What does it mean to understand literacy and disability together—as intertwined, entangled, or even mutually transforming?
Please join the Writing, Rhetoric, & Literacy program in welcoming Dr. Elisabeth L. Miller as she explores this question during the 2025 Corbett Lecture. Her talk, "Disability and the Embodied Entanglements of Literacy,” takes up recent calls in Writing Studies (Rosenberg & Kerschbaum) and beyond (Mills & Sanchez) to understand literacy and disability together. Miller explores the material-embodied-social entanglements that disabled writers frequently narrate in their experiences with literacy. Drawing from a body of qualitative research focused on aphasia and literacy, as well as a developing project collecting literacy-history interviews with disabled writers, Miller identifies and explores a couple of major threads in these literacy-disability entanglements:
- Bodyminds and literacy materials intertwine, influence one another, and even blur in complex, sometimes facilitative and sometimes constraining (emotionally, physically, and more), ways.
- Materials, bodyminds, and identities entangle not only in scenes of literate activity or practice, but across the lifespan—accumulating, facilitating, and conflicting in the process of doing literacy—and relating to literate identities.
Building from this analysis, Miller argues for the importance of attending to literacy-disability entanglements as a way of 1) more fully interrogating writing, or literacy, studies theories of process, practice, and activity—and who they center or exclude; and 2) exposing and helping to counter the all-too-common tendency to conceive of literacy and disability as static.
Dr. Miller’s careful approach to understanding intersections between disability and literacy studies has expanded how scholars understand ableism in relation to literate norms. Her work draws upon the insights and experiences of disabled writers to deepen conceptions of writing and literacy ecologies. Dr. Miller is the author of What It Means to Be Literate: A Disability Materiality Approach to Literacy After Aphasia (2022) and “Literate Misfitting: Disability Theory and a Sociomaterial Approach to Literacy” (2016), both of which investigate literacy practices of individuals with aphasia.
Dr. Elisabeth L. Miller is an Associate Professor of English and director of the Writing & Speaking Initiative at the University of Nevada – Reno. Her research and teaching centers around literacy, disability, and writing across the curriculum.
The 2025 Corbett Lecture will be held in Denney 311 and on Zoom.