This co-authored text critically explores the key findings of the Living Life to the Fullest project - a project that has explored the lives, thoughts, hopes and aspirations of disabled young people living with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions. Written by disabled young people and academic researchers, the book articulates ethical co-production in social research. The prolific contemporary political and theoretical debates about life, death and the human in an age of global precarity and austerity are explored in this book. Chapters draw upon key themes and co-researchers' priorities for writing about their lives: for example, the politics and potentials of co-production as a research method/ology; animal and human relationships; aging, time; sexuality and body image; politics, activism and disability arts and culture; and fragility, and death and dying.

Theism is one of the major types of metaphysics and cosmology is the general theory of the whole wide world. Must the world have an over-worldly source, or any source? Would "space" crumble unless God perpetually sustained it by his brooding omnipresence? Is all power, properly understood, divine power? These large questions, never out of date, are examined by Professor Laird in the light of contemporary philosophy. This seminal work, originally published in 1940 is a lucid and profound discussion in theological philosophy.

The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s, and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities--disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies-- Jose Alaniz seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol.

Alaniz traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series--some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar U.S. as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body's "imperfection" comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series as "The Human Fly, Strikeforce: Morituri," and the landmark graphic novel "The Death of Captain Marvel," all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond."

What can society learn about disability through the way it is portrayed in TV, films and plays?

This insightful and accessible text explores and analyses the way disability is portrayed in drama, and how that portrayal may be interpreted by young audiences. Investigating how disabilities have been represented on stage in the past, this book discusses what may be inferred from plays which feature disabled characters through a variety of critical approaches.

In addition to the theoretical analysis of disability in dramatic literature, the book includes two previously unpublished playscripts, both of which have been performed by secondary school aged students and which focus on issues of disability and its effects on others. The contextual notes and discussion which accompany these plays and projects provide insights into how drama can contribute to disability education, and how it can give a voice to students who have special educational needs themselves.

Other features of this wide-ranging text include:

• an annotated chronology that traces the history of plays that have featured disabled characters
• an analysis of how disability is used as a dramatic metaphor
• consideration of the ethics of dramatising a disabled character
• critical accounts of units of work in mainstream school seeking to raise disability awareness through engagement with practical drama and dramatic texts
• a description and evaluation of a drama project in a special school.

In tackling questions and issues that have not, hitherto, been well covered, Drama, Disability and Education will be of enormous interest to drama students, teachers, researchers and pedagogues who work with disabled people or are concerned with raising awareness and understanding of disability.

JA(3)zef Boruwlaski was the most famous dwarf of the Enlightenment age. Polish-born, he travelled extensively throughout Europe, appearing and performing at royal courts and salons, before settling in Durham in his later life until his death at the age of 97. He was described in Diderot's Encyclopedie and the press of his day - both on the continent and in the UK - sustained an interest in him and kept tabs on his life and experiences. His memoirs, published in a bilingual (French and English) version in 1788, show him to have been an intelligent and sharp observer of the world he inhabited. The life story of this miniature gentleman is not only highly interesting in its own right, but also offers a new perspective on the culture of the Enlightenment. Through a meticulous survey of source materials in Poland, France, and the United Kingdom, the author has managed to unearth and reconstruct many heretofore unknown details about Boruwlaski's life and adventures, about his travels first on the continent and then in the United Kingdom. It is not typical biography, but rather an attempt at identifying certain social roles that were imposed upon Boruwlaski: a plaything of the salons, a source of entertainment for the masses, an adventurist against his own wishes. At the same time, his story is that of a man who spent his whole life trying to escape from such roles imposed upon him. Boruwlaski's memoirs are included in full, containing many of the letters he sent to his wife, with critical annotation. The author also investigates for the first time the sizeable differences between the many different versions of the memoirs published during his own lifetime. This monograph offers not only an opportunity to rediscover the fascinating life story of an intriguing man, but also gives a unique point of view on Europe's uppermost elite in the Enlightenment age - as people who remained deeply fascinated with deformities and oddities despite their own self-professed 'refined' tastes.

Covering the period from Antiquity to Early Modernity, A Historical Sociology of Disability argues that disabled people have been treated in Western society as good to mistreat and - with the rise of Christianity - good to be good to. It examines the place and role of disabled people in the moral economy of the successive cultures that have constituted 'Western civilisation'. This book is the story of disability as it is imagined and re-imagined through the cultural lens of ableism. It is a story of invalidation; of the material habituations of culture and moral sentiment that paint pictures of disability as 'what not to be'. The author examines the forces of moral regulation that fall violently in behind the dehumanising, ontological fait accompli of disability invalidation, and explores the ways in which the normate community conceived of, narrated and acted in relation to disability. A Historical Sociology of Disability will be of interest to all scholars, students and activists working in the field of Disability Studies, as well as sociology, education, philosophy, theology and history. It will appeal to anyone who is interested in the past, present and future of the 'last civil rights movement'.

