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School of Education

Spring lecture to discuss book by UD faculty

The University of Delaware’s Center for the Study of Diversity (CSD) will host its spring lecture, celebrating the launch of a book by three faculty members about disability disclosure in higher education, on Thursday, March 8.

The lecture, “Negotiating Disability,” will be held from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the Ewing Room of Perkins Student Center on UD’s Newark campus. It is free and open to the public.

Speakers Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, associate professor of English, and Laura T. Eisenman, associate professor of education, will speak at the event about the new book they co-edited with James M. Jones, Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Africana Studies and director of the CSD.

Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education was published in November 2017 by the University of Michigan Press. The collection of 20 essays grew out of the highly successful “Disability Disclosure in/and Higher Education” conference held in 2013 at UD, which brought to campus more than 100 scholars from a broad range of interdisciplinary disability studies fields.

Disability is not always central to claims about diversity and inclusion in higher education, but collectively, the contributors to Negotiating Disability argue that it should be. The essays in the collection emphasize how pervasive disability issues are across higher education populations and settings, from classrooms to physical environments to policy impacts on students, faculty, administrators and staff.

“While diversity often specifically refers to race and ethnic diversity, we take the view that diversity—including disability—is broad, complex, multileveled, intersectional and dynamic,” Jones writes in the editors’ introduction to the book.

The book has four thematic sections: “Identity,” “Intersectionality,” “Representation” and “Institutional Change and Policy.”

In the March 8 lecture, Eisenman and Kerschbaum will trace some of the threads moving through the collection, beginning with the idea that higher education is largely inhospitable to disability. They will identify ways that the contributors to the book help imagine other ways of moving within higher education spaces, paying specific attention to—and offering suggestions for—the UD campus and community.

Books will be available for sale and signing.

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Read this article on UDaily.