Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes disability as “the most human of experiences, touching every family and—if we live long enough—touching us all” (5) For Allison, disability has always been a lens through which I’ve viewed and understood people and environments, my family, and myself: growing up with an autistic older brother who my mom constantly advocated for, helping my mom when she was sick with cancer and couldn’t get out of bed or drive to the store, negotiating my own depression and anxiety. Disability shaped my family and was thus very personal. It wasn’t until I was in my Master’s program and had Jay Dolmage as a teaching mentor that I realized disability could be something more. As a Ph.D. student at Syracuse, I took classes in the Disability Studies Program that made me start thinking about what rhetoric and composition can learn from disability studies, what we as instructors can learn from non-normative literacies and disabled composing processes, what we as scholars can learn about rhetoric and writing from cultural, historical, and disciplinary representations of disability.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric