Captures the importance of belonging and the need for social connectedness- a key driver for positive adjustment post-injury. Highlights the issues around how people with brain injuries are 'managed' in a residential home environment that is predominantly intended for elderly and frail individuals. Covers a decades-long timespan of a survivor of brain injury. Provides much needed support for patients and family members adjusting to life after brain injury.

Includes 29 newly written chapters from scholars and activists around the world. First book to provide an overview of Critical Autism Studies and explore the different kinds of knowledges and their articulations, similarities and differences across cultural contexts and key tensions within this sub-discipline. Of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, education, health, social care and political science as well as members of the autistic community and activists.

This volume represents a compilation of critically reflexive thinkers in adaptive physical activity (APA) who have willingly embraced the uncomfortable issues of ableism, disableism, and ethically questionable professional practices in the field. From an unprecedented, frank, and introspective stance, the authors make the comfortable and taken-for-granted, uncomfortable. International researchers and educators bring reflexion to ableism in higher education - including curriculum making, textbooks as artefacts of the professional landscape in APA, and the models of disability that unconsciously frame post-secondary instruction in APA.

The rising cost of illness and disability benefits are one of today's biggest social and labour market challenges. The promise of activation-oriented work disability policies was labour market engagement for all people, regardless of illness, injury or impairment. However, the reality has been more complex. The Science and Politics of Work Disability Policy addresses social and political economic contexts driving state work disability reform in 13 countries. In this first attempt to explain the history and future of work disability policy, this book asks new questions about work disability policy design, focus, and effects. It details how work disability policies have evolved with jurisdictions, why these take their current shape, and where they are heading. The well positioned authors draw on their insider knowledge and expertise in law, medicine, and social science to provide detailed case studies of their jurisdictions. This pathbreaking volume will be of interest to social security system policy makers, scholars, and students in the health and social sciences.

This practical book introduces a new, research-based model of occupational wholeness, a way of conceptualising satisfaction with what one does to meet needs for being, belonging and becoming. It explores how to: conceptualise people's life stories through the model; take vital steps to help identify any problems; draw personal profiles; introduce intervention strategies for promoting wellbeing. Focusing on enhancing wellbeing, rather than ill health, the concept of occupational wholeness supports people to feel more control of their own lives and helps to identify what balance can be created, while recognising personal limitations and environmental restrictions. Alongside theoretical background, it includes practice applications and practical tools, with scenarios and activities to consolidate learning. Providing a unique combination of the practice and theory of occupational science, Yazdani integrates occupational science, psychology and sociology with clinical experience of working with diverse groups of people in different countries. This book is an important guide and reference for occupational therapists, occupational scientists, counsellors and life coaches.

This practical book introduces a new, research-based model of occupational wholeness, a way of conceptualising satisfaction with what one does to meet needs for being, belonging and becoming. It explores how to: conceptualise people's life stories through the model; take vital steps to help identify any problems; draw personal profiles; introduce intervention strategies for promoting wellbeing. Focusing on enhancing wellbeing, rather than ill health, the concept of occupational wholeness supports people to feel more control of their own lives and helps to identify what balance can be created, while recognising personal limitations and environmental restrictions. Alongside theoretical background, it includes practice applications and practical tools, with scenarios and activities to consolidate learning. Providing a unique combination of the practice and theory of occupational science, Yazdani integrates occupational science, psychology and sociology with clinical experience of working with diverse groups of people in different countries. This book is an important guide and reference for occupational therapists, occupational scientists, counsellors and life coaches.

Outlines how in modern societies hearing, health and sound technologies are entangled in multi-faceted ways. The book brings together, for the first time, historians, scholars from media studies, social sciences, cultural studies, acoustics and neuroscientists to show and discuss how modern technologies play a decisive role in the ways 'normal', enhanced or 'smart' hearing as well as hearing impairment have been configured and experienced. Addresses current hearing practices that become increasingly mediated by personalized hearing technologies and aids that engage with continuously changing sonic situations along advanced algorithms and intuitive apps.