Reveals how disability and disablement have shaped Black social life in America Through both law and custom, the color line has cast Black people as innately disabled and thus unfit for freedom, incapable of self-governance, and contagious within the national body politic. Disabilities of the Color Line maintains that the Black literary tradition historically has inverted this casting by exposing the disablement of racism without disclaiming disability. In place of a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement alike are shunned, Dennis Tyler argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed what he calls the disabilities of the color line: the historical and ongoing anti-Black systems of division that maim, immobilize, and stigmatize Black people. In doing so, Tyler reveals how Black writers and activists such as David Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Mamie Till-Mobley have engaged in a politics and aesthetics of redress: modes of resistance that, in the pursuit of racial and disability justice, acknowledged the disabling violence perpetrated by anti-Black regimes in order to conceive or engender dynamic new worlds that account for people of all abilities. While some writers have affirmed disability to capture how their bodies, minds, and health have been made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and its citizens, others' assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of community as well as a willingness to imagine and create a world distinct from the dominant social order.

Within the domains of criminal justice and mental health care, critical debate concerning 'care' versus 'control' and 'therapy' versus 'security' is now commonplace. Indeed, the 'hybridisation' of these areas is now a familiar theme. This unique and topical text provides an array of expert analyses from key contributors in the field that explore the interface between criminal justice and mental health. Using concise yet robust definitions of key terms and concepts, it consolidates scholarly analysis of theory, policy and practice. Readers are provided with practical debates, in addition to the theoretical and ideological concerns surrounding the risk assessment, treatment, control and risk management in a cross-disciplinary context. Included in this book is recommended further reading and an index of legislation, making it an ideal resource for students at undergraduate and postgraduate level, together with researchers and practitioners in the field.

Politics, Disability, and Education Reform in the South explores how race, gender, disability, and politics all came together to impact the career of one State Superintendent of Education in South Carolina who fought to improve educational conditions for African-Americans, women, and millworkers' children in South Carolina.

An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) license, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust. Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain's most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book looks at British coal through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miners and their families. A diverse range of sources are used to examine the economic, social, political and cultural impact of disability in the coal industry, looking beyond formal coal company and union records to include autobiographies, novels and existing oral testimony. It argues that, far from being excluded entirely from British industry, disability and disabled people were central to its development. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability history, disability studies, social and cultural history and representations of disability in literature. -- .

In recent years, disability studies has been driven by a model of disability which focuses on the social and economic oppression of disabled people. Although an important counterbalance to a pathologising medical model, the social model risks presenting an impoverished and disembodied view of disability, one that ignores the psychological nature of oppression and its effects.

This innovative work argues that a psychological framework of disability is an essential part of developing a more cohesive disability movement. Brian Watermeyer introduces a new, integrative approach, using psychoanalysis to tackle the problem of conceptualising psychological aspects of life with disablism. Psychoanalytic ideas are applied to social responses to impairment, making sense of discrimination in its many forms, as well as problems in disability politics and research. The perspective explores individual psychological experience, whilst retaining a rigorous critique of social forces of oppression. The argument shows how it is possible to theorise the psychological processes and impressions of discriminatory society without pathologising disadvantaged individuals.

Drawing on sociology, social anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis - as well as clinical material - Towards a Contextual Psychology of Disablism shapes a view of disabled subjectivity which is embodied, internal, and political. Presenting a range of conceptual ideas which describe psychological dynamics and predicaments confronting disabled people in an exclusionary and prejudiced world, this volume is an important new contribution to the literature. It will interest students and researchers of disability studies, including those working within psychology, education, health and social work.

'Keith became really quiet... He completely withdrew from what was going on. It was unbelievable... He was unhappy all the time. He wouldn't eat at the dinner table. He would throw his plate on the floor. We couldn't believe it.'

People with learning disabilities living in residential care regularly experience separation and loss when their keyworkers move away. Clinical experience suggests that these transitions are critical for the emotional well-being of clients, for whom supportive relationships with staff are essential. In Saying Goodbye the authors aim to raise awareness of some of the processes that occur when keyworker relationships end, in the hope that such endings can become less painful for both staff and clients. Specific recommendations of how to plan the end of staff-client relationships are included.

The book draws extensively on the words of the participants themselves, looking at parallel accounts of loss and change. People with learning disabilities are rarely asked about their experience of care and this is the first study to examine how these clients, as well as staff, experience the end of keyworking relationships.

