That disability is at once a question of the body and a question of the built environment makes it a central subject for the humanities—and for the social and natural sciences, and thus for new forms of cross-disciplinary study.

           Michael Berube
                    Disability Studies in the Humanities (2002: 342)

                                                                                                

Dr. Linda Ware joined the faculty in the Ella Cline School of Education at SUNY Geneseo (2006) where she teaches courses in Curriculum, Special Education and an Interdepartmental Writing Seminar titled, Disability in America.  Prior to moving to Geneseo she was on the faculty at City College/City University of New York (CUNY) where she served as the program head for Special Education and held an appointment on the CUNY Graduate Faculty in Urban Education.  

Dr. Ware is recognized nationally and internationally for her research and scholarship in the nascent field of Disability Studies—a relatively new area of interdisciplinary academic inquiry that is defined and refined by scholarship that interrogates ableism—the assumed privilege afforded to non-disabled people.  She has published in humanities, education, and social science journals, and authored numerous book chapters on disability and education. Her book, Ideology and the Politics of InExclusion (2004) appeared in the series, Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg (Peter Lang Publishers). This edited work offers an incisive exploration of inclusion in international contexts framed through a critical lens that reveals the myriad ways that educational inclusion is enacted in policy and practice as Exclusion.   

Dr. Ware brings to her teaching a broad set of experiences informed by disability studies. This academic area of inquiry invites understanding about disability as more than a biological condition and as such merits understanding beyond the professions that have thus far authored exclusively medicalized interpretations located within psychiatry, psychology and medicine. Awareness of disability as more than a medical/biological event rooted to pathology located within the individual enables Disability Studies to theorize and to confirm how society shapes the meaning of disability. This inquiry reveals how institutions—and schools in particular—discredit and dismiss disability experience as inherently less worthy.