"From Disability to Possibility will change the way you look at your students with disabilities. And when you make that shift, the way those students look to you will change. You will see the possibilities, and in that vision, you will see the power of the inclusive classroom. " -Kylene Beers

Three decades after landmark special education legislation promised a better learning experience for students, special education is still just that-a promise. In America we have earned a failing grade in educating diverse learners, as evidenced by their overwhelming underemployment or joblessness after graduation. We can do better by adopting a new model - one that honors varied teaching and learning styles, transforming disability into possibility. Only then can we finally fulfill the promise of special education.

"From Disability to Possibility" leads the way presenting the specific kinds of teaching, classroom practices, and support approaches that will make this new model of possibility a reality. Drawing on the stories of learners, both with and without disabilities, as well as families and teachers, Patrick Schwarz shows you not only why many current special education frameworks don't work, but also how they damage children, often for life. Then he demonstrates how possibility studies offers a meaningful, practical, and doable alternative to traditional special education practices both during the school years and after.

Ideal for general educators, special educators, administrators, educational leaders, related service professionals, paraeducators and self-advocates, "From Disability to Possibility" illustrates, through stories of struggle and success, how creative, conscientious teachers can work with everyone involved in a student's learning to make special education work. In addition Patrick Schwarz will show you that special education is a service, not a sentence, and that labels hurt. His ideas and passion will inspire you to look at diverse learners, their instruction, and their support in the classroom, the curriculum, and the social world of school from a new perspective: the "possibility of disability."

Practice Issues in Sexuality and Learning Disabilities explores the sexual behaviour of people with learning difficulties and addresses issues of concern such as sexual abuse, HIV and AIDS, service provision for those from ethnic minorities, the development of policy guidelines and the implementation of such guidelines in this intensely personal area. Ann Craft draws upon professional expertise from a broad range of backgrounds including social work, psychology, and medicine. She offers practical ideas and suggestions for service responses which acknowledge and respect the right of people with learning disabilities to express their sexuality in ways that are valued by other members of their society. Practice Issues in Sexuality and Learning Disabilities will be of interest to all whose work or relationship brings them into contact with people with learning disabilities - professionals, carers, parents, advocates. It will be invaluable to social workers, practitioners in social work and health, trainees, training officers and voluntary organizations.

First published in 1986. The authors and their contributing associates have spent most, in some cases all, of their professional years working both with mentally handicapped individuals and with the men and women who serve them in residential facilities. This book, at its core, is about the future of these people.

Developing better employment and management practices for a diverse workplace is quickly becoming a major concern amongst most modern organisations; however, a lack of research into good practices has a limiting effect. Dealing specifically with disabilities, this pioneering work is based on international research spanning several European countries to demonstrate best practice. Aiming to fill a gap in knowledge, the authors offer interdisciplinary insights into managing diversity in the workplace, taking into account various social and cultural contexts. Providing analysis and recommendations for adapting organisational practices to different workplace settings, this Palgrave Pivot is a vital read for scholars of HRM and diversity management, as well as policy-makers and practitioners.

This book is written for professionals who wish to learn about methodological issues associated with health care surveys. It represents a distinct and important contribution to the application of the methodology of sample surveys to the collection of data on the utilization of health care services.

While the visibility of disability studies has increased in recent years, few have thoroughly examined the marginalization of people with disabilities through the lens of political economy. This was the great contribution of Marta Russell (1951-2013), an activist and prominent scholar in the United States and best known for her analyses of the issues faced by people with disabilities. This book examines the legacy of Marta Russell, bringing together distinguished scholars and activists such as Anne Finger, Nirmala Erevelles and Mark Weber, to explicate current issues relevant to the empowerment of people with disabilities. Drawing from various fields including Law, Political Economy, Education and History, the book takes a truly interdisciplinary approach, offering a body of work that develops a dextrous understanding of the marginalization of people with disabilities. The book will be of great use and interest to specialists and students in the fields of Political Economy, Law and Society, Labour Studies, Disability Studies, Women's Studies, and Political Science.

Disability studies has become a legitimate area of academic study. It is multi-disciplinary in its critique of the oppressions that have historically "dumped" disabled people on the margins of society. This fully revised and updated edition not only explains disability studies as an academic field of inquiry, it also explores many of the current issues affecting the lives and circumstances of disabled people. The book explores and analyzes "quality of life" factors in the lives of disabled people in relation to the professional development of undergraduates and examines the emergence of "rights" for disabled people in the local area, the UK and abroad. The author indicates the strengths and weaknesses of organizations "of" and "for" disabled people, and provides examples of individual and institutional oppressions against disabled people and "success stories," exploring how these have been overcome in education and employment. The book suggests how disabled and non-disabled people can collaborate in the development of inclusive communities and neighborhoods. The text is suitable for students taking courses in the areas of health, social care and allied services at NVQ, BTEC, Degree and PGCE level. The author encourages students to raise their own questions and develop their own forms of inquiry.