Assistive Technology for People with Disabilities, Second Edition, includes eight comprehensive chapters that focus on devices and software to enhance the lives and promote the independence of people with disabilities. Updated with new research, content and features to address current developments in the field, the book approaches assistive technology and education in a lifespan, multidisciplinary manner by discussing the use of current technology in the fields of special education, rehabilitation, speech-language pathology, and other disciplines. Featured devices and software will help you understand how areas such as mobility, communication, education, independent living, and access to information media affect learning and living for individuals with disabilities. You will also gain a great understanding of the foundational and historical perspectives of AT, assessment, universal design, and the ADAPT framework, which is a tool to help educators make decisions about appropriate AT, student needs, and the demands of the environment. Developed from the authors' years of experience teaching both K-12 students and adults, as well as their own framework for understanding assistive technology application and integrating technology into instruction, this new edition addresses assistive technology that promotes knowledge and skills, practical application and a myriad of opportunities that good technology provides for persons with disabilities.

Although the field of disability services and societal understanding of disability issues have advanced in recent decades there remain controversial subjects and unresolved disputes. These cover a wide spectrum from legislation impacting the entire disability community such as the ADA, to culture clashes within a minority group such as the deaf community. Experts analyze and discuss nine of these controversies of particular interest to professional social workers. They are ones about which there are obvious disagreements and no readily available solutions . All sides of the issues are examined to enable readers to draw their own conclusions. The overall intent is to draw attention to each controversy and to motivate professional social workers to engage in personal as well as public dialogue about them.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Social Work in Disability and Rehabilitation.

A much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives In an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we aren't even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an "emergency." In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of "emergency" as an opposite of "normal." Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Elizabeth Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media. By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archival materials, and discursive and technological readings of hardware and infrastructures, Ellcessor demonstrates that emergency media are powerful components of American life that are rarely, if ever, neutral. The normalization of ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. As emergency media undergo massive growth and transformation in response to digitization and attendant entrepreneurial cultures, Ellcessor asks where access, equity, and accountability fit in all of this. The first book to develop a typology of emergency media, In Case of Emergency opens a much-needed conversation around the larger cultural meanings of "emergency," and what an ethical and care-based approach to emergency could entail.

Active Social Work with Children with Disabilities provides a comprehensive social worker's guide to working with children with disabilities, exploring current issues from the perspective of both the social worker and the family. Many people are afraid of working in this field of social work and this book dispels the myths and fears about working with children with disabilities and build the social worker's confidence in an area that is often left behind within the social work world. The book will help you to: undertake a social work assessment with a child with a disability consider the holistic needs of the child and the family explore the impact of grief and loss upon the family build emotional intelligence and resilience within families. communicate with children with disabilities communication techniques. The new SEND legislation and issues around Safeguarding of Children with Disabilities and Transition to Adult Social Care for the young person are explored, and activities and scenarios help you to critically reflect and explore theory and practice further

Disability: The Basics is an engaging and accessible introduction to disability which explores the broad historical, social, environmental, economic and legal factors which affect the experiences of those living with an impairment or illness in contemporary society. The book explores key introductory topics including:

the diversity of the disability experience;

disability rights and advocacy;

ways in which disabled people have been treated throughout history and in different parts of the world;

the daily realities of living with an impairment or illness;

health, education, employment and other services that exist to support and include disabled people;

ethical issues at the beginning and end of life.

Disability: The Basics aims to provide readers with an understanding of the lived experiences of disabled people and highlight the continuing gaps and barriers in social responses to the challenge of disability. This book is suitable for lay people, students of disability studies as well as students taking a disability module as part of a wider course within social work, health care, sociology, nursing, policy and media studies.

Table of Contents

1. Understanding Disability 2. Disability Across Time and Place 3. A Life Worth Living 4. Disabling Barriers 5. Services to Support and Include 6. A Matter of Life and Death 7. Advocacy and Resistance 8. Glossary

With contributions from distinguished authors in 14 countries across 5 continents, this book provides a unique transnational perspective on intellectual disability in the twentieth century. Each chapter outlines different policies and practices, and details real-life accounts from those living with intellectual disabilities to illustrate their impact of policies and practices on these people and their families. Bringing together accounts of how intellectual disability was viewed, managed and experienced in countries across the globe, the book examines the origins and nature of contemporary attitudes, policy and practice and sheds light on the challenges of implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCPRD).

For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances, Arseli Dokumaci draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumaci shows how they use improvisation to imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds through the smallest of actions and the most fleeting of movements---what she calls "activist affordances." Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance opens up to allow disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise. Dokumaci shows how disabled people's activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us.

