The Society for Disability Studies (SDS) is a scholarly organization dedicated to promoting Disability Studies. For more than forty years, members with backgrounds in advocacy, activism, and scholarship have joined the SDS to hone and expand upon the field of Disability Studies. Multinational, multi-disciplinary, and multi-generational, the SDS fosters Disability Studies within and outside of the academy. In the past, the SDS brought together hundreds of participants for the Ohio State University Multiple Perspectives Conference. As we look towards building community under new global constraints, we are experimenting with virtual gatherings and digital networking technologies. We look forward to working with you to shape the future of the field together!
If you would like to become a member today, please register on our Patreon.
Mission
The Society for Disability Studies (SDS) is a non-profit organization that promotes the study of disability in social, cultural, and political contexts. Disability Studies recognizes that disability is a key aspect of human experience, and that the study of disability has important political, social, and economic implications for society as a whole, including both disabled and nondisabled people. Through research, artistic production, teaching and activism, the Society for Disability Studies seeks to augment understanding of disability in all cultures and historical periods, to promote greater awareness of the experiences of disabled people, and to advocate for social change.
History
Founded in 1982 as the Section for the Study of Chronic Illness, Impairment, and Disability (SSCIID), the organization was renamed the Society for Disability Studies in 1986. The Society maintains affiliation status with the Western Social Science Association (WSSA) through its Chronic Disease and Disability Section.
SDS’s proudest accomplishment is one of the most successful and the leading journals on disability studies. International in scope, Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ) provides scholars, activists, artists with disabilities, and others to consider the experience of disability in the written form.
In 2022, the SDS celebrated its 40th year anniversary. At this time, the society also adopted a new logo that was conceptualized and designed by Griffin Zimmerman (he/they). The new logo, a dandelion head with a few seeds floating past the edges of an embracing circle, is drawn from the critical interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarly and advocacy work that drives our SDS Principles[link to page]. Black feminist scholar adrienne maree brown explains in her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, the natural elements she ties to emergent strategy, or the strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions. Of dandelions, she writes, “Dandelions are often mistakenly identified as weeds, aggressively removed, but are hard to uproot; the top is pulled but the long taproot remains. Resilience. Resistance. Regeneration. Decentralization” (46). We see the dandelion as emblematic of embodied experience of disabled lives and the interwoven network of scholarship, advocacy, activism, and collective identity-making that allows us to, in the words of Mia Mingus (2010) Create Collective Access (CCA).
Founders
Through its annual conference and its journal, the Society for Disability Studies has been instrumental in establishing disability studies as a discipline. None of this progress would have been possible had it not been for the dedicated founders of this organization, whose collaborative efforts helped form the field we continue to build upon today. We are grateful to the activists, scholars, and academics who shaped the earliest iterations of the SDS. Many thanks especially to founders Daryl Evans, Nora Groce, Steve Hey, Gary Kiger, John Seidel, Jessica Scheer, and Irving Kenneth Zola.