Brittany Postle - Disability Rights as Belonging
Brittany is currently a research assistant to Professor Laverne Jacobs, Special Rapporteur and member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She is a member of the Disability Rights Working Group at the BerkeleyCenter on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination at Berkeley Law. She works as a Reader for Professor Gold McBride in American Studies. She is continuing on her path of disability as belonging and pursuing a path in higher education in the next graduate cycle.
Area of Concentration Courses
Native American Studies 178 - Water, the West, and Indigenous Peoples
History 130U - The Radicalism of American Revolutions
American Studies H110 - Remains: The Making and Unmaking of the American Body
Environmental Science, Policy and Management 290 - Disabled Ecologies
UGIS 110 - Introduction to Disability Studies
Thesis
Barriers Between Belonging: William O. Douglas and Architectural Exclusion in the Wilderness
Brittany’s honors thesis focuses on ideas of architectural exclusion and the built environment. With a case study of Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas and the setting of Wilderness as the “built” environment, the disabled body is examined as a locus for belonging or unbelonging. This thesis examines the ability of persons in positions of extreme power to be able to influence the built environment to foster inclusion or create exclusion. This thesis introduces the confluence of legal, environmental histories, along with disability studies to try and understand the hypocrisy of our policies that exist in the name of pristine natural areas. It tells the lived experience of a person with extreme chronic health conditions who did not identify as disabled and instead chose “nature as healer” due to the American identity of masculinity in the 20th century. It’s an interesting story of disability history, legal history, environmental history, and disability rights, all coming together in a formulative time in their individual histories.
