Rodney Sharkey

Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar

rxs2001@qatar-med.cornell.edu

 

 

The quotation marks that appear around "Disability Studies" in the title of this paper are intended to signify the difficulty in studying disability in general.  When the medical industrial complex submits the idea of disability to medical scrutiny, the line between understanding a complex form of social engagement and pathology is often blurred and crossed. With this in mind, this paper will propose that the best way to approach and understand disability is through the humanities such that, finally, we might come to understand disability not as a pathology but as an essential feature of humanity itself. 

 

 

 

Dr. Rodney Sharkey is a native of Dublin in Ireland and teaches writing through literature in the Pre-medical Program at Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar where he is professor of English.  His specialized fields of interest are in Anglo-Irish literature, critical theory, performance dynamics and popular culture. He publishes regularly in journals such as Modern Culture Reviews, Journal of Beckett Studies, Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness and Reconstruction, and he recently published Bowie, Beckett and Being: The Art of Alienation (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2024)