Childhood disabilities, particularly cognitive disabilities, are on the rise yet social programs and services to help US families respond to disabilities are not. Many families turn to grandparents for assistance juggling work, family responsibilities, and specialized therapies. This book is based on in-depth interviews with grandparents who are providing at least some care to grandchildren with disabilities. The analyses will help to better understand (1) under what conditions grandparents provide care and support, (2) what types and intensities of care and support grandparents provide, and (3) the impact of that care and support on grandparents' social, emotional, physical, and financial wellbeing. In this fascinating and provocative book, Madonna Harrington Meyer and Ynesse Abdul-Malak take readers on a deep dive into the complex lives of grandparents who care for their disabled grandchildren. In Grandparenting Children with Disabilities, their interviews reveal the joy, meaning, and purpose grandparents find in caregiving, the challenges and frustrations they encounter, and the many ways they compromise their own health and well-being for the sake of their grandchildren. Drawing from theories of cumulative inequality and from their deep knowledge of the US policy context, the authors lay bare the systemic failures that leave families of children with disabilities without adequate support and that place the most vulnerable among them at grave physical, emotional, and financial risk... Jane McLeod, Provost Professor, Indiana University Grandparents in the U.S. already take on far more parenting responsibilities as compared to their peers in other countries. Grandparenting Children with Disabilities demonstrates that the intensity of these responsibilities is compounded for those whose grandchildren have disabilities given limited policy supports and a society still largely unaccommodating to those with disabilities. This book beautifully navigates the tension between the love these grandparents have for their grandchildren and the challenges they face caring for them. Pamela Herd, Professor, Georgetown University Grandparenting Children with Disabilities offers important insights about the lived experience of older adults who care for and care about their grandchildren...The authors skillfully integrate the stories they tell with consideration of macro social structural influences and life course perspectives... I recommend it highly! Eva Kahana, Distinguished University Professor, Case Western Reserve

In this probing exploration of what it means to be deaf, Brenda Brueggemann goes beyond any simple notion of identity politics to explore the very nature of identity itself. Looking at a variety of cultural texts, she brings her fascination with borders and between-places to expose and enrich our understanding of how deafness embodies itself in the world, in the visual, and in language.

Taking on the creation of the modern deaf subject, Brueggemann ranges from the intersections of gender and deafness in the work of photographers Mary and Frances Allen at the turn of the last century, to the state of the field of Deaf Studies at the beginning of our new century. She explores the power and potential of American Sign Language--wedged, as she sees it, between letter-bound language and visual ways of learning--and argues for a rhetorical approach and digital future for ASL literature.

The narration of deaf lives through writing becomes a pivot around which to imagine how digital media and documentary can be used to convey deaf life stories. Finally, she expands our notion of diversity within the deaf identity itself, takes on the complex relationship between deaf and hearing people, and offers compelling illustrations of the intertwined, and sometimes knotted, nature of individual and collective identities within Deaf culture.

In addition to advising judicial decision-makers by assessing such issues as pre-trial competency, insanity, and dangerousness, mental health professionals working in criminal justice system settings manage and treat mentally ill and substance abusing offenders on a daily basis. This work may involve either institutional treatments or community-based programs. The purpose of this bibliography is to collect the professional literature from numerous disciplines, including psychology, psychiatry, nursing, education, and social work, that addresses the theoretical, empirical, and practice-related issues encountered by mental health researchers and practitioners in developing and providing services to mentally ill and substance abusing offenders in criminal justice system settings. There are over 1250 annotated citations and author and subject indexes to facilitate access to the resources listed.

This volume provides an informed review of the accomplishments of the Washington Group on Disability Statistics (WG) in the provision of international data and statistics on disability. It does so within the context of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The volume includes a description of the development and testing of a short set of questions for Censuses, now used in approximately 29 countries and recommended in the U.N.'s Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses: The 2020 Round, which includes disability as a core topic to be collected in censuses. It discusses the experiences of several countries on the use of the WG questions and how this has impacted on national agendas in the area of disability. It follows the development and testing of an extended set of questions for use in national surveys other than censuses and examines the challenges of translation and the importance of generating comparable question sets in different languages and within different cultures. It studies the examination of cognitive testing techniques in a variety of countries, and presents the results of the first round of censuses in 2010 in countries using the six question set. The volume includes discussions of the new development of question modules on a broad range of child disability and functioning, and the environmental contexts of participation that are part of the current work of the WG. In addition, it contains a reflection on the use of the WG's functionality approach to identifying disabilities by humanitarian agencies to identify disabilities in populations of displaced persons. A thoughtful conclusion addresses what the development of cross-nationally comparable data can mean for the improvement of circumstances for all persons with disabilities.

