Department of Political Science

KATHARINA HEYER

Picture of Professor Katharima Heyer

Background: I was born and raised in what was then called the "American sector" of divided West Berlin, Germany. My high school was a bilingual school, attended equally by native German and native English speaking students. Growing up with two languages prompted me to go to university in the United States (Smith College, B.A. in Government, 1988) and then to move to Kyoto to study Japanese language and culture. I came to Hawai'i for graduate school and decided to stop moving for a while. I have a Ph.D. in political science from this department (2002) and joined the faculty in 2004. During my fieldwork I spent a year in Tokyo with the German Institute for Japanese Studies, four months in Berlin, and two years on a dissertation fellowship at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. My dissertation "Rights on the Road: Disability Politics in Germany and Japan" received the best dissertation prize from the Law and Society Association.

My position in the department is in disability law and politics. It is a joint appointment with the law school, where I teach disability law, the Center for Disability Studies, where I participate in research projects, and the Department of Political Science, where I teach courses in disability politics and law and society.

Research Interests: I research the ways that rights language and rights practices are moving across national and ideological boundaries. I ask: how do rights travel? What medium do they travel by, and how are they transformed once they reach foreign shores?

In thinking about these questions I have focused on a fairly recent but nonetheless significant international phenomenon, and that is the emergence of disability rights movements in countries across the globe. This movement was heightened by the passage of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA is now widely considered by disability activists as an international model of a new approach to disability policy. It stands in direct contrast to traditional policy approaches to disability, which focus on institutionalization, compensation and rehabilitation. Instead, the ADA interprets disability discrimination as a civil rights issue and mandates equal opportunities and reasonable accommodations for disability difference.

As the world's first comprehensive antidiscrimination law for people with disabilities the ADA has inspired activists in other countries to adopt rights talk as a mobilizing strategy and to work towards the passage of similar legislation in their home countries. I chose two destinations as case studies: Japan and Germany. I chose them for their prominence in the traditional welfare approach to disability. Both countries are considered leaders in Europe and Asia regarding their political commitment to maintaining a well funded but segregated disability welfare state. I thought it would be interesting to look at the impact of an American-inspired rights model in two settings that are so firmly embedded in the welfare model. My research examines the ways that American-style rights talk and rights consciousness work in new and unexamined ways when they are transplanted abroad.

Selected publications

"Rights or Quotas? The ADA as a Model for Disability Rights" in New Civil Rights Research: Constitutive Approaches to Rights Consciousness (forthcoming)

"The ADA on the Road: Disability Rights in Germany" 27 Law and Social Inquiry, 2002: 901

"From Welfare to Rights – Japanese Disability Law" Asia-Pacific Law and Policy Journal 1, 2000: 6 (http://www.hawaii.edu/aplpj)