Skip to Main Content
University of Texas University of Texas Libraries

UGS 302: American Sign Language: History, Culture & Media / Singleton

Keywords

Preparing to Search

Search Strategies for Disability Studies

Finding keywords for disability studies can be challenging:

  • Critical theory may use its own critical vocabulary and jargon
  • Some terms related to disability may be used as metaphors in other contexts
  • Older work may use dated terminology
  • Older work may not have been cataloged as disability studies at all

Some keywords to try

  • abledness, ableism,ableist, able-bodied, able-bodiedness
  • access, accessible, accessibility
  • ageism, ageist, aging
  • Deaf, deafness, deaf studies (some Deaf people consider themselves to be a linguistic/cultural minority, not disabled)
  • dis/ability, disability, disabilities, "disability studies", "disability rights", disabled
  • disease, dis-ease
  • enable, enabling
  • inclusion, inclusiveness, inclusivity
  • normalcy, normals, normative
  • sick, sickness
  • universal design

Rhetorical constructions in disability studies
If you're looking for specific readings or theorizations of a topic, try combining your keyword with frequently paired terms like:

  • advocate, advocacy
  • biology, biological, bioethics
  • body, bodies
  • critical
  • difference
  • "disability studies"
  • discrimination
  • "identity politics"
  • medical, medicalization
  • microaggression
  • narrative, narratives
  • politics, political
  • representation, representations
  • rhetoric, rhetorical, "visual rhetoric"
  • signify, signifying
  • visible, visibility, invisible, invisibility, visual

Text for this section courtesy of Stacy Reardon and Jennifer Dorner from the UC Berkeley Libraries. 

1. Save time, prepare to research!

  • Break your research question into key concepts (you'll connect these in your paper to make an original argument)
  • For each of these concepts, brainstorm multiple keywords

Sample Topic:

   Services for college students with disabilities 

Key Concepts

services

college students

 disabilities

Related Keywords

accommodations
assistive tech*

university
higher education
campus

disab*
ability
ableism
  • Try this keyword tool to brainstorm online and send the results to yourself.


2. Combine keywords using AND and OR:

  • Too many results? Try using quotation marks around an exact phrase. Ex: "students with disabilities"
  • Still too many results? Narrow using AND. Ex:  "students with disabilities" AND "assistive technology"
  • Too few results? Broaden using OR. Ex: "students with disabilities" AND (campus OR college OR university OR higher education)
  • Put parentheses around synonyms.
  • The asterisk finds multiple endings from a root word. Ex: wom* will bring back women, woman's, wombat, etc.


3. Brush up on the search tools available:

A research question is what forms and guides your literature review. It is the question that you want the literature to answer for you. A research question should be specific, focused, and concise.

To develop a research question, start with a general topic of interest to you. You'll want to do some preliminary and background research on this topic to think through what specific questions you might have.

Examples:

Sample Topic: impact of social media on adolescent physical activity

Sample Research Question: Can social media serve as an effective tool for increasing physical activity among adolescents?

 

Need more guidance on developing your topic into a research question? Check out this video from the library at Northern Kentucky University.

Where to search for background information

These are 'tertiary' sources.

Why would I search these if they are not scholarly? This is one of the top challenges I see in research: folks diving into scholarly literature, but they do not know enough about their topics so they become overwhelmed and 'can't find anything on my topic!'

I know how to fix this issue - read encyclopedia articles, learn how scholars talk about topics and steal all the citations you can find in the references lists at the bottom of entries.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.