Professor Tani will discuss themes from her book project, Costed Out: Governing Through Disability in the Late Twentieth-Century U.S. The project analyzes change-over-time in whom state actors recognized as “disabled” (a contestable, but ever-expanding category) and for what purposes they chose to do so. It also shows how disability-related laws and legal controversies ended up affecting the experiences of all Americans, in ways that ranged from how they were able to enforce their rights to what they perceived as the best avenue to obtain social support. Governing through disability, the state provided what Americans had come to expect, while also shrinking their horizon as to what government could and should do to protect them from the hardships of a less regulated form of capitalism.
