Papers by Thomas D . Craig
Produced by The Center on Disability Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawai... more Produced by The Center on Disability Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawai'i and The School of Social Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas for The Society for Disability Studies.
Medicalization of the Body, Feminization of Disease, Developing Regimes of Silence
Semiotics, 1996
Human Studies, 2002
In 1997 we were invited to present a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology... more In 1997 we were invited to present a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) in a panel honoring the work of Erwin Strauss. Having presented disability-based work in the sister organization, the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS), and in other disciplinary contexts, we were delighted to participate in a panel grounded in the commemoration of Strauss' commitment to the heterogeneity of the lived body. Controversial in many ways, Strauss nonetheless persisted in his non-pejorative use of the notion of the "animalistic" and its role in both instinctive and learned human behaviors. His remarkably dignified investigations into atypical neurological development and the consequences of injury and trauma foreground much of what is still considered mysterious in neuroscientific and neuropsychological work, and continue to inform our own examinations of wild being. The paper we presented there -"Doing phenomenology in the wild: Bodily contingency and the politics of sensory integration" -is the touchstone for the present essay, which commemorates twenty-five years of Human Studies. It is unlikely that presentations and essays with disability and bodily contingency as their dominant scholarly and political focus would have their present visibility and legitimacy were it not for journals like this one. This essay will unfold as a "braided narrative": we will revisit our earlier paper and provide the Human Studies intersections as we go. In this way, we hope to keep visible and legitimate the lived experience of disability and bodily contingency -a personally and politically significant aspect of all of our writing -while acknowledging the contributions to our work from colleagues and authors associated with Human Studies. Our project addresses a curiously taken-for-granted dimension of lifeworlds, that is, the so-called undeniable "givenness" of internal processes of ongoing concordance which take bodies as primarily stable, healthy, productive entities in the world. It is our contention that the undisclosed assumption of automatically integrated processing informs much of the curious "normalizing"
Society for Disability Studies, 2001
Our present work is influenced by a number of theoretical frames across several disciplines -chor... more Our present work is influenced by a number of theoretical frames across several disciplines -choreology, phenomenology, third-wave feminism, semiotics. In order to preserve our narratives of rupture, healing, and wild being -that is, our embodied "tales from the abyss" -as a whole, we mention briefly here the most notable among them before moving directly to our stories: Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and his notions of competing authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. Samuel ljsseling's (1976) philosophical history of rhetoric and his postmodern question, "Who is speaking whenever anything is said?" . Julia post-Lacanian psychoanalytic frame of the subject living in an impossible dialectic between law and transgression, on trial, in crisis, and -sometimes through revolutionary practicein process. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1962) de-structuring of the so-called "normal" subject who refuses any sense of"deficiency" or disability and his later recognition of"wild" or "savage being" as an existential contrast to so-called "reflective" philosophies which play themselves out everywhere in unreflective presumptions of concordance and stability. Richard Lanigan's ( 1992, 1988) semiotic phenomenology of communication, especially his existential propositions about the emancipatory "choice of context" which makes being human possible, and the constraining, imposing, dehumanizing "contexts of choice" which we continue to construct and which drive persons and worlds mad. Nancy Mairs (1989) and other hyper-graphic, rhetorical artists (Kat Duff, Arthur Frank, Kay Toombs, Susan Wendell, among others) 1 who write about the abyss of uncertainty and unlearning not to speak of the "bone house" erotics of space and place we all live. We also draw upon our own ongoing collaborative work in the politics of pain, disability, and the utterly subversive practice of reconciling ourselves to the body we actually live.
Theory and Method in the Human Sciences
Schutzian Research. A Yearbook of Worldly Phenomenology and Qualitative Social Science, 2011
Human Studies - HUM STUD, 2002
In 1997 we were invited to present a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology... more In 1997 we were invited to present a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) in a panel honoring the work of Erwin Strauss. Having presented disability-based work in the sister organization, the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS), and in other disciplinary contexts, we were delighted to participate in a panel grounded in the commemoration of Strauss' commitment to the heterogeneity of the lived body. Controversial in many ways, Strauss nonetheless persisted in his non-pejorative use of the notion of the "animalistic" and its role in both instinctive and learned human behaviors. His remarkably dignified investigations into atypical neurological development and the consequences of injury and trauma foreground much of what is still considered mysterious in neuroscientific and neuropsychological work, and continue to inform our own examinations of wild being. The paper we presented there -"Doing phenomenology in the wild: Bodily contingency and the politics of sensory integration" -is the touchstone for the present essay, which commemorates twenty-five years of Human Studies. It is unlikely that presentations and essays with disability and bodily contingency as their dominant scholarly and political focus would have their present visibility and legitimacy were it not for journals like this one. This essay will unfold as a "braided narrative": we will revisit our earlier paper and provide the Human Studies intersections as we go. In this way, we hope to keep visible and legitimate the lived experience of disability and bodily contingency -a personally and politically significant aspect of all of our writing -while acknowledging the contributions to our work from colleagues and authors associated with Human Studies.
Uploads
Papers by Thomas D . Craig