Disabled children's lives have often been discussed through medical concepts of disability rather than concepts of childhood. Western understandings of childhood have defined disabled children against child development 'norms' and have provided the rationale for segregated or 'special' welfare and education provision. In contrast, disabled children's childhood studies begins with the view that studies of children's impairment are not studies of their childhoods. Disabled children's childhood studies demands ethical research practices that position disabled children and young people at the centre of the inquiry outside of the shadow of perceived 'norms'. The Palgrave Handbook of Disabled Children's Childhood Studies will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, as well as practitioners in health, education, social work and youth work.

* What is the relevance of feminist ideas for understanding women's experiences of disability? * How can the social model of disability be developed theoretically? * What are the key differences between Disability Studies and medical sociology? In answer to these questions, this book explores and develops ideas about disability, engaging with important debates in disability studies about what disability is and how to theorize it. It also examines the interface between disability studies, women's studies and medical sociology, and offers an accessible review of contemporary debates and theoretical approaches. The title Female Forms reflects two things about the book: first, its use of disabled women's experiences, as told by themselves, to bring a number of themes to life, and second, the author's belief in the importance of feminist ideas and debates for disability studies. The social model of disability is the book's bedrock, but the author both challenges and contributes to social modelist thought. She advances a materialist feminist perspective on disability, producing a book which is of multi-disciplinary relevance. Female Forms will be useful to the growing number of students on Disability Studies courses, as well as those interested in women's studies, medical sociology and social policy. It will also appeal to those studying or working in the health and social care professions such as nursing, social work, occupational therapy and physiotherapy.

In austerity Britain, disabled people have been recast as worthless scroungers. From social care to the benefits system, politicians and the media alike have made the case that Britain's 12 million disabled people are nothing but a drain on the public purse. In Crippled, journalist and campaigner Frances Ryan exposes the disturbing reality, telling the stories of those most affected by this devastating regime. It is at once both a damning indictment of a safety net so compromised it strangles many of those it catches and a passionate demand for an end to austerity, which hits hardest those most in need.

AspergerWorld is a fascinating, part-autobiographical book written by Joely Williams, a young woman with Asperger's syndrome. It aims to inspire and empower those on the autistic spectrum, and teach them the joy of self-acceptance. AspergerWorld shares Joely's journey: from the challenges she faced as a child, to successfully completing her education, to her current role as an autism activist. It also contains invaluable advice for both parents and professionals on how to best support those with autism. Most importantly, it aims to educate, igniting what Joely calls 'a positive rainbow of change' into the heart of the autistic community.

Challenging existing approaches to autism that limit, and sometimes damage, the individuals who attract and receive the label, this book questions the lazy prejudices and assumptions that can surround autism as a diagnosis in the 21st Century. Arguing that autism can only be understood through examining 'it' as a socially or culturally produced phenomenon, the authors offer a critique of the medical model that has produced a perpetually marginalising approach to autism, and explain the contradictions and difficulties inherent in existing attitudes. They examine and dispute the scientific validity of diagnosis and 'treatment', asking whether autism actually exists at the biological level, and question the value of diagnosis in the lives of those labelled with autism. The book recognises that there are no easy answers but encourages engagement with these essential questions, and looks towards service provision and practice that moves beyond a reliance on all-encompassing labels. This unique contribution to the growing field of critical autism studies brings together authors from clinical psychiatry, clinical and community psychology, social sciences, disability studies, education and cultural studies, as well as those with personal experiences of autism. It is essential and challenging reading for anyone with a personal, professional or academic interest in 'autism'.

The Story of My Life (1903) is the autobiography of Helen Keller. Written while she was an undergraduate student at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Story of My Life was a joint effort between Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan, and Anne's husband John Macy. "Gradually I got used to the silence and darkness that surrounded me and forgot that it had ever been different, until she came-my teacher-who was to set my spirit free. But during the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, 'the day is ours, and what the day has shown.'" After losing her hearing and sight as an infant, Helen Keller received a life-changing education from her dedicated teacher Anne Sullivan, herself vision impaired. As she learned to communicate through signs, she found an innate determination to surpass the expectations of those around her, eventually becoming the first deafblind person to obtain her Bachelor of Arts. Her autobiography is a rich retelling of the first twenty-one years of Keller's life, a period marked by tragedy and miracle alike, shaping her into one of the twentieth century's leading civil rights activists and public speakers. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

