Harlan Hahn was a well known disability rights activist and scholar, after he passed away the University of Washington received an endowment fund to support the integration of disability studies into research and education.
Heather Feldner was awarded $4000 to pursue the following project, as summarized below:
The Harlan Hahn Endowment Fund will support the creation and delivery of a multidisciplinary technology design course curriculum that infuses disability studies content and encourages student activism within the science and engineering communities of UW and the disability communities of Seattle. Students will gain exposure to seminal disability studies scholarship about the social and complex embodiment models of disability, the history of disability discrimination and the Disability Rights Movement, and explore how disability studies can inform issues of accessibility and inclusive design that have been historically conceptualized within a medical model of disability. Each student will participate in a technology co-design project with a disabled community member serving as a consultant and project lead. Funding will also support the assessment of student attitudes and knowledge of disability studies principles prior to and after completing the course, as well as support dissemination of the course model and outcomes at a national engineering conference in 2018.
