Dr. Amy Shuman began teaching disability studies a little over 10 years ago. (Photo courtesy of The Ohio State University)
“The idea that you could speak for other people instead of having them speak for themselves removes people from decision-making capacities,” she notes.
Over the course of her career, Shuman’s work has centered on how people communicate about disability. Shuman even recently wrote an essay that she hopes to publish explaining her views on communicative competence.
“People with disabilities are competent because they are successfully communicating (in their own way),” she says.
Shuman’s introduction to disability studies came from reading Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity and learning the different ways people are deemed as less acceptable.
“It changed the way I think about everything,” she says. “Whether it’s race, skin color, religion, age or ability, Goffman’s point is it’s the social structure, the social conditions that give people high status or low status. It’s all temporary, contextual, situational.”
Shuman has since published three books: Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents; Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy; and Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century, with Carol Bohmer.
