Ryerson University

Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies, established in 1999, may be the first in Canada to provide a degree education that's strongly rooted inside a disability studies perspective. We provide a definite undergraduate program that fires up the extent that the lives of disabled individuals are formed by designs of injustice, exclusion, discrimination and also the rule of social, cultural and aesthetic ‘norms’. Put one other way, Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies doesn't train about disability, but instead shows about social and material mobile phone industry's, starting with disability.

What's Disability Studies?

In 1993, the official meaning of disability studies was utilized through the Society for Disability Studies, an expert organization of students from around the globe.

The meaning claims that Disability Studies, amongst other things:

“... examines the guidelines and practices of communities to know the social, as opposed to the physical or mental determinants of the expertise of disability. Disability Studies continues to be designed to disentangle problems in the misconceptions, ideology and stigma that influence social interaction and social policy. The scholarship challenges the concept that the social and economic statuses and also the designated roles of individuals with disabilities would be the inevitable final results of the condition”.

The disability privileges movement, emerging within the seventies and eighties, laid a lot of the footwork for that current growth and development of disability studies. It had been individuals with disabilities themselves who moved the angle from an emphasis on individual deficiency and pathology, perfectly into a concentrate on socially built obstacles (inaccessible architecture, exclusion, prejudice).

As students in Disability Studies, we contemplate it vital that you remain attached to the disability privileges movement. Maintaining the “fusion” between disability studies and individuals with disabilities as well as their organizations is a vital underpinning of Ryerson’s Disability Studies program.

(Modified from Disability Studies: A Area of Study Whose The years have Come, by Melanie Panitch, Director, Ryerson School of Disability Studies.)

About Disability Studies at Ryerson

The Disability Studies program is made upon fundamentals of inclusion and social justice, while offering a strategy that's in line with Ryerson’s status for appropriately relevant education. Integrating theory and exercise, our students and school pursue scholarship that serves, shapes and animates disability actions in Canada and globally. Drawing in the work of students, artists and activists and building from students’ professional and personal encounters, our program engages students inside a major procedure for reflection, debate and discovery.