This handbook questions, debates and subverts commonly held assumptions about disability and citizenship in the global postcolonial context. Discourses of citizenship and human rights, so elemental to strategies for addressing disability-based inequality in wealthier nations, have vastly different ramifications in societies of the Global South, where resources for development are limited, democratic processes may be uncertain, and access to education, health, transport and other key services cannot be taken for granted. In a broad range of areas relevant to disability equity and transformation, an eclectic group of contributors critically consider whether, when and how citizenship may be used as a lever of change in circumstances far removed from UN boardrooms in New York or Geneva. Debate is polyvocal, with voices from the South engaging with those from the North, disabled people with nondisabled, and activists and politicians intersecting with researchers and theoreticians. Along the way, accepted wisdoms on a host of issues in disability and international development are enriched and problematized. The volume explores what life for disabled people in low and middle income countries tells us about subjects such as identity and intersectionality, labour and the global market, family life and intimate relationships, migration, climate change, access to the digital world, participation in sport and the performing arts, and much else.

Drawing from long term ethnographic work and practice in Guatemala, this incisive and interdisciplinary text brings in perspectives from critical disability studies, postcolonial theory and critical development to explore the various interactions and dynamics between disability and extreme poverty in rural areas.

Disability and Disaster adds disaster research to the expanding area of disability studies. The book includes writings by international scholars and first-hand narratives from individuals with disabilities affected by disasters around the globe. Hazards described in these narratives include earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, fires, and war.

This edited collection explores the intersectionality of childhood and disability. Whereas available scholarship tends to concentrate on care-giving, parenting, or supporting and teaching children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, the contributors to this collection offer an engaging and accessible insight into childhoods that are impacted by disability and impairment. The discussions cut across traditional disciplinary divides and offer critical insights into the key issues that relate to disabled children and young people's lives, encouraging the exploration of both disability and childhoods in their broadest terms. Dis/abled Childhoods? will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including Special Educational Needs; Childhood Studies; Disability Studies; Youth Studies; and Health and Social Care.

In a unique way this study probes the linguistic, sociological, religious and theological issues associated with being physically disabled in the ancient Near East. By examining the law collections, societal conventions and religious obligations towards individuals who were physically disabled Fiorello gives us an understanding of the world a disabled person would enter. He explores the connection between the literal use of disability language and the metaphorical use of this language made in biblical prophetic literature as a prophetic critique of Israel's dysfunctional relationship with God. COMMENDATIONS "In this well-researched volume Michael Fiorello has made a significant contribution to the study of disability in the Bible in the context of its ancient Near Eastern world. Fiorello's work needs to be taken seriously in the church, the academy, and the world." - Richard E. Averbeck, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, USA

This book presents an ethnographic case study of the personal motivations, advocacy, and activation of social capital needed to create and sustain the Immortelle Children's Centre, a private school that has served children with disabilities in Trinidad/Tobago for four decades. Based on narratives by parents from the 1980's, current parents, teachers, community advocates, and the author, who was the founder of Immortelle in 1978, the study views the school within the context of a nation standing in a liminal space between developed and developing societies. It argues that the attainment of equity for children with disabilities will require an agenda that includes a legal mandate for education of all children, increased public funding for education, health and therapeutic services, and an on-going public awareness campaign. Relating this study to the global debate on inclusion, the author shows how the implementation of this agenda would have to be adapted to the social, cultural, and economic realities of the society.

The newly emerged interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on its social construction, and shifting attention from biology to culture. In the past fifteen years, disability-related scholarly work has been undertaken in a variety of disciplines, and disability now occupies a central place in cultural analysis, along with well-established categories like race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. The Oxford Handbook of Disability Studies represents a comprehensive "state of current research" for the field of Disability Studies and Music. The forty-two chapters in the book span a wide chronological and geographical range, from the biblical, the medieval, and the Elizabethan, through the canonical classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to modernist styles and contemporary musical theater and popular genres, with stops along the way in post-Civil War America, Ghana and the South Pacific, and many other interesting times and places. Disability is a broad, heterogeneous, and porous identity, and that diversity is reflected in the variety of bodily conditions under discussion here, including autism and intellectual disability, deafness, blindness, and mobility impairment often coupled with bodily deformity. Cultural Disability Studies has, from its inception, been oriented toward physical and sensory disabilities, and has generally been less effective in dealing with cognitive and intellectual impairments and with the sorts of emotions and behaviors that in our era are often medicalized as "mental illness." In that context, it is notable that so many of these essays are centrally concerned with madness, that broad and ever-shifting cultural category. There is also in impressive diversity of subject matter including YouTube videos, Ghanaian drumming, Cirque du Soleil, piano competitions, castrati, medieval smoking songs, and popular musicals. Amid this diversity of time, place, style, medium, and topic, the chapters share two core commitments. First, they are united in their theoretical and methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction. Disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical culture. Second, these essays individually and collectively make the case that disability is not something at the periphery of culture and music, but something central to our art and to our humanity.