This book considers the social and geographical context in which the National Health Service (NHS) operated during the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that disease and health care systems are the product to a large degree of the wider social and cultural context. It explores the relationship between health, work, poverty, housing, class and culture. examines how resource allocation and social policies are determined by the wider social and cultural context. discusses how the health of the nation, broadly defined should best be managed. As relevant today as when it was originally published, comments on the nature of welfare geography, assesses the impact of integrated approaches on the policy process and points the way forward to geographies rather than a geography of the national health.

This handbook provides a much-needed holistic overview of disability and sexuality research and scholarship. With authors from a wide range of disciplines and representing a diversity of nationalities, it provides a multi-perspectival view that fully captures the diversity of issues and outlooks. Organised into six parts, the contributors explore long-standing issues such as the psychological, interpersonal, social, political and cultural barriers to sexual access that disabled people face and their struggle for sexual rights and participation. The volume also engages issues that have been on the periphery of the discourse, such as sexual accommodations and support aimed at facilitating disabled people's sexual well-being; the socio-sexual tensions confronting disabled people with intersecting stigmatised identities such as LGBTBI or asexual; and the sexual concerns of disabled people in the Global South. It interrogates disability and sexuality from diverse perspectives, from more traditional psychological and sociological models, to various subversive and post-theoretical perspectives and queer theory. This handbook examines the cutting-edge, and sometimes ethically contentious, concerns that have been repressed in the field. With current, international and comprehensive content, this book is essential reading for students, academics and researchers in the areas of disability, gender and sexuality, as well as applied disciplines such as healthcare practitioners, counsellors, psychology trainees and social workers.

The special needs of women with disabilities have been disregarded in a wide variety of vital areas. Issues pertain to women as wives and mothers. Studies of the effects on female sexuality of such conditions as renal disease and diabetes are lacking, though the sexual functioning of men with these diseases has been researched. On the economic front, the Federal-State Vocational Rehabilitation system and the regulations concerning disability benefits under Social Security provide less adequately for women than for men. Hopefully, this volume will raise the consciousness of its readers to the special status of women with disabilities as a minority group experiences multiple sources of discriminations.

Insists on the importance of embodiment and movement to the creation of Black sociality Linking African diasporic performance, disability studies, and movement studies, Falling, Floating, Flickering approaches disability transnationally by centering Black, African, and diasporic experiences. By eschewing capital's weighted calculus of which bodies hold value, this book centers alternate morphologies and movement practices that have previously been dismissed as abnormal or unrecognizable. To move beyond binaries of ability, Hershini Bhana Young traverses multiple geohistories and cultural forms stretching from the United States and the Mediterranean to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, as well as independent and experimental film, novels, sculptures, images, dance, performances, and anecdotes. In doing so, she argues for the importance of differential embodiment and movement to the creation and survival of Black sociality, and refutes stereotypic notions of Africa as less progressive than the West in recognizing the rights of disabled people. Ultimately, this book foregrounds the engagement of diasporic Africans, who are still reeling from the violence of colonialism, slavery, poverty, and war, as they gesture toward a liberatory Black sociality by falling, floating, and flickering.

Sexuality, Disability, and the Law approaches issues of sexual autonomy and disability from multiple perspectives, including constitutional law, international human rights, therapeutic jurisprudence, history, cognitive psychology, dignity studies, and theories and findings on gender constructs and societal norms. Perlin and Lynch determine that if our society continues to assert that persons with mental disabilities possess a primitive morality, we allow ourselves to censor their feelings and their actions. By denying their ability and desires to show love and affection, we justify this disparate treatment. Our reliance on stereotypes has warped our attitudes and our policies, and has allowed us to avoid important issues of humanity and of dignity that should be at the basis of any policies that affect this population.

Guided by developmental cultural psychology, this volume focuses on understandings and responses to disability and stigmatization from the perspectives of educators practicing in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Synthesizing research that spanned over a decade, this volume seeks to understand disabilities in different developmental and cultural contexts. The research presented in this book found that educators from all four cultural groups expressed strikingly similar concerns about the impact of stigmatization on the emerging cultural self, both with children with disabilities and their typically developing peers, while also describing culturally nuanced socialization goals and practices pertaining to inclusive education. In providing a multicultural view of common challenges in classrooms from around the world, this book provides important lessons for the improvement of children's lives, as well as the development of theory, policy, and programs that are culturally sensitive and sustainable.

