Karen
Hirsch,
Affiliate Assistant Professor
Division of Teaching and Learning
University of Missouri, St. Louis
Karen Hirsch received her Ph.D. in Special Education from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1984. Since that time she has worked both in
academic and community based settings. She started one Independent Living Center
in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1987, and another in Kirksville, Missouri, in
1993, because she believes that the Independent Living Movement provides people
with disabilities with an opportunity to fight oppression and become active
participants in community life. Dr. Hirsch has worked to promote the idea that
disability studies needs to become an interdisciplinary field involving
historians and other scholars from the humanities. Her article, “Culture and
Disability: The Role of Oral History,” (Oral History Review, Summer 1995)
shows how humanities scholars need to include disability as one of their
categories of analysis.
Based on her own background, Dr. Hirsch is interested in the life experiences
of individuals who have both physical and mental health disabilities. She has
been involved with the COSP research program since the fall of 1999 and has
participated in several site visits. Dr. Hirsch is currently conducting a
preliminary baseline analysis of multi-site qualitative data using the software
package, Nvivo. She is conducting oral history interviews with some of the
original founders of the independent living movement for a NIDRR funded project
at the Bancroft Library, University of California. She is also interviewing
individuals who are moving out of nursing homes and into community based
independent living settings in western Illinois. Additionally, she is
coordinating a consumer advisory council for a research project on employment
discrimination charges filed with the EEOC under the ADA, and she serves as the
secretary for the Board of the Society for Disability Studies.
In the fall of 2001, Dr. Hirsch started teaching full time in the Division of
Teaching and Learning at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. She was invited
to join the faculty at UMSL to become part of a team that will be developing a
new approach to the training of educators who will become teachers of children
with disabilities. This new approach will in large part be based on research by
and input from disabled scholars and activists.
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