This elegantly written book offers an unexpected and unprecedented account of blindness and sight. Legally blind since the age of eleven, Georgina Kleege draws on her experiences to offer a detailed testimony of visual, impairment -- both her own view of the world and the worlds view of the blind. "I hope to turn the reader's gaze outward, to say, not only Heres what I see but also 'Here's what you see, to show both what's unique and what's universal", Kleege writes.

Kleege describes the negative social status of the blind, analyzes stereotypes of the blind that have been perpetuated by movies, and discusses how blindness has been portrayed in literature. She vividly conveys the visual experience of someone with severely impaired sight and explains what she can see and what she cannot (and how her inability to achieve eye contact -- in a society that prizes that form of connection -- has affected her). Finally she tells of the various ways she reads, and the freedom she felt when she stopped concealing her blindness and acquired skills, such as reading braille, as part of a new, blind identity. Without sentimentality or cliches, Kleege offers us the opportunity to imagine life without sight.

This book presents an international research-based framework that has empowered parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to become critical decision makers to actively guide their child's learning and self-advocacy. Parents can use this framework to identify their child's vision and dreams, and to work with educators and service providers to establish specific learning goals and to implement effective interventions and programs that enable their child to achieve those goals and realise their vision for the future. The book begins by reviewing available research on evidence-based practice for children with ASD and outlining the Cycle of Learning decision-making framework for parents and professionals. Throughout the remainder of the book, case studies are presented to illustrate the ways in which different parents have successfully utilised this framework to develop effective plans for their child and to advocate for learning and education programs for both their child and other children with ASD in school and community settings. In addition, it highlights concrete examples of how parents have used the framework to empower their children with ASD to develop their self-awareness and self-determination, and to be able to self-advocate as they move through adolescence and into adult life.

Drawing from work in a wide range of fields, this book presents novel approaches to key debates in thinking about and defining disability. Differing from other works in Critical Disability Studies, it crucially demonstrates the consequences of radically rethinking the roles of language and perspective in constructing identities.

In recent years, attending to diversity in the cultivation of embodied identity has been given additional impetus as a result of intersectionality theory. Despite this, a key gap remains in terms of knowledge about masculinity and disability. This book addresses this lacuna through ten empirical chapters organised through the inter-related themes of corporeality, pedagogy and the critique of otherness. Each of the chapters positions the subject of masculinity and disability as a site of cultural pedagogy by affirming different ways of knowing of masculinity beyond dominant ideologies that normalise a particular masculine body and relegate disabled masculinities to the position of abnormal 'Other'. Part One focuses on pedagogy. Through the materialities of 'medicalized colonialism', imprimaturs of 'relational genealogies', 'compounding differences' and an analytical exposition of some of the neo-colonial conditions of the Global South within spatially-considered places of the Global North, Chapter 1 examines the denial of human rights to the Indigenous Anishinaabe community of Shoal Lake 40 in Canada. Chapter 1 theorises masculine corporeality in terms that take seriously First Nations', national and transnational body politics seriously. Chapter 2 examines the ways that movement and affect serve as a form of pedagogy for boys with autism spectrum in schools. Part Two's focus on corporeality includes an examination of the nexus of disability and diagnosis in the context of transgender men's experiences of mental health, and a discussion of the ways that intersex individuals who identify as men and have experienced 'genital normalising surgery' actively negotiate pluralised masculinities. The focus on media in Part Three encompasses a study of the mis-interpellation of the disabled male subject in Australian male literature, research on the discursive strategies utilised in media representations of disabled veterans in Turkey, and an analysis of the political implications of depictions of masculinity, disability and sexualities in a variety television program. Part Four's theme of self-stylisation takes up the questions of men's reconstructions of masculinity in light of Lyme Disease, the potential pleasures of heterosexuality for young men with a hearing disability in the realm of Australian-Rules Football, and the diverse ways that disabled men negotiate patriarchal masculinity in intimate relationships.

