1. Society for Disability Studies Irving K. Zola Emerging Scholar Award
The Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies is given annually for a scholarly paper in disability studies suitable for publication that is written by an emerging scholar or scholars. Founded originally by the late Professor Zola’s colleagues at Brandeis University, this annual award recognizes excellence in research and writing that shares the values and commitment to disability studies exemplified by Irving K. Zola’s life and scholarship. Application information has been typically posted and circulated late in the year of the award and submissions have been due in the early winter months of the following year.
Previous Awardees of the Irving K. Zola Emerging Scholar Award
2021: Cora Segal (for her paper “Against Productivity & Liberal Pity: A Case Study in Prison Abolition & Disability Justice”). Cora Segal (she/her pronouns) is a first year Master’s student in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work examines how state and capitalist violence such as borders, policing, prisons, and colonial occupation create what is considered a normative body-mind. As a scholar-activist of disability justice and racial capitalism, she is particularly interested in anti-capitalist, anti-state and abolitionist disability politics and resistance.
2020: Lezlie Frye (Honorable Mention: Hangping Xu)
2019: Robin Roscigno
2018: Michael E. Skyer (Honorable Mention: Sona Kazemi and Patrick Smyth)
2017: Lydia X. Z. Brown, (Honorable Mention: Sara Acevedo and Alyson Patsavas)
2016: Krystal Cleary, Renee Mullaney, Jean Fanzino
2015: Priya Lalvani (Honorable Mention: Sonya Loftis)
2014: Amanda Cachia (Honorable Mention: Jessica Waggoner)
2013: Cassandra Hartblay
2012: Jina Kim
2011: Bethany Stevens
2. Society for Disability Studies Senior Scholar Award
The Society for Disability Studies Senior Scholar Award has been given annually to a scholar with more than 10 years of experience in the field and a PhD in a relevant discipline. Awardees have been selected based on their contribution to the field in terms of publications and scholarship, and excellence in mentoring, teaching, and other forms of leadership. Awardees have been selected by the SDS Award Committee based on a nomination packet submitted by a nominating member other than the proposed awardee. Typically, calls for nominations have been posted around the end of the calendar year of the award and due early in the following year. In typical years, awardees have been announced and invited to speak at the SDS conference.
Previous Awardees of the Senior Scholar Award
2021: Dr. Therí A. Pickens (for her groundbreaking contributions to the field of Disability Studies). Dr. Pickens (she/her pronouns) is a professor of English at Bates College. In the words of her nominators:
[The text about T. A. Pickens below might be published as a separate page, hyperlinked above]
“In [Dr. Pickens’] writing, we all learn how to read scholarship much more generously and capaciously, finding insights about illness, pain, and disability in texts marked as being “about” race or using writings about disability to inform our understandings of white supremacist logics. As That Dr. Pickens manages to mentor so many colleagues (and across multiple fields of study and phases of professional development) is, quite simply, dazzling. We are better scholars, community members, and activists because of her commitment to us.”
Dr. Therí A. Pickens is nationally and internationally recognized for her original, timely, and multidisciplinary work at the overlaps of African American, Arab American, critical feminist, queer, ethnic and disability studies. She is a prominent leader in Black and critical ethnic studies and in critical disability studies. Deeply intersectional and thoroughly researched, her book “Black Madness: Mad Blackness” (Duke 2019) offers a mad methodology for writing and thinking, one that reveals the narrowness of existing work on race and disability and is firmly grounded in Black feminist thought. As with her previous monograph, New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States (Routledge, 2014), Dr. Pickens models how to forge vital social and political critique through close encounters with cultural productions, personal anecdotes, and critical theory. In both texts, Dr. Pickens makes clear the necessity of disability theory even when one’s analysis is not squarely focused on disabled people.
She published an edited collection called Arab American Aesthetics: Literature, Material Culture, Film, and Theatre (Routledge, 2018) that enlists a wide range of voices to explore, if not tentatively define, what could constitute Arab American aesthetics. Rather than divorce aesthetics from politics, the book sutures the two more closely together by challenging the causal relationship so often attributed to them. The conversations include formal choices, but also extend to the broad idea of what makes a work distinctly Arab American. That is, what about its beauty, ugliness, sublimity, or humor is explicitly tied to it as part of a tradition of Arab American arts?
Her work has appeared in a host of critical journals including Hypatia, MELUS, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Al-Jadid, Women & Performance, and the Journal of Ethnic American Literature.
Alongside her academic scholarship, Dr. Pickens regularly contributes to public political knowledge-spaces, including Ms. Magazine, The Root, Medium and The Washington Post. Dr. Picken’s full academic bio is here.
Past awardees include:
2020: Brenda Jo Bruggerman
2019: Susan Burch
2018: Joan Ablon
2017: Nirmala Erevelles
2016: Katherine Ott
2015: David Gerber
2014: Devva Kasnitz
2013: Richard K. Scotch
2012: Carol Gill
2011: Tobin Siebers
2010: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
2009: Elizabeth Depoy and Stephen Gilson
2008: Steve Taylor
3. The Chris Bell Memorial Scholarship
The Chris Bell Memorial Scholarship honored the life and scholarship of Chris Bell, disability scholar and activist, former Society for Disability Studies president, and co-founder of the SDS People of Color Caucus. It was funded for 5 years by a generous anonymous donor, this award is no longer available. However, the work it funded and Chris Bell’s work which it celebrated continues to impact us all to see more broadly and more deeply. We list it here to honor that work.