International Issues in SEND and Inclusion brings together a collection of cutting-edge researches on approaches to special education needs and disability education, across 6 continents and within 12 countries. Written by authors who are experts in their own countries in relation to special educational needs and disability, the book provides a unique knowledge and understanding of different international perspectives in special educational needs, disability and inclusion. The chapters present extended case studies and reflect on current policy, practice and theory within that context, challenging assumptions which can dominate the policy and practice of inclusive education. Each of the six continents has a separate section and introduction within the book to offer a relevant approach and context for analysis. The book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of inclusion, special educational needs and disability, teacher education and comparative education.

This book explores the complex, evolving relationships between men, masculinities, and social welfare in contemporary context. It is inspired by themes examined in 'Men, Gender Divisions and Welfare', an edited collection published in 1998 by Popay, Hearn, and Edwards. While international policy agendas reflect a growing commitment to critically addressing the relations between men, masculinities, and policy, in policy and popular discussions, societies continue to grapple with the question of 'what to do with men?' This question reflects an ongoing tension between the persistence of men's power and control over welfare and policy development, alongside their ostensible avoidance of welfare services. The collection constitutes an up-to-date account of the gendered and social implications of policy and practice change for men, and their inherent contradictions and complexities, tracing both stability and change over the past 25 years. This book will appeal to students and scholars in diverse fields, particularly in sociology, social policy, applied social sciences, gerontology, gender studies, youth studies, welfare studies, politics, and social geography. Given the volume's empirical attention throughout to both policies and practice developments, it will also be of interest to those training in applied and vocational degrees such as health and social care, social work, family support, and health visiting.

This interdisciplinary volume links dis/ability and agency by exploring LatDisCrit's theory and activist emancipatory practice. It uses the author's experiential and analytical views as a blind brown Latinx engaged scholar and activist from the global south living and struggling in the highly racialized global north context of the United States. LatDisCrit integrates critically LatCrit and DisCrit which look at the interplay of race/ethnicity, diasporic cultures, historical sociopolitics and disability within multiple Latinx identities in mostly global north contexts, while incorporating global south epistemologies. Using intersectional analysis of key concepts through critical counterstories, following critical race theory methodological traditions, and engaging possible decoloniality treatments of material precarity and agency, this book emphasizes intersectionality's complex underpinnings within and beyond Latinidades. Through a careful interplay of dis/ability identity and dis/ability rights/empowerment, the volume opens avenues for intersectional solidarity and spaces for radical transformational learning. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies; intersectional disability justice activists; critical Latinx/Chicanx studies; critical geographies; intersectional political philosophy; and political and public sociology.

Argues for a return to a positive view of the other via a personalist philosophy of being offered by Mounier, Marcel, and Wojtyla, and deepened by participation, belonging, and possibility of contributing to the good of all. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, philosophy and anthropology. Disability studies are often regarded as practical studies as opposed to the apparently inevitable theorizing of philosophy or theology. However, this book's methodology of explicitly linking disability studies with philosophy and theology demonstrates their complementarity.

This book addresses the ways in which individualised, market-based models of disability support provision have been mobilised in and across different countries through cross-national investigation of individualised funding (IF) as an object of neoliberal policy mobility. Combining rich theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives with extensive empirical research, the book provides a timely examination of the policy processes and mechanisms driving the spread of IF amongst countries at the forefront of disability policy reform. It is argued that IF's mobility is not attributable to neoliberalism alone but to the complex intersections between neoliberal and emancipatory agendas and to the transnational networks that have blended the two agendas in new ways in different institutional contexts. The book shows how disability rights struggles have synchronised with neoliberal agendas, which explains IF's propensity to move and mutate between different jurisdictions. Featuring first-hand accounts of the activists and advocates engaged in these struggles, the book illuminates the consequences and risks of the dangerous liaisons and political trade-offs that seemed necessary to get individualised funding on the policy agenda for disabled people. It will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies, social policy, sociology and political science more generally.

