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

Abstract

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.

Notes

1 In offering the possibility of cripping human rights, we cite McRuer (2006) and his assertion of crip theory as a necessary intervention to interrogate neoliberalism and corporate commodification of crip bodies. We find that the process of cripping human rights is essential to vizibilizing the ontological erasure of disabled body-minds within HRE, as crip theory articulates the absence of the production of crip (disability) identity within disability studies, and as identified by Bennett’s (2007) review of McRuer’s (2006) Crip Theory, creates the possibility for new images of disability coalition and solidarity.

2 This reference list does not include the materials cited in the syllabus since therein are full citations.