In his article “White Disability Studies” (published in the Disability Studies Reader, editor Lennard Davis) Bell makes a strong case for including issues of race within the field of disability studies. His essay “To Act is to be Committed” discusses the challenges of activism with/in the academy. Chris’s work explored issues of race, disability, AIDS, illness, class and sexuality.
At the time of his death in 2009, he was an ARRT Fellow at the Center for Human Policy, Law and Disability Studies at Syracuse University. The Chris Bell Memorial Scholarship seeks to support people of color and non-white racial minorities doing scholarly work in the field of disability studies with preference for those whose work aligns with Chris’s commitment to intersectionality, identity politics and activism.
The Chris Bell Memorial Scholarship was funded through the generosity of an anonymous donor who shares Bell’s commitment to diversifying both SDS and disability studies.
Previous Chris Bell Memorial Scholarship Recipients:
2015: Jina Kim (Honorable Mentions: Washington Opiyo and Akemi Nishida)
2014: Nookayaju Bendukurthi (Honorable Mention: Geoffrey Wilson)
2013: Haydee Smith (Honorable Mention: Tania Xalitla Ruiz-Chapman)
2012: Vandana Chaudhry and Aimi Hamraie (Honorable Mentions: Jagdish Chander and Eloise Tyler)
4. The Society for Disability Studies Tanis Doe Award
The Society for Disability Studies (SDS) Tanis Doe Prize is an award recognizing the best poster at the annual SDS conference. The award has included a cash award and a certificate of recognition. The Tanis Doe award has been open to everyone at all levels of education and experience. SDS sponsors an “Honorable Mention” at the student level. Authors of the posters earning Honorable mention have likewise received a certificate of recognition. Proposals in all areas of disability studies have been welcome as well as submissions premised on this year’s theme. Posters have been considered by a panel of judges appointed by members of the conference program committee; awardees were selected and announced at the business meeting.
Previous Tanis Doe Prize Awardees:
2015: Yosung Song (Honorable Mention Poster: Bridget Cotner, Jennie Keleher, and Lisa Otomanelli)
2014: Augustina Naami
2013: Adam Pacton
2011: Tammy Morris
5. The Disability Studies Quarterly Prize
The DSQ Prize was awarded annually for the best literary article published in Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ), the journal of the Society for Disability Studies. The winner was chosen by the editors of DSQ, recognized at the annual SDS conference, and presented with a certificate and a check for $500.
Previous DSQ Prize Awardees:
2015: Sarah Juliet Lauro and Lindsay Waggoner Nordan – “Into the White: Larry Eigner’s Meta-physical Poetics”
2014: Maren Linett – “Involuntary Cure: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier”
2013: Tom Jordan – “The Myth of American Ability: Cooper’s Leatherstocking, the Frontier Tradition, and the Making of the American Canon“
2012: Essaka Joshua – “The Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris“
2011: Kristina Chew – “The Disabled Speech of Asian Americans: Silence and Autism in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Father of the Four Passages”
2010: Sarah Birge – “No Life Lessons Here: Comics, Autism, and Empathetic Scholarship“
2009: Rachel Hile – “Disability and the Characterization of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew“
6. The Society for Disability Studies President’s Award (2018)
This award honors an activist and/or artist who has advanced the mission of SDS. The award recipient may or may not be an SDS member; there are no restrictions on who may be considered. This is the only SDS honor awarded directly by the Board of Directors, and it comes with complimentary SDS meeting registrations. In establishing this award, the Board of Directors wants to acknowledge all contributors to the development of disability studies and the advancement of disability justice. We look beyond the usual structure of SDS awards such as paper prizes, editors’ choices, and formal scholastic nomination procedures based on curriculum vitae and letters of reference. This award recognizes the full work of disability studies by noting that academia is only one point of focus of our efforts and creativity.
The President and the Board of Directors of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) are delighted to award the 2018 SDS President’s Award to Judith E. (Judy) Heumann.
SDS confers the President’s Award for artists and activists who embody the goals of the Society, reiterating our commitment to all kinds of work in disability studies. SDS recognizes Judy Heumann for her five-decade career as a disabled activist who has changed the lives of every single disabled person in the United States and across the globe. Her work has shown the vibrancy and strength of the social model of disability and the power and importance of the disability rights movement’s central mantra: “nothing about us without us.”
Born in 1947, Judy Heumann has been a part of almost every pivotal moment in American and international disability history: she founded Disabled in Action in 1970; helped found the first Center for Independent Living in Berkeley; was a leader in the 1977 federal building sit-in as part of the Section 504 movement; co-founded the World Institute for Disability in 1983 and helped ignite a global independent living movement; served in the Clinton administration as the Assistant Secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services, 1993-2001; and worked at the World Bank as their first Advisor on Disability and Development, 2002-2006. In 2010, Judy became the first Special Advisor on Disability Rights for the US State Department under President Obama. Most recently, she is serving as a senior fellow to the Ford Foundation.
Disabled people experience the effects of Judy’s life work every time we roll into a building, access a talking ATM, work at a job that recognizes the unique strengths we have, use a sign language interpreter at a hospital, or see a teacher in a school who has the same disability as us. Without her activism, we may not have had the Independent Living Movement, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. We all truly owe much to her.
Judy Heumann is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Long Island University, and has received numerous honors including the Henry B. Betts Award, the Max Starkloff Lifetime Achievement Award, and the InterAction Disability Inclusion Award. The Society for Disability Studies confirms that our efforts and creativity exist and thrive far beyond academia. SDS 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. Past recipients of the SDS President’s Award are Laura Hershey, MFA (1962 -2010), writer, poet, activist, and consultant, and Riva Lehrer, artist, writer, curator, and educator.