Search Results for: 2024

• DISA 330: Critical Disability Studies – GUR
  • Description: 5 Credits. BCGM GUR. This course provides an exploration of the field of critical disability studies. Students will learn about several central topics, including disability rights and disability justice movements, cultural criticism of literature and popular media, and the principles of universal design in physical and digital spaces. Students will explore disability as an identity category that intersects with other identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. This is an interdisciplinary course designed for students from any major.
  • Instruction: Daman Wandke, Kristen Chmielewski, Andrew Lucchesi, Kyann Flint
  • Section details: Varies: Asynchronous online; Face-to-face
  • Next offering(s): At least one section every quarter
  • This is a Core Class in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• DISA 350: Topics in CDS
  • Description: 3 – 5 Credits. This series of courses makes a deep dive into specific divisional topics centering critical disability studies. If DISA 330 is our core course that covers the general overview of theory and core principles of critical disability studies, DISA 350 is the application of these to a wide variety of interdisciplinary areas, whether it’s Dance, Leadership, Science, or Business. It can be taken once as a Core requirement to our Minor, or can be repeated once with a different instructor to serve as an Elective.
  • Instruction: Daman Wandke, Andrew Lucchesi, Pam Kuntz, Cathy McDonald, G McGrew
  • Section details: Varies: Asynchronous online; Face-to-face
  • Next offering(s): At least two sections every year
  • This can serve as a Core Class and potential Elective in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• DISA 201: Stories of Disability in the World – GUR
  • Description: 4 Credits. HUM GUR. This course focuses on personal experiences of disability, the body, and community engagement. Students will learn how disability is a complex social experience that goes far beyond medical conceptions of illness and health, ability and disability. Through the lens of personal storytelling, students will examine the role that disability plays in the world, including such concepts as ableism, accessibility, and disabled joy.
    We’re in the process of approving this course to begin offering in AY 2025-26.
  • Instruction: TBD
  • Section details: Face-to-face & Online
  • Previous offerings: NEW
  • Next offering(s): Approx. 1-3 each year (funding permitting)
  • This course could serve as an Elective for our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

This was the experimental course number for what is now DISA 330. It was offered once during Spring 2023.

• DISA 397: Critical Disability Studies
  • Description: 5 Credits. BCGM GUR. This course provides an exploration of the field of critical disability studies. Students will learn about several central topics, including disability rights and disability justice movements, cultural criticism of literature and popular media, and the principles of universal design in physical and digital spaces. Students will explore disability as an identity category that intersects with other identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. This is an interdisciplinary course designed for students from any major.
  • Instruction: Kristen Chmielewski
  • Section details: face-to-face
  • Previous offerings: Spring 2023 TR 10:00 – 11:50 am, CRN 24011
  • Next offering(s): N/A. This course is now offered as DISA 330.

• Elementary ASL/Culture
  • Description: 5 Credits. ACGM GUR. This course provides practice in ASL conversational skills, regarding learning and giving signs as well as receiving signs and basic signs for everyday living. In addition, this course focuses upon worldwide deaf culture, historical aspects of deafness and the development of a variety of supports for the deaf community, especially in developing countries. ASL is the primary sign language used in North America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. The course also provides for exploration of other systems of sign communication used internationally.
  • Instruction: Linda Boyd
  • Section offerings: Face-to-face

• Accessible Computing
  • Title: Accessible Computing (graduate & undergraduate)
  • Description: 4 Credits
    • This project-based course introduces software accessibility principles. Students will learn how to design and build software for users with different abilities, e.g., people with visual impairments. Topics include:
      1. Interaction design for users with different abilities
      2. Ethics and human subject research
      3. Accessibility testing and evaluation techniques
      4. Open-source assistive technologies
      5. Machine learning for accessible computing
      6. Software engineering tools for accessible computing
      7. Mobile accessibility
      8. Wearable devices for people with disabilities
    • Prerequisites: CSCI 345 or instructor permission
  • Instruction: Yasmine Elglaly
  • Previously Offered: Fall 2021, CRN 44199, 44644
  • Future Offering(s): TBD

• Disability, Diversity, and the Mass Media
  • Description: 4 Credits. BCGM GUR. Introduction to the experience and perspectives of those with disabilities.
  • Instruction: Daman Wandke
  • Section details: online asynchronous & hybrid offerings
  • Offered every quarter!

