Embracing Disorientation in the Disability Studies Classroom

Abstract:The article explores disorienting encounters within the disability studies classroom as a necessary and generative affective interaction, rather than a distraction from teaching and learning. While these sorts of encounters appear within disability studies scholarship, their impact and import within pedagogy remains under-examined. The argument in the article is that such moments provide an occasion not only to learn about ableism or disability culture but actually to feel something about these things. This analysis of disorientation involves an account of complex encounters that expose ways of knowing and feeling disability typically covered over in everyday life.