From workplace accidents to polio epidemics and new waves of immigration to the returning veterans of World War II, the first half of the twentieth century brought the issue of disability-what it was, what it meant, and how to address it-into national focus. Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America explores the history of disability activism, concentrating on the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), a national, cross-disability organization founded during World War II to address federal disability policy. Unlike earlier disability groups, which had been organized around specific disabilities or shared military experience, AFPH brought thousands of disabled citizens and veterans into the national political arena, demanding equal access to economic security and full citizenship. At its core, the AFPH legislative campaign pushed the federal government to move disabled citizens from the margins to the center of the welfare state. Through extensive archival research, Audra Jennings examines the history of AFPH and its enduring legacy in the disability rights movement. Counter to most narratives that place the inception of disability activism in the 1970s, Jennings argues that the disability rights movement is firmly rooted in the politics of World War II. In the years immediately following the war, leaders in AFPH worked with organized labor movements to advocate for an ambitious political agenda, including employer education campaigns, a federal pension program, improved access to healthcare and education, and an affirmative action program for disabled workers. Out of the Horrors of War extends the arc of the disability rights movement into the 1940s and traces how its terms of inclusion influenced the movement for decades after, leading up to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

This book brings together research relating to the economics of disability in Ireland. It addresses a range of issues of relevance to the economic circumstances of people with disabilities, considering topics such as social inclusion, poverty, the labour market, living standards and public policy. It also considers issues of specific relevance to children, working-age adults and older people with disabilities, providing important evidence that can help improve disability policies, services and supports. Each chapter presents a clear and relatively non-technical treatment of the specific topic under consideration, making it accessible to a greater number of interested readers. In doing so, it provides an important addition to our knowledge and understanding of the economics of disability and will serve as a useful and up-to-date resource for a range of interested parties both in Ireland and internationally. -- .

This book is a result of an output of a Commission of the World Leisure and Recreation Association (WLRA) to examine the role of leisure and education for leisure activities among people with special needs living in the community, and requiring social or health services outside hospital. It provides a conceptual and practical framework for understanding the role of leisure education for community development with a special emphasis on special populations. It will also serve the reader as a foundation for developing models and programs for leisure education within community settings.

Takes the recent wave of German autobiographical writing on illness and disability seriously as literature, demonstrating the value of a literary disability studies approach. In the German-speaking world there has been a new wave - intensifying since 2007 - of autobiographically inspired writing on illness and disability, death and dying. Nina Schmidt's book takes this writing seriously as literature,examining how the authors of such personal narratives come to write of their experiences between the poles of cliche and exceptionality. Identifying shortcomings in the approaches taken thus far to such texts, she makes suggestions as to how to better read their narratives from the stance of literary scholarship, then demonstrates the value of a literary disability studies approach to such writing with close readings of Charlotte Roche's Schossgebete(2011), Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (2009), Verena Stefan's Fremdschlafer (2007), and - in the final, comparative chapter - Christoph Schlingensief's So schoen wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (2009) and Wolfgang Herrndorf's blog-cum-book Arbeit und Struktur (2010-13). Schmidt shows that authors dealing with illness and disability do so with an awareness of their precarious subject position in the public eye, a position they negotiate creatively. Writing the liminal experience of serious illness along the borders of genre, moving between fictional and autobiographical modes, they carve out spaces from which they speak up and share their personal stories in the realm of literature, to political ends. Nina Schmidt is a postdoctoral researcher in the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universitat Berlin.

The two volume set LNCS 9758 and 9759, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs, ICCHP 2015, held in Linz, Austria, in July 2016. The 115 revised full papers and 48 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 239 submissions. The papers included in the second volume are organized in the following topics: environmental sensing technologies for visual impairments; tactile graphics and models for blind people and recognition of shapes by touch; tactile maps and map data for orientation and mobility; mobility support for blind and partially sighted people; the use of mobile devices by individuals with special needs as an assistive tool; mobility support for people with motor and cognitive disabilities; towards e-inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities; At and inclusion of people with autism or dyslexia; AT and inclusion of deaf and hard of hearing people; accessible computer input; AT and rehabilitation for people with motor and mobility disabilities; HCI, AT and ICT for blind and partially sighted people.