This volume engages with questions of justice and equality, and how these can be achieved in modern society. It explores how theory and research can inform policy and practice to bring about real change in people's lives, helping readers understand and interrogate patterns and causes of inequality, while investigating how these might be remedied. Chapters outline ways in which theories of justice inform and are factored into effective actions, programmes and interventions. The book includes an international selection of case studies. These range from global inequalities in development and health to cross-border conflict; from gender justice to disability violence; from child protection to disability-inclusive research; from illicit drug use to torture prevention; and from prison wellbeing to sexual and reproductive health and rights. Together, contributors explore: how social science and humanities scholarship can lead to a better understanding of, and capacity to respond to, key social issues and problems the importance of normative reflection and a concern for principles of justice in pursuit of social change the importance of community voice and grassroots action in the pursuit of justice, equity and equality. Envisioning a better world - in which concern for the just treatment of all trumps the pursuit of privilege and inequality - Practical Justice: Principles, Practice and Social Change will appeal to students and academics in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, political science, sociology, anthropology, geography and education, and in fields such as policy studies, criminology, healthcare, social work and social welfare.

This book explores how being "disabled" originates in the physical world, social representations and rules, and historical power relations-the interplay of which render bodies "normal" or not. Do parking signs that represent people in wheelchairs as self-propelling influence how we view dis/ability? How do wheelchair users understand their own bodies and an environment not built for them? By asking questions like these the authors reveal how normalization has informed people's experiences of their bodies and their fight for substantive equality. Understanding these processes requires acknowledging the tension between social construction and embodiment as well as centering the intersection of dis/abilities with other identities, such as race, class, gender, sex orientation, citizen status, and so on. Scholars and researchers will find that this book provides new avenues for thinking about dis/ability. A wider audience will find it accessible and informative.

Locates social attitudes towards blindness in a personal and cultural landscape. Is interdisciplinary in its crossing of lines among education, the humanities, and the social sciences. Includes case-studies from Canada, Cyprus, India, Indonesia, Italy, Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, South America, and Spain.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the social and spatial experiences of people with dwarfism, an impairment that results in a person being no taller than 4' 10". This book engages with the concept that dwarfism's most prominent feature - body size and shape - can form the basis of social discrimination and disadvantages within society. By ignoring body size as a disability, it is hard to see the resulting disabling consequences of the built environment. Using a mixed-methods approach and drawing on the work undertaken by human geographers and disability studies academics, this book analyses how the relationship between harmful cultural stereotypes and space shapes everyday experiences of people with dwarfism and works to socially exclude them in diverse ways. Showing how spatial and social barriers are not mutually exclusive but can influence one another, this book responds to the limited academic work on the subject of dwarfism, whilst also contributing to the study of geographies of body size. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, human geography, the built environment, sociology and medical humanities.

The Gifts We Receive from Animals is a book guaranteed to brighten a reader's day. Professionals engaged in therapy work as well as those who have companion animals at home will enjoy learning about the many ways in which animals impact people's lives. Through a series of short, true-life stories, written by professionals engaged in animal assisted interventions, The Gifts We Receive from Animals reminds readers of the core essence of the human animal bond and the reason behind the growing phenomenon of animal assisted interventions. Readers will learn, for example, about the young child who shares her inner most thoughts with a dog and, as a result, learns how to talk with people; the soldier who feels comfortable and safe with a dog, a feeling he has been lacking since active duty; and the elderly adult who works through difficult physical therapy because of his therapy dog. The Gifts We Receive from Animals takes readers on a delightful journey, offering insights into the unique impact animals have in the lives of those they help.

Social change in the twenty-first century is shaped by both demographic changes associated with ageing societies and significant technological change and development. Outlining the basic principles of a new academic field, Socio-gerontechnology, this book explores common conceptual, theoretical and methodological ideas that become visible in the critical scholarship on ageing and technology at the intersection of Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Comprised of 15 original chapters, three commentaries and an afterword, the book explores how ageing and technology are already interconnected and constantly being intertwined in Western societies. Topics addressed cover a broad variety of socio-material domains, including care robots, the use of social media, ageing-in-place technologies, the performativity of user involvement and public consultations, dementia care and many others. Together, they provide a unique understanding of ageing and technology from a social sciences and humanities perspective and contribute to the development of new ontologies, methodologies and theories that might serve as both critique of and inspiration for policy and design. International in scope, including contributions from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, Socio-gerontechnology is an agenda-setting text that will provide an introduction for students and early career researchers as well as for more established scholars who are interested in ageing and technology.