Universal Design is Selwyn Goldsmith's new authoritative design manual, the successor to his internationally acclaimed Designing for the Disabled. A clear and concise design guide for practising and student architects, it describes and illustrates the differences there are between universal design and 'for the disabled' design Universal Design presents detailed design guidance for architects in an easily referenced form. Covering both public buildings and private housing, it includes informative anthropometric data, along with illustrative examples of the planning of circulation spaces, sanitary facilities, car parking spaces and seating spaces for wheelchair users in cinemas and theatres. It is a valuable manual in enhancing understanding of the basic principles of 'universal design'. The aim - to encourage architects to extend the parameters of normal provision, by looking to go beyond the prescribed minimum design standards of the Part M building regulation, Access and facilities for disabled people.

'Some years ago I read the phrase "the spontaneous revulsion to the deformed". The phrase seemed to be both potent and provocative: Was there a spontaneous revulsion to disabilities in children or did such conditions evoke a more compassionate response?' Originally published in 1978, the problems of the disabled were no longer confined to the medical and educational professionals, but had become the concern of the community as a whole. Using terminology very much of the time, the author shows how attitudes towards different kinds of disability had developed at the time; they varied both regionally and by social class, sometimes calling into question the accepted 'facts' about the distribution of a particular condition. Most importantly, the author examines these attitudes together with many other social and psychological factors in relation to their impact on the social behaviour and developing self-image of the disabled child. It becomes clear that the dangers of categorization and the difficulties in overcoming stigma have a profound influence on the education and socialization of disabled children. This book will be of historical interest to students and teachers of psychology, education, social work and rehabilitation; and it will provide insight for parents and all those concerned with the care and development of the disabled child about how far we have come.

The disability of blindness is a learned social role. The various attitudes and patterns of behavior that characterize people who are blind are not inherent in their condition but, rather, are acquired through ordinary processes of social learning. The Making of Blind Men is intended as a systematic and integrated overview of the blindness problem in America. Dr. Scott chronicles which aspects of this problem are being dealt with by organizations for the blind and the effectiveness of this intervention system. He details the potential consequences of blind people becoming clients of blindness agencies by pointing out that many of the attitudes, behavior patterns, and qualities of character that have been assumed to be given to blind people by their condition are, in fact, products of socialization. As the self-concepts of blind men are generated by the same processes of socialization that shape us all, Dr. Scott puts forth the challenge of reforming the organized intervention system by critically evaluating the validity of blindness workers' assumptions about blindness and the blind. It is felt that an enlightened work force can then render the socialization process of the blind into a rational and deliberate force for positive change.

Written in a clear, accessible style, Health introduces students to the valuable contribution sociologists have made to understanding health, illness and disease. In so doing, it challenges the adequacy of biomedical models, contrasting them with explanations offered by positivist, interactionist, structuralist and feminist sociologists. Aggleton, an experienced teacher, links the key debates within the sociology of health and illness with their implications for health care, and covers topics such as complementary medicine and AIDS. Students are encouraged to undertake suggested activities and are given guidance for further reading to develop their understanding.

Drawn from Disability & Society over the period 1997-2012, the twelve chapters in this book address a range of personal, cultural and institutional arenas in which challenges experienced by disabled children are played out. The book includes a mix of theoretical and applied material offering both powerful conceptual tools and practical insights, enabling readers to connect the work of recent decades to their own research and questions about disability and childhood. Readers will find this book an invaluable resource for understanding what we have learned about disability and childhood through the pages of the world leading international journal in the field. The collection makes available a well-informed understanding of conditions, policies and practices that create disability in children's lives so that we can further the struggle for a more inclusive future in which inequalities structured around impairment are removed. The importance of children's own voices for resisting disablement in childhood is clearly foregrounded in this invaluable collection. This book was originally published as a special issue of Disability & Society.

The purpose of this book is to challenge people (service providers, people with a hearing disability and those who advocate for them) to reconsider the way western society thinks about hearing disability and the way it seeks to 'include them'. It highlights the concern that the design of hearing services is so historically marinated in ableist culture that service users often do not realise they may be participating in their own oppression within a phono-centric society. With stigma and marginalisation being the two most critical issues impacting on people with hearing disability, Hogan and Phillips document both the collective and personal impacts of such marginality. In so doing, the book brings forward an argument for a paradigm shift in hearing services. Drawing upon the latest research and policy work, the book opens up a conceptual framework for a new approach to hearing services and looks at the kinds of personal and systemic changes a paradigm shift would entail.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Foreword.

