Disability Studies and Questions of Communicability
About the Cluster
This research cluster seeks to cultivate a sustained, interdisciplinary inquiry into how disability reshapes our understanding of communication, expression, and relationality. The purpose of the cluster is to examine how meaning is made, shared, withheld, and/or transformed when communicative norms are unsettled—whether through embodied difference, technological mediation, or the limits of language itself. By bringing together faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and community members, the cluster positions disability not as a problem of communication but as a generative framework for rethinking what communication is and what it can become.
While grounded in the humanities, the cluster draws strength from all five academic divisions—Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, and Physical & Biological Sciences—and is poised to convene one of the most genuinely interdisciplinary working groups on campus. Disability studies is inherently cross-disciplinary: questions of communicability intersect with linguistic theory, narrative studies, rhetoric, cognitive science, assistive technology design, human-computer interaction, biomedical research, and the politics of care. Faculty and graduate students from engineering may contribute expertise on communication technologies, captioning systems, and accessibility design; scholars from the sciences may bring perspectives on sensory perception, neurodiversity, and embodiment; social scientists and humanists may offer frameworks for understanding communicative norms, institutions, and inequities; and artists may explore multimodal expression, performance, and creative translation.
The cluster aligns closely with THI’s annual theme Language through its focus on the limits and possibilities of communication, the materiality of language, and the embodied dimensions of knowledge production. Disability studies has long interrogated how communicative norms are constructed and enforced, and how disabled people innovate new modes of expression, relationality, and meaning-making. By centering disability as a framework rather than a topic, the cluster engages the annual theme’s interest in how humans negotiate difference, imagine alternative modes of connection, and create meaning in contexts where communication is strained, partial, or non-linguistic. The cluster’s year-long emphasis on access aesthetics further underscores this connection, inviting participants to consider how access practices—captioning, transcription, multimodal communication, and other forms of mediated expression—are not merely accommodations but creative and intellectual acts that reshape the conditions of communicability.
Co-Principal Investigators
Megan Moodie (Anthropology)
Amy Vidali (Writing Program)
Disability at UCSC
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Banner Image: Close-up photo of an Indigenous woman’s brown hands using a fidget stim toy. The woman wears finger splints on her index fingers and support wraps around her wrists, and her manicured nails are sparkly and pink. Photo by Gritchelle Fallesgon, courtesy of Disabled And Here.