Setting a case study of deaf people's leisure practices in north-west England within a wider examination of communal deaf leisure across Britain, this book offers new insights into a misunderstood and misrepresented community. Available for the first time in paperback, the book provides a detailed analysis of deaf people's leisure during the second half of the twentieth century, which questions perceptions of deafness as a disability, investigates the importance of shared leisure in community formation more generally and examines the ways in which changing patterns of socialisation are affecting British society. Although focusing on the British deaf community, the concepts and principles explored in this book can be applied across a wide range of social, cultural and ethnic groups. This book draws upon a wide range of subject areas and will consequently be of interest to students and academics working in the fields of disability, history, community and cultural minority studies, sport, leisure and regional studies. -- .

Many people are shocked upon discovering that tens of thousands of innocent persons in the United States were involuntarily sterilized, forced into institutions, and otherwise maltreated within the course of the eugenic movement (1900-30). Such social control efforts are easier to understand when we consider the variety of dehumanizing and fear-inducing rhetoric propagandists invoke to frame their potential victims. This book, now available in paperback, details the major rhetorical themes employed within the context of eugenic propaganda, drawing largely on original sources of the period. Early in the twentieth century the term 'moron' was developed to describe the primary targets of eugenic control. This book demonstrates how the image of moronity in the United States was shaped by eugenicists. This book will be of interest not only to disability and eugenics scholars and historians, but to anyone who wants to explore the means by which pejorative metaphors are used to support social control efforts against vulnerable community groups. -- .

Disability Rhetoric is the first book to view rhetorical theory and history through the lens of disability studies. Traditionally, the body has been seen as, at best, a rhetorical distraction; at worst, those whose bodies do not conform to a narrow range of norms are disqualified from speaking. Yet, Dolmage argues that communication has always been obsessed with the meaning of the body and that bodily difference is always highly rhetorical. Following from this rewriting of rhetorical history, he outlines the development of a new theory, affirming the ideas that all communication is embodied, that the body plays a central role in all expression, and that greater attention to a range of bodies is therefore essential to a better understanding of rhetorical histories, theories, and possibilities.

In After War Zoe H. Wool explores how the American soldiers most severely injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars struggle to build some kind of ordinary life while recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center from grievous injuries like lost limbs and traumatic brain injury. Between 2007 and 2008, Wool spent time with many of these mostly male soldiers and their families and loved ones in an effort to understand what it's like to be blown up and then pulled toward an ideal and ordinary civilian life in a place where the possibilities of such a life are called into question. Contextualizing these soldiers within a broader political and moral framework, Wool considers the soldier body as a historically, politically, and morally laden national icon of normative masculinity. She shows how injury, disability, and the reality of soldiers' experiences and lives unsettle this icon and disrupt the all-too-common narrative of the heroic wounded veteran as the embodiment of patriotic self-sacrifice. For these soldiers, the uncanny ordinariness of seemingly extraordinary everyday circumstances and practices at Walter Reed create a reality that will never be normal.

Law and Neurodiversity offers invaluable guidance on how autism research can inform juvenile justice policies in Canada and the United States. In Canada, the diversion of youth away from formal processing has fostered community-based strategies for serving those with autism. US policies rely more heavily on formal responses, often employing juvenile custody facilities. Building on a rigorous exploration of how assessment, rehabilitation, and community re-entry differ between the two countries, Law and Neurodiversity offers a much-needed comparative analysis of autism and juvenile justice policies on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel.

This book brings together research relating to the economics of disability in Ireland. It addresses a range of issues of relevance to the economic circumstances of people with disabilities, considering topics such as social inclusion, poverty, the labour market, living standards and public policy. It also considers issues of specific relevance to children, working-age adults and older people with disabilities, providing important evidence that can help improve disability policies, services and supports. Each chapter presents a clear and relatively non-technical treatment of the specific topic under consideration, making it accessible to a greater number of interested readers. In doing so, it provides an important addition to our knowledge and understanding of the economics of disability and will serve as a useful and up-to-date resource for a range of interested parties both in Ireland and internationally. -- .

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. -- .

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.