it was breaking the conventions of scientific techniques in the lab, or scavenging for different supplies in the art studio, or eating jello on salad in the dining center – was crucial to the sorts of relationships and community that formed," commented Lopes.
This new course developed organically out of conversations with students who wanted to pursue further work in disability studies. The Center for Creative Works was enthusiastic about working with us. Eventually, the decision was made to propose a course that would enable more students to join in the shared interests in disability studies and community-based learning.
Health Studies supported the idea, and we received funding through the Civic Engagement & Social Responsibility Initiative and the Hurford Center for the Arts & Humanities to support our community partnership and a final course exhibition and catalog. Lopes and Waldis were responsible for designing and leading the BioArt project with the students and CCW participants. The KINSC and biology faculty offered their laboratory space, exhibition space, and logistical support. With so many moving parts, it would not have come together without a lot of work and creative collaboration involving students, staff, faculty, and our partners at CCW.
excerpts of this story were taken from the original story on Haverford.edu website