This book interrogates trends in training and employment of people with disabilities in the media through an analysis of people with disabilities' self-representation in media employment. Improving disability representations in the media is vital to improving the social position of people with disability, and including people with lived experience of disability is integral to this process. While the media industry has changed significantly as a result of digital and participatory media, discriminatory attitudes around fear and pity continue to impact whether people with disability find work in the media. The book demonstrates no significant changes in attitudes towards employing disabled media workers since the 1990s when the last major research into this topic took place. By focusing on the employment of people with disability in media industries, Katie Ellis addresses a neglected area of media diversity, appealing to researchers in media and cultural studies as well as critical disability studies.

Throughout the history of the United States, work-based social welfare practices have served to affirm the moral value of work. In the late nineteenth century this representational project came to be mediated by the printed word with the emergence of industrial print technologies, the expansion of literacy, and the rise of professionalization. In Work Requirements Todd Carmody asks how work, even the most debasing or unproductive labor, came to be seen as inherently meaningful during this era. He explores how the print culture of social welfare-produced by public administrators, by economic planners, by social scientists, and in literature and the arts-tasked people on the social and economic margins, specifically racial minorities, incarcerated people, and people with disabilities, with shoring up the fundamental dignity of work as such. He also outlines how disability itself became a tool of social discipline, defined by bureaucratized institutions as the inability to work. By interrogating the representational effort necessary to make work seem inherently meaningful, Carmody ultimately reveals a forgotten history of competing efforts to think social belonging beyond or even without work.

Over the past 30 years, attitudes toward people with disabilities have changed dramatically, moving from deinstitutionalization in the 1960s to the Disability Rights Movement of the 1970s and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The results of this shift have been to move more and more people with disabilities into mainstream activities in their communities. Social workers and other health and mental health professionals are now encountering people with a wide range of disabilities at various stages of their lives. It is important to be prepared. Understanding Disability details expected developmental stages for those without disabilities as well as the impact of disability at each of these periods. This is a much needed reference for working with a person with a disability, or with a family member or other interested party. Beginning with infancy and the diagnosis of congenital or early onset disabilities, the book identifies traditional developmental life stages and then provides specific information for four different disabilities: Down syndrome, visual impairment, cerebral palsy, and spina bifida. In addition, spinal cord injury is added at the young adult stage of some adapted expectations. In keeping with a social work emphasis on strengths, the book is based on a social, rather than medical, model of disability. The information in this book allows the social worker to create treatment plans, coordinate with other professionals, and competently assist the person with the disability and his/her family. Filling the void in literature on disabilities since the Disabilities Act of 1990, Understanding Disability will be a most valuable resource for social workers, counselors, and nurses.

In Undoing Suicidism, Alexandre Baril argues that suicidal people are oppressed by what he calls structural suicidism, a hidden oppression that, until now, has been unnamed and under-theorized. Each year, suicidism and its preventionist script and strategies reproduce violence and cause additional harm and death among suicidal people through forms of criminalization, incarceration, discrimination, stigmatization, and pathologization. This is particularly true for marginalized groups experiencing multiple oppressions, including queer, trans, disabled, or Mad people. Undoing Suicidism questions the belief that the best way to help suicidal people is through the logic of prevention. Alexandre Baril presents the thought-provoking argument that supporting assisted suicide for suicidal people could better prevent unnecessary deaths. Offering a new queercrip model of (assisted) suicide, he invites us to imagine what could happen if we started thinking about (assisted) suicide from an anti-suicidist and intersectional framework. Baril provides a radical reconceptualization of (assisted) suicide and invaluable reflections for academics, activists, practitioners, and policymakers.

This book explores our ethical responsibilities regarding health in general and disabilities in particular. Disability studies and human enhancement stand out as two emerging areas of research in medical ethics, prompting debates into ethical questions of identity, embodiment, discrimination, and accommodation, as well as questions concerning distributive justice and limitations on people's medical rights. Edited by two ethicist philosophers, this book combines their mastery of the theoretical debates surrounding disability and human enhancement with attention to real world questions that health workers and patients may face. By including a wide range of high-quality voices and perspectives, the book provides an invaluable resource for scholars who are working on this important and emerging area of leadership and health care ethics.

Brian Gault is one of the 450 survivors of the 'miracle-drug' Thalidomide's exposure to the British market in the mid-twentieth century. To the shock of his parents, he was born with no arms. Otherwise physically and mentally fit and able, Brian has struggled throughout his life to overcome the restrictions society has tried to place on him, beginning with the cumbersome prosthetic arms of his childhood, which he had to sabotage to escape wearing them! Brian's story is lively, funny, challenging and moving and centres around his call to Christian faith. With a foreword by Joni Eareckson Tada.