• ENG 201: Writing in the Humanities: Disability in YA Novels
  • Title: Representation of Disability in Books Written for Children and Young Adults
  • Description: 5 Credits; CCOM
    • English 201 is a composition course that offers advanced instruction and practice in writing using ideas, texts and questions from a specified topic in the humanities. This section of 201 will examine the social significance, cultural power, and personal influence—not to mention delight—of children’s books and young adult literature as the underlying topic of our research and writing. In particular, we’ll look at how disability is portrayed to children. 
  • Instruction: English Department Faculty; Cathy McDonald
  • Previously offered: Winter 2022, CRN 10765

• English 301: Writing and the Public Title: Disability and Public Writing
  • Description: 5 Credits. This course examines the concept of disability through a social and cultural lens, exploring its intersections with writing studies and the topic of public writing. We will think about what disability means in different contexts as it relates to rhetoric and public actions, such as activism and community building. We will observe that disability has long been a matter of public debate. In a traditional, medical context, we often think about disability as a medical issue, a disorder, or a physical or mental abnormality. As we will observe in this class, these medical definitions are severely limited and often rooted in accepted cultural biases about what is normal and which lives matter more than others. We will examine the ways we think about disability more broadly. What stories and cultural traditions tell us about whether it is good or bad to have a disability? What cultural values and political priorities have brought groups of disabled people together throughout history and still today? These questions will bring us into a much more dynamic and exciting conversation about what disability means, both for ourselves and for the world around us.
  • Instruction: Andrew Lucchesi
  • Section details: Online Asynchronous, CRN 30616

• ENG 401: Writing & Rhetoric: Disability Rhetoric
  • Title: Sr Writing Studies / Rhet Sem: Disability Rhetoric
  • Description: 5 credits
    • Disability means different things depending on your point of view. From a medical perspective, disability has to do with the body. From a legal perspective, disability has to do with civil rights. From a rhetorician’s perspective, disability has to do with a wide range of stories, debates, tropes, biases, and identities. Our task in this course is to examine the different ways disability is and has been understood across different contexts. We will examine the growing movement of rhetorical study focused on disability, moving from classical rhetorical traditions to contemporary rhetorics of autism, mental disability, and the disabled body. We will see that in some situations, to be disabled is to be devoid of rhetorical power, to be forbidden from speaking for yourself. We will also see disability claimed as an asset of rhetorical power, a source of authority
    • Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301 or ENG 302 or ENG 370 or ENG 371, or instructor permission; senior status.
  • Instruction: Andrew Lucchesi
  • Previously Offered: Fall 2021, CRN 44211
  • This class can count as an Elective for our Minor in Critical Disability Studies with Advisor/ICDS approval

• ENG 418 – Senior Seminar in Disability & Literature
  • Description: 5 Credits. WP3. An advanced seminar offering an in-depth exploration of specialized topics. Requires students to develop scholarly projects integrating course material with their own literary, historical, and theoretical interests.
  • Instruction: Allison Giffen
  • Section details: face-to-face
  • Prerequisites: ENG prerequisites and senior status required
  • Recent offering(s): Spring 2023 TR 10:00 – 11:50 am, CRN 20415
  • Next offerings(s): TBD

• ENG 397K: Cultural Disability Studies
  • Description: 5 cr; Humanities GUR
    • This course offers an introduction to the key philosophies and scholarly approaches of Disability Studies in the humanities. Students will study literature, film, and everyday texts to understand the concept of “disability” as a social and cultural phenomenon. Through their work in this class, students will develop an increased understanding of disability as a valuable form of diversity. Students will leave prepared to apply Disability Studies ideas and approaches to their future courses in almost any field in the social sciences, humanities, education, and beyond. This course will also provide a comprehensive basis for students interested in pursuing more advanced work in future Disability Studies courses.
  • Instruction: English Department Faculty; Andrew Lucchesi
  • Previously offered: Spring 2021

