King's University College

Bachelor of Arts in Disability Studies

The Disability Studies department at King's creates the space for rethinking traditional medical approaches to imagining disability, mental health, and related social institutions through a liberal arts lens. In this program, students share cases of successful inclusion and support that broaden the role of disabled people and the upside potential of welcoming this diversity. Faculty use stimulating social science and humanities lenses to critique the common perception that it is the disability that needs to be fixed or cured, or even that there is any “hard line” of “who is disabled.” We show instead how systemic ableism winds up making curriculum, policy, and laws exclusionary – and why that is a collective loss for us all. By situating disability amidst contemporary, interdisciplinary debates and developments in research, policy, and theory, we illustrate how it touches all our lives in different spheres: family, sports education, youth, workplace, art, war, aging, cultures, and mobility. Students can then apply those theories to the analysis of everyday cases from social media, news, business, and schools and are prepared to confront and transform those kinds of real-world challenges after graduating.