Winner of the 2007 Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the MLA

aThe members of the Committee were especially impressed by McRuer's original intervention in the area of queer studies, one that not only sheds light on the important new area of disability studies, but brings it into conversation with a variety of disciplinary perspectives, from composition studies to performance art. McRuer's book combines the public and the private work of queer studies in surprisingly new ways.a
--Ed Madden, Gay and Lesbian Caucus for the MLA

aA wonderful combination of humor, theory, intellectual, and personal insights... A valuable and well-written study.a
--Disability Studies Quarterly

"A compelling case that queer and disabled identities, politics, and cultural logics are inexorably intertwined, and that queer and disability theory need one anothera]. Makes clear that no cultural analysis is complete without attention to the politics of bodily ability and alternative corporealities."
--Elizabeth Freeman, author of "The Wedding Complex"

"Important and significant for its attempt to find the common ground between disability studies and queer studies. This deftly written and very readable book will appeal to a wide range of readers who are increasingly fascinated by the biocultural interplay between the body, sexuality, gender, and social identity."
--Lennard Davis, author of "Bending Over Backwards"

Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, andidentities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.

Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.

Over recent decades an increasing amount of attention has been paid to identifying and meeting the individual support needs of mental health service users and people with physical impairments in the UK. Evidence of this can be seen within the literature that considers mental health and physical impairment from a wide range of perspectives, as well as the increased range of service provision for individuals within both categories. However, the support needs of individuals who fall into both categories have largely been overlooked by social care and health service providers, practitioners, and organisations for whom the main focus is either mental health or physical impairment. The lack of attention that has been given in theory and in practice to the mental health support needs of disabled women who experience mental distress has resulted in an insufficient knowledge base of how to support disabled women who may require some form of mental health support. For this group of women this has meant that their needs have arguably continued to be neglected and subsequently left unmet. Writing from her position as both a social worker and a service user, Julia Smith has written an innovative and important text which both discusses a neglected area of personal experience and makes an original contribution to knowledge with regard to both policy and practice.

This volume describes art therapy interventions for particularly dysfunctional families and explains the connections between the process of creating art and the curative process in meeting these families' needs. The first chapter examines distressed family systems, and psychotherapy in relation to the uses of art therapy. Subsequent chapters present a crisis intervention model for family art therapy and demonstrate the applications of this model with single-parent families, families affcetd by alcoholism or sexual abuse, and families of political refugees and disaster victims. More than 70 samples of the art produced by these families are reproduced and analyzed.

'GORGEOUS, VIVIDLY ALIVE' NEW YORK TIMES 'BOLD, HONEST AND SUPERBLY WELL-WRITTEN' ANDRE ACIMAN, AUTHOR OF CALL ME BY YOUR NAME 'GRACEFUL AND SOUL-BARING' MELANIE REID, THE TIMES 'WHAT A GIFT . . . HAS THE RIGOR AND PRECISION OF JOAN DIDION AND MAGGIE NELSON AND A FORTHRIGHT HUMOR AND NAKED TRUTH ALL OF ITS OWN.' SARAH RUHL, AUTHOR OF SMILE I am in a bar in Brooklyn listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether or not my life was worth living. So begins Chloe Cooper Jones's bold account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis, she must contend not only with her own physical pain, but the emotional discomfort of others. It is only when she unexpectedly becomes a mother that she confronts the demand to live life fully, propelling her on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she'd been denied, and denied herself. From Roman sculptures to a Beyonce concert, from a tennis tournament to the Cambodian Killing Fields, Jones interrogates the myths of beauty with spiky intelligence, aesthetic philosophy, love and humor, inviting us to find a new way of seeing.

This much-needed volume fills an overlooked gap in adult safeguarding - the digital arena - in providing a comprehensive overview of policy and practice in supporting vulnerable adults online. Providing an essential analysis illustrated by recent court rulings and case studies, the authors advocate for the effective support of adults with learning disabilities and/or mental capacity issues in their digital lives without compromising their privacy and participation rights. The text balances a theoretical exploration of the tensions between participation and protection, legislation, human rights, professional biases and social wrongs. It encourages a critical approach in adopting both a practical and realistic understanding for policy makers, professionals and students in social work, law and adult social care.

As a response to real or imagined subordination, popular culture reflects the everyday experience of ordinary people and has the capacity to subvert the hegemonic order. Drawing on central theoretical approaches in the field of critical disability studies, this book examines disability across a number of internationally recognised texts and objects from popular culture, including film, television, magazines and advertising campaigns, children's toys, music videos, sport and online spaces, to attend to the social and cultural construction of disability. While acknowledging that disability features in popular culture in ways that reinforce stereotypes and stigmatise, Disability and Popular Culture celebrates and complicates the increasing visibility of disability in popular culture, showing how popular culture can focus passion, create community and express defiance in the context of disability and social change. Covering a broad range of concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and cultural studies, including media representation, identity, the beauty myth, aesthetics, ableism, new media and sport, this book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the critical analysis of popular culture, across disciplines such as disability studies, sociology and cultural and media studies.