Serendip Studio Projects

In Spring 2014, Sam Terry and Anne Dalke pursued a shared reading list on this topic. We read the work of theorists Lauren Berlant, Cathy Caruth, Albert Camus, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Didier Fassin, Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub, Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, Linda Kauffman, Dominick LaCapra, Eve Sedgwick, Laurie Vickroy and Anne Whitehead; we also studied novels and memoirs by Pat Barker, Edwidge Danicat, Rena Fraden, Larry Heinemann, Ann Michaels, Caryl Phillips and Binjamin Wilkomirski.

Grounding ourselves in the domains of identity matters and ecological studies, two Emily Balch Seminars @ Bryn Mawr College ask how different dimensions of human identity (such as race, class, gender, sexuality and religion) affect our ability to act in the social and natural worlds; simultaneously, we look at how these spaces shape and re-shape our identities and actions, individually and collectively. Our cross-disciplinary approach re-examines personal experiences through the differing orientations of the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Seeking fresh understandings, we revisit well-known examples of children’s literature, alongside Eli Clare's memoir, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation; Elizabeth Kolbert’s “unnatural history,” The Sixth Extinction; and Ruth Ozeki's novel, All Over Creation, as well as essays by-and-about community activists and educators Teju Cole, Paulo Freire, Van Jones, and Eve Tuck.

At the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Society of Disability Studies (Minneapolis, June 2014), Jody Cohen, Anne Dalke, Kevin Gotkin and Clare Mullaney explore the gradations, shades and registers that mark both differences and similarities and open up disability into a capacious intellectual brainspace.   If disability is not just disability, or if disability is less a noun (an ascribed set of traits) than a verb, something through which we move (again and again) both in and out, like a needles and thread, then, they ask, how might this point us toward an alternative vision of “access”?

This cluster of courses, which have been co-designed by professors with shared interests in disability studies, gender studies, human development, literature, social work, visual studies and writing, considers how multiple systems of identity, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson says, “intertwine, redefine, and mutually constitute one another.” Focusing, in particular, on those identity categories of “humans being” that may seem non-normative, we are reading, viewing and creating a range of self-representations: What stories do we tell about ourselves? What images do we construct? How might we revise them? To what degree can we—and do we want to--intervene in the processes of gender and sexual identity, illness, disability and aging? What changes and “cures” are desirable? What are the possibilities, and what are the limits, of our re-imagining ourselves?  What roles might others play in this re-imagining