• ENG 497B: Literature and Disability: Disability in Nineteenth-Century US Literature and Culture
  • Description: 5 Credits. This course will introduce you to some of the foundational scholarship in Critical Disability Studies specifically as it pertains to literature and the cultural work of disability.  Focusing specifically on nineteenth-century US literature, we will explore representations of people with disabilities in literature, social perceptions of disability, and the perspective of writers with disabilities. One of the central goals of this course is to explore disability as a social construction and then investigate its fascinating intersections with other identity categories, including race, class, gender, and age. The nineteenth century offers us an especially rich cultural moment when identities like disability, childhood, and blackness and whiteness were becoming codified by way of enlightenment rationality, empirical science, and the nineteenth-century’s drive to classify. We will examine these intersecting and mutually constitutive identities as they are represented in short stories, poetry, and memoir. We will look to primary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Dave, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Packard, along with a variety of short stories published in St. Nicholas Magazine, an influential children’s periodical. And, we will read these primary materials alongside such disability scholars as Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Douglas C. Baynton, Nirmala Erevelles, and Mitchell and Snyder.
  • Instruction: Allison Giffen
  • Prerequisites: Eng 202 or Instructor permission
  • Section details: face-to-face
  • Next Offering: Fall 2023, MWF 1:00-2:20, IS 242, CRN 44113.
  • This class can count as an Elective for our Minor in Critical Disability Studies with Advisor/ICDS approval

• LDST 416: Disability Inclusivity in Leadership
  • Title: Disability Inclusivity in Leadership
  • Description: 3 credits
    • People with disabilities are diverse in their range of abilities and intersect with every other identity. One in five people has a disability. As leaders, do we know how to be inclusive to people with disabilities in our work? In LDST 416, you will learn the often-untold history of the U.S. Disability Rights Movement and explore the current issues facing people with disabilities. Learn how to be more inclusive in your current and future leadership efforts through the journey of a disability rights activist, diverse essays about disability, and disability sensitivity training. We end the course by exploring a topic you choose related to the future of disability rights through a project. Daman is a national disability rights advocate, entrepreneur, and instructor. As a WWU student, Daman led the effort to create the A.S. Disability Outreach Center. Daman consults on disability topics for organizations small and large, across the country. He now teaches a course on Disability, Diversity, and the Mass Media here at WWU.
    • The course prerequisite is LDST 101, or email morse.institute@wwu.edu for an override.
  • Instruction: Daman Wandke
  • Previously Offered: Fall 2021, CRN 43344
  • Contact:  morse.institute@wwu.edu

• REL 330:  Religion and Disability
  • Description: 5 cr; BCGM GUR
    • This discussion-based course resituates the study of religion within a Critical Disability Studies framework in order to register the prismatic, ambivalent relationships between human variation and religious traditions. By pairing recent scholarship with literature, film, and other textual materials, it foregrounds the ways that, historically speaking, religions have not only structured possibilities for people with disabilities, but also have provided opportunities for disabled people to create alternative lifeworlds and imagine otherwise futures.
  • Instruction: Department of Global Humanities and Religions; Kathleen Brian
  • Previously offered: Fall 2021
  • Contact: GHR@wwu.edu

• WGSS 367: Feminist Disability Studies
  • Description: 5 Credits. This class explores the fields of Disability Studies and Feminist Studies to see what each can bring to the other.
  • Instruction: Anika Tilland-Stafford
  • Previous offerings: 
  • Next offering(s): Fall 2023

• CSEC 397x (placeholder course number): Disability & Access in STEM
  • Description: 3 Credits. This College of Science and Engineering Collaborations elective explores ableism, disablism, access, and Universal Design for Learning in the sciences.
  • Instruction: G (GIM) McGrew
  • Previous offerings:  N/A
  • Next offering(s): Winter or Spring 2026

