DISABLTY 113G Making Disabilities: The Construction of Ideas
This course looks at how social and cultural ideas of disability are expressed in popular culture.
You’ll study how concepts of disability and disabling identities are created and maintained in film, television and print media.
We’ll discuss the consequences of these processes and their implications for perpetuating social devaluation, discrimination, and disadvantage.
Most citizens are unaware of the experience of disablement and do not have the opportunity to think critically about social responses to disability and their reflection in the media. Students will develop an awareness of the construction of disability through a combination of theory and illustration in culture and media of New Zealand and internationally and an understanding of how social and economic position, status, privilege, and power contribute to the different experiences of both able-bodied and disabled people.
- Develops student awareness of the processes of the construction of disability in culture and media of New Zealand and internationally.
- Develops students’ critical and reflective thinking alongside an awareness of students’ own identity.
- Examines the role of media such as film, television and photography in the construction of the disabled identity.
- Demonstrates the contribution of ideas and methods from cross-disciplinary research to an understanding of the construction of social responses to disability.
- Conceptualising disability. An examination of traditional societal responses to disability.
- How is disability portrayed? Representation and the use of imagery, populist to art house.
- How is disability portrayed in popular media in New Zealand? Influence of social/economic/contextual factors.
- Disability and advertising. The charity discourse and the use of the media to raise funds.
- The television documentary and disability and as entertainment.
- Disability and film. The genre of human oddity.
- The construction of disability in New Zealand cinema.
- The construction of normalcy in movies.
- The viewpoint of the disabled person portrayed in film and documentary. Representing the reality of impairment.
- Disability and portraiture. Photography and painting.
- Ableism and embodiment. Desire and fantasy revisited.
- Review: culture and identity. The construction of disability.
- Reflective journal based on viewing 3 disability related movies (15%).
- An essay (35%).
- An examination (50%).
Book of readings available through UBS.
Selection of films available through audiovisual library.
Additional resources include:
- Cairns, B. & Martin H. (1994). Shadows on the wall: A study of seven New Zealand feature films. Auckland: Longman Paul.
- Ens, A. & Smit, C. (Eds.). Screening disability: Essays on cinema and disability. Lanham, ML:University Press of America.
- Riley, C. (2005). Disability and the media: Prescriptions for change. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
- Sandahl, C. & Auslander, P. (Eds.). Bodies in commotion: Disability and performance. Chicago: The University of Michigan Pres
Rod Wills
Email: r.wills@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 48652
Margaret McLean
Email: ma.mclean@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 48691
- "The course has let me rethink my medical understanding of disability" (Medical science pathway)
- Lecturers with "a knowledge of the subject and a passion for it".
- Visual and audio examples were helpful for putting theory into a context, which made it much easier to understand.
- The book of readings was truly invaluable.
- Lecturers had personal knowledge of the situations they were lecturing about.
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