“Disability is everywhere, once you know how to look for it,” Garland-Thomson said.
“And we’re still learning how to look for it,” added the other keynote speaker, Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University who focuses on disability studies, along with other topics.
“How many people think of Harry Potter as a disability narrative?” Bérubé asked. He used the Harry Potter books – more on that later – and other popular stories to show how authors convey ideas about disability through characters and plots, even when readers might not be consciously aware of it.
Although anyone could be or become disabled, this broad and varied category has all too often been left out of discussions of civil rights, said Krentz, who is deaf and teaches American Sign Language and American literature.