In Disability Studies, Universal Design (UD) is a concept that is often borrowed from an architectural or design context to mean an ideology of inclusion and flexibility with a range of applications in education, technology, and other milieus. This paper returns to UD as a design phenomenon, considering knowledge production practices as conditions…[Read more]

Universal Design (UD) is a movement to produce built environments that are accessible to a broad range of human variation. Though UD is often taken for granted as synonymous with the best, most inclusive, forms of disability access, the values, methodologies, and epistemologies that underlie UD require closer scrutiny. This paper uses feminist and…[Read more]

On geopolitics, disability rhetoric, and the CRPD

In feminist technoscience studies (FTS), the term technoscience conveys that scientific knowledge and technological worlds are active constructions of entangled material, social, and historical agents. Feminist analyses of assisted reproduction, environmental harm, digital media, and cyborg bodies constitute some of the work of FTS, a close…[Read more]

Disability has become a hot topic for feminist philosophy in recent years. Special issues of Hypatia and Disability Studies Quarterly, multiple conference keynote addresses, and a growing cadre of scholars are exploring the intersections of feminist and critical disability thought. As a disabled feminist scholar, I perceive these trends as a…[Read more]

In this paper, I argue for historical epistemology as a methodology for critical disability studies (DS) by looking to Foucault’s archaeology of cure in History of Madness. While the moral, medical, and social models of disability frame disability history as a progressive movement and replacement of moral and medical authority with s…[Read more]

Although Universal Design gains popularity as a common sense strategy for crafting built environments for all users, accessibility for disabled people remains a marginal area of inquiry within design practice and theory. This article argues that the tension between accessibility and Universal Design stems from inadequate critical and historical…[Read more]

Tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) is best-known as a potent pro-inflammatory cytokine involved in many cardiovascular diseases. During vascular calcification, TNF-α has been reported topromote osteogenic differentiation of human vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) and mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). In contrast, there is alack of data reporting t…[Read more]

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]

My subject is an archive of gay and lesbian activism that helps us understand a postcolonial counterpublic. The project I undertake is of historical recovery and theoretical elaboration of the specificities of postcolonial sexuality-based movements as necessary and long overdue supplements to global sexual activism.

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

Kismet may not be the first Muslim superhero, but he may be the first worthy of that title. Some buffoonish characters preceded him, and other orientalist caricatures appeared on earlier comics pages, but without either superpowers or other key elements of the genre. This month (March 2014), on the seventieth anniversary of his first appearance,…[Read more]

The manuscript now called the Salisbury Breviary (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS lat. 17294) contains the only extant illustrated cycle of of the Life of St Edith of Wilton; the fifteen miniatures accompany the readings for the feast of St Edith. These images emphasize the connections among Edith’s holiness, royal genealogy, and…[Read more]

The performances of Christ in the text of The Dream of the Rood construct a masculinity for Christ that is majestic, martial, and specifically heterosexual and that relies on a fragile opposition with a femininity defined as dominated Other in the figure of the Cross. His particularly constructed masculinity, explored rather than merely assumed or…[Read more]

An entry in the Women Medievalists and the Academy collection, this brief biography presents Cambridge historian Mary Bateson, scholar and suffragist, who lived on the cusp of the opportunity for academic professionalization for women. Her life illustrates an inspiring blend of serious scholarship, accessible publication, and devoted political…[Read more]

Feminist and gender scholars working in Anglo-Saxon studies in the past ten years have been asking new and important questions of a variety of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Most crucially, this interdisciplinary new work redefines the historiographical paradigms of Anglo-Saxon cultural production and reception so that women must now be…[Read more]

Abstract: This short edition makes available for the first time three Middle English verse prayers to Christ from the Mohun Hours, a fourteenth-century Book of Hours held by the Boston Public Library (MS 124). Late medieval Books of Hours have received substantial recent critical attention as expressions of devotional literacy practiced mainly by…[Read more]