It’s also Disability EmploymentAwareness Month, and a number of activities are taking place across the City, state and country.  PBS will be showing “Lives Worth Living,” a disability rights documentary on Independent Lens on October 27th at 10 PM.   Let us know if there are other activities in your community or here at CUNY we can publicize!

Next month I’ll be going to Washington, D.C. for the Alliance for Full Participation Summit, which will bring together a cross section of people who believe in the importance of integrated employment and are committed to making this a reality.  The goal is to double integrated employment for people with disabilities by 2015.  State teams will be setting goals and making plans to reach them so that this target can be realized.

The reality is that so many people with disabilities are unemployed or underemployed, increasing poverty and decreasing the quality of life.  Disabled people have much to contribute, and they deserve an opportunity to do so. 

Mariette Bates

Welcome to CUNY Academic Commons, and to the Disability Studies Interest Group!  I hope that this will be a place for those of us in the CUNY community who are interested in Disability Studies to exchange ideas, scholarship,  and resources.

This seems to be an especially rich time in the world of Disability Studies – new academic programs are being created, new ideas are being discussed and new scholarship is being published almost every month.  As this scholarship and these ideas are evolving, the definition of Disability Studies is also evolving, changing, and taking new shape. 

At CUNY, the Disability Studies program strives to be a place where everyone can find a home – students enrolled in programs at undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty with wide-ranging interests, and staff members who, like students and faculty, struggle with issues of inclusion and access every day.  I would like this blog to represent a diversity of interests and points of view as well.

Have you written a paper you’d like feedback on?  Please post it!  Conferences that we should know about?  We welcome the information!  New blogs or web sites or groups you’d like to share?  Post information here!

So, welcome – I look forward to hearing from all members of our community in the months and years to come. 

Mariette Bates