• DISA 330: Critical Disability Studies – GUR
  • Description: 5 Credits. BCGM GUR. This course provides an exploration of the field of critical disability studies. Students will learn about several central topics, including disability rights and disability justice movements, cultural criticism of literature and popular media, and the principles of universal design in physical and digital spaces. Students will explore disability as an identity category that intersects with other identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. This is an interdisciplinary course designed for students from any major.
  • Instruction: Kyann Flint, Daman Wandke
  • Section details: FTF 8 – 9:50 am CRN 12907, and remote asynchronous, CRN 13836
  • This is a Core Class in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• DISA 350: Topics in Critical Disability Studies: Accessible Communication and Leadership
  • Description: 4 Credits
  • Instruction: Daman Wandke
  • Section details: Remote Async, CRN 44021
  • This course is crosslisted with LDST 416, and can count as either a Core Class or Elective in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• DISA 330: Critical Disability Studies – GUR
  • Description: 5 Credits. BCGM GUR. This course provides an exploration of the field of critical disability studies. Students will learn about several central topics, including disability rights and disability justice movements, cultural criticism of literature and popular media, and the principles of universal design in physical and digital spaces. Students will explore disability as an identity category that intersects with other identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. This is an interdisciplinary course designed for students from any major.
  • Instruction: Anika Tilland-Stafford EDIT: Andrew Lucchesi
  • Section details: Remote Synchronous, 10 – 11:50 am MTWR , CRN 30656 EDIT: Remote Asynchronous, 6-week.
  • This is a Core Class in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• DISA 330: Critical Disability Studies – GUR
  • Description: 5 Credits. BCGM GUR. This course provides an exploration of the field of critical disability studies. Students will learn about several central topics, including disability rights and disability justice movements, cultural criticism of literature and popular media, and the principles of universal design in physical and digital spaces. Students will explore disability as an identity category that intersects with other identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. This is an interdisciplinary course designed for students from any major.
  • Instruction: Andrew Lucchesi
  • Section details: remote asynchronous, CRN 23591
  • This is a Core Class in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• DISA 350: Topics in Critical Disability Studies
  • Description: 5 Credits.
  • Instruction: Lindsay Foreman-Murray
  • Section details: in-person Bellingham, MW 10:00 – 11:50 am, CRN 23590
  • This course is crosslisted with SPED 310, and can count as either a Core Class or Elective in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• DISA 330: Critical Disability Studies – GUR
  • Description: 5 Credits. BCGM GUR. This course provides an exploration of the field of critical disability studies. Students will learn about several central topics, including disability rights and disability justice movements, cultural criticism of literature and popular media, and the principles of universal design in physical and digital spaces. Students will explore disability as an identity category that intersects with other identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. This is an interdisciplinary course designed for students from any major.
  • Instruction: Kristen Chmielewski
  • Section details: in-person Bellingham, TR 02:00-03:50 pm, CRN 13823
  • This is a Core Class in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• DISA 350: Topics in Critical Disability Studies: Disability Moves
  • Description: 5 Credits. This course examines disability in dance through investigating choreographers, dancers, educators, and activists. Students will engage in readings, viewings and discussions to culminate in a research project of their choosing. On occasion class may take place in a dance studio environment.
  • Instruction: Pam Kuntz
  • Section details: in-person Bellingham, TR 10:00-11:50 am, CRN 13822
  • This can count as either a Core Class or Elective in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• ENG 401: Writing & Rhetoric: Disability Rhetoric
  • Title: Sr Writing Studies / Rhet Sem: Disability Rhetoric
  • Description: 5 credits. Disability means different things depending on your point of view. From a medical perspective, disability has to do with the body. From a legal perspective, disability has to do with civil rights. From a rhetorician’s perspective, disability has to do with a wide range of stories, debates, tropes, biases, and identities. Our task in this course is to examine the different ways disability is and has been understood across different contexts. We will examine the growing movement of rhetorical study focused on disability, moving from classical rhetorical traditions to contemporary rhetorics of autism, mental disability, and the disabled body. We will see that in some situations, to be disabled is to be devoid of rhetorical power, to be forbidden from speaking for yourself. We will also see disability claimed as an asset of rhetorical power, a source of authority
  • Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301 or ENG 302 or ENG 370 or ENG 371, or instructor permission; senior status.
  • Instruction: Andrew Lucchesi
  • This class can count as an Elective for our Minor in Critical Disability Studies with Advisor/ICDS approval! Contact icds@wwu.edu