Participatory Case Study Work shows academic co-researchers how to adapt and implement their methods so that data collection and analysis is authentically participatory. At the heart of this text is advocating a participatory approach to case study work, with co-construction as a catalyst for shared understanding and action in advancing ageing studies. Whilst case study research has a relatively long tradition in the canon of research methodologies, little attention has so far been paid to the importance and value of participatory case study work. This is surprising as its egalitarian and democratic value-base naturally lends itself to the co-production and co-creation of personal and collective theory drawn directly from lived experience. The book brings together over 15 years' worth of participatory case study work in ageing studies in which the editors have been actively involved as either front-line researchers or as supervisors to PhD and MPhil studies adopting the methodology, and from where each of the contributors is selected. Real-life case examples are shared in the main chapters of the book and they provide direction as to how learning can be applied to other settings. The chapters also contain key references and recommended reading. This volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as research methods, qualitative methods, ageing studies and mental health studies.

This book investigates how being diagnosed with various disabilities impacts on identity. Once diagnosed with a disability, there is a risk that this label can become the primary status both for the person diagnosed as well as for their family. This reification of the diagnosis can be oppressive because it subjugates humanity in such a way that everything a person does can be interpreted as linked to their disability. Drawing on narrative approaches to identity in psychology and social sciences, the bio-psycho-social model and a holistic approach to disabilities, the chapters in this book understand disability as constructed in discourse, as negotiated among speaking subjects in social contexts, and as emergent. By doing so, they amplify voices that may have otherwise remained silent and use storytelling as a way of communicating the participants' realities to provide a more in-depth understanding of their point of view. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, medical humanities, disability research methods, narrative theory, and rehabilitation studies.

* Based on blog entries providing an authentic reflection of the lived experience at some of the key stages along the road to recovery. * Author has a medical background which provides an articulate and interesting perspective into the difficulties around providing and withdrawing intensive care therapy, focusing particularly on understanding the wishes of patients with regard to the treatment of critical injuries. * Provides a peer-level approach to helping readers understand and navigate their new lives, from pragmatic concerns about new daily difficulties, to loftier concerns about their new place in life * Provides much needed support for patients and family members adjusting to life after brain injury.

Drawing on rich empirical work emerging from core conflict regions within the island nation of Sri Lanka, this book illustrates the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development. This pathbreaking book shows the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development. Through offering a rare yet important insight into the processes of gendered-disability advocacy activation within the post-conflict environment, it provides a unique counter narrative to the powerful images, symbols and discourses that too frequently perpetuate disabled women's so-called need for paternalistic forms of care. Rather than being the mere recipients of aid and help, the narratives of women with disabilities reveal the generative praxis of social solidarity and cohesion, progressed via their nascent collective practices of gendered-disability advocacy. It will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of disability studies, gender studies, post-conflict studies, peace studies and social work.

Provides a rich synthesis of research and theory of nascent and emergent innovative work of social suffering through rich empirical examination of changing welfare structures, regimes and technologies. Synthesises, critiques and expands the boundaries of existing research which has been undertaken from a number of different disciplinary and international perspectives and examines in rich empirical analysis its implications for specific subjectivities. Fills an existing gap within the international literature through focusing upon the Australian case and empirically demonstrate the significance of Australia to identifying and understanding global trends.

Drawing upon vivid and harrowing life history narratives of people labelled intellectually disabled, this book examines the ways in which disabled subjects are constituted, regulated, governed, and violated through an account of abjection. Extending interdisciplinary dialogues and approaches, it abandons a construct of violence (which by law requires a stable notion of a victim and a perpetrator) and moves to a theorisation of abjection to explore the ways in which disabled subjects are (re)produced, constituted, and treated through time. Deploying a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, this book sits at the intersections of criminology and sociology, re-thinks notions of dis/ability, violence, and subjectivity, and utilises crip and queer theory to imagine dis/ability differently. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology and criminology, and specifically those working the areas of life history work, post-structuralism, hate crime, and post-modern criminology.

A book on dance-making, centred on practitioners with disabilities but valuable for dancers in all situations. Aimed at the huge range of dance-makers looking to make their work accessible, inclusive and diverse. A leading book in the field on this topic, now updated and expanded to reflect current trends and debates.