• HNRS 350: Disability Inequality and Advocacy in the United States
  • Title: Honors Seminar – Disability Inequality and Advocacy in the United States
  • Description: 3 credits. Historian Douglas C. Baynton writes, “Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write.” Building upon that idea, disability is everywhere in society. Ideas about disability shape our language—“the blind leading the blind”—and our insults. Disability provides motivation for villains in children’s movies, like Captain Hook, and moments of tragic catharsis in classic literature, like in Of Mice and Men. Disability shapes educational policies, practices, and curriculum while also affecting employment policies, like subminimum wage and retirement and disability benefits and stipulations. Everyone, if they live long enough, will experience disability at some point in their lives. Disability is everywhere in the United States but is conspicuously absent from most conversations of identity, justice, and equity.
    In this seminar, students explore the historical roots of current issues faced by the disabled community to examine how definitions of disability have changed over time and how current injustices are engineered and enforced rather than inevitable and natural. Each week will focus on a different facet of life—law, education, the medical system, immigration, media representation, recreation, and employment—with one class covering readings and discussion that provide historical context and the other focusing on readings, discussion, and activities related to current issues. The culminating work in the course will be a “Disability Excavation” project in which the students conduct original archival research—either in the WWU archives or online—to trace the history and evolution of a disability issue they have encountered in their own lives or in their field.
  • Notes & Prerequisites: Requires admission to Honors College; Jr or Senior status
  • Instruction: Kristen Chmielewski
  • This class can count as an Elective for our Minor in Critical Disability Studies with Advisor/ICDS approval! Contact icds@wwu.edu

• DISA 330: Critical Disability Studies – GUR
  • Description: 5 Credits. BCGM GUR. This course provides an exploration of the field of critical disability studies. Students will learn about several central topics, including disability rights and disability justice movements, cultural criticism of literature and popular media, and the principles of universal design in physical and digital spaces. Students will explore disability as an identity category that intersects with other identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. This is an interdisciplinary course designed for students from any major.
  • Instruction: Daman Wandke
  • Section details: online asynchronous, CRN 44074, 44496
  • This is a Core Class in our Minor in Critical Disability Studies

• WGSS 367: Feminist Disability Studies
  • Description: 5 Credits. This class explores the fields of Disability Studies and Feminist Studies to see what each can bring to the other.
    • Unraveling ableist norms and structures is intersectional work, it is decolonizing and anti-racist work, and it is feminist and queer. We live in a settler colonial context where hetero/patriarchy instituted gender hierarchies, regulated sexuality, and classified bodies as holding greater and lesser value along ableist and capitalist lines. All of these foundations and structures limit bodily sovereignty, the capacity to be self-determining agents who live with the right to connection and authority over our bodies.
      In Feminist Disability Studies we will examine historical fudations that unpin ableist constructions of citizenship and belonging as well as differing approaches to movements for disability justice. Throughout the course we will emphasize Intersectional Bodily Sovereignty with topics such as embodiment, sexuality, and food. Students will have the opportunity to bring their own disciplinary and creative work to the course.
  • Instruction: Anika Tilland-Stafford
  • Section details: Remote Synchronous, MW 04:00-06:20 pm, CRN 42943
  • This class counts as an Elective for our Minor in Critical Disability Studies!

• ENG 497D: Literature and Disability: Disability in Nineteenth-Century US Literature and Culture
  • Description: 5 Credits. This course will introduce you to some of the foundational scholarship in Critical Disability Studies specifically as it pertains to literature and the cultural work of disability.  Focusing specifically on nineteenth-century US literature, we will explore representations of people with disabilities in literature, social perceptions of disability, and the perspective of writers with disabilities. One of the central goals of this course is to explore disability as a social construction and then investigate its fascinating intersections with other identity categories, including race, class, gender, and age. The nineteenth century offers us an especially rich cultural moment when identities like disability, childhood, and blackness and whiteness were becoming codified by way of enlightenment rationality, empirical science, and the nineteenth-century’s drive to classify. We will examine these intersecting and mutually constitutive identities as they are represented in short stories, poetry, and memoir. We will look to primary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Dave, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Packard, along with a variety of short stories published in St. Nicholas Magazine, an influential children’s periodical. And, we will read these primary materials alongside such disability scholars as Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Douglas C. Baynton, Nirmala Erevelles, and Mitchell and Snyder.
  • Instruction: Allison Giffen
  • Section details: face-to-face, MWF 1:00-2:20, IS 242, CRN 44113.
  • Prerequisites: Eng 202 or Instructor permission
  • This class can count as an Elective for our Minor in Critical Disability Studies with Advisor/ICDS approval