Dreams of pregnancy include the expectation that nine months of waiting will end with a joyous event. But, each year, a "shattered dream" occurs for thousands of couples who receive the news that their child will have a disabling condition severe enough that they may question if they are the best parents for their child. Societal expectation is that parents will raise their child or, if the condition of the child is detected prenatally, abortion is offered as an alternative. Parents who explore other options face scrutiny and, sometimes, condemnation--"lonely choices." Joanne Finnegan shares her personal experience and that of several families she interviewed who, like herself, explored options other than raising their child with a disability. Parents express with candor the overwhelming pain they felt when receiving "the news," the frustration when searching for options, the "no-win" feeling of decision making, the resolve with a final decision, and finally, life after the decision. Parent quotes also address issues such as spiritual dilemmas and interactions with friends, family, their other children, and medical professionals. Words of advice for new parents include how to build support systems and gather information, how to search for an adoptive family, and arranging the details of communication between adoptive and birth parents. Interviews with adoptive parents, poetry, and extensive resource lists complete the book. Written as a gift for other parents to help them cope with the pain and loneliness of decision making, this book will also be a valuable resource for medical professionals, adoption and social workers, counselors and spiritual advisors, and friends and family of theparents. It is a helpful as well as a deeply therapeutic book, providing a strong lesson in how to manage during this stressful time, from receiving "the news" about the baby's condition and prognosis, to weighing the factors involved in the various decisions. Should one take the baby home from the hospital? If not home, then where? Foster care, respite care, guardianship, and other forms of substitute care are mentioned. The author also examines decisions about finances and support services, family issues, finalizing an adoption plan, living with the decision, regrets, and future pregnancies.

This collection is a serious attempt to explore the relationship between cultural content and the form AIDS takes in different cultural settings. Written mostly by anthropologists, these essays examine different cultural areas and AIDS: central Africa (Rwanda), New York City, Houston, and London. In addition, articles address topics such as stigmatization of AIDS victims by the press; language and AIDS; class variations in the delivery of social services as experienced by gay and bisexual men in New York City; and homophobia and AIDS. The volume is a valuable addition to the social-anthropological literature on AIDS and should be useful to professionals and for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses dealing with sociocultural aspects of AIDS. "Choice"

AIDS has become a pandemic with major implications for the future vitality of humankind, according to this powerful new book compiled by the editor of the widely acclaimed The Social Dimensions of AIDS. As a cultural phenomenon the social patterning of AIDS can be explained and its direction largely predicted. Culture and AIDS is written almost entirely by anthropologists and represents the interest of dozens of anthropologists and represents the anthropologists' interest in AIDS related research and activities. Thirteen essays explore the social and cultural context of AIDS related behavior and clarify key domains in AIDS and the social sciences. This volume seeks to broaden its readers' understanding of how AIDS is changing our lives as it redirects human experience.

"Culture and AIDS" is not intended as an introduction to AIDS. It looks at AIDS as a cultural phenomenon. It includes an introduction and postscript by its editor, Douglas A Feldman. Eleven essays explore: AIDS in Rwanda (Central Africa); A Haitian village handling AIDS; possible cofactors in HIV transmission; social service needs of gay men with AIDS in NYC; psychological factors influencing adjustment among HIV-infected gay men in Houston; social behavior of female prostitutes in London; social effects of AIDS on minority women; AIDS-related stigma in the press; language and AIDS; and other AIDS related areas.

This book offers a critical investigation of the exclusion of individuals described as having 'learning difficulties' from participation in higher education. Using a postmodernist framework, the author explores the insights and experiences of a theatre group attempting to develop an undergraduate degree programme in the performing arts. In doing so, he provides a theoretical map of insights into discourses of power and knowledge, and makes transparent competing and contradictory discursive practices. Suggesting that 'learning difficulties' is a constructed and re-constructed discourse serving normative interests, the author demonstrates that despite the rhetoric of widening participation, individuals are intentionally beset by barriers, silenced and excluded from degree level participation. The author calls for a radical re-think of the notion of 'learning difficulties', segregated provision, access to employment in theatre, and critically questions the notion of participation in higher education. This pioneering volume will appeal to students and scholars of inclusive education, (critical) disability studies, cultural studies and the sociology of education.

How should disability justice be conceptualised, not by orthodox human rights or capabilities approaches, but by a legal philosophy that mirrors an African relational community ideal? This book develops the first comprehensive answer to this question through the contemporary literature on African philosophy, which is relied upon to construct a legal philosophy of disability justice comprising of ethical ideals of community, human relationships and obligations. From these ideals, an African legal philosophy of disability justice is offered as a criterion for critically evaluating existing laws, legal and political institutions, as well as providing an ethical basis for creating new ones to ensure that they are inclusive to people with disabilities. In taking an alternative perspective on the subject, the book outlines and emphasises the need for a new public culture of obligations owed to people with disabilities, highlighting both the prospects and difficulties of achieving the ideal of disability justice that continues to elude the lived experiences of millions of Africans today. Oche Onazi's An African Path to Disability Justice is the first book-length exploration of disability in the light of African ethics, as contrasted with the human rights and capabilities frameworks. Of particular interest are Onazi's thoughtful reflections on how various conceptions of community salient in African moral philosophy--including group-based, reciprocal and relational--bear on what we owe to the disabled. --Thaddeus Metz, Distinguished Professor, University of Johannesburg

Fundamental rights for all people with disabilities, education and employment are key for the inclusion of people with autism. They play as facilitators for the social inclusion of persons with autism and as multipliers for their enjoyment of other fundamental rights. After outlining the international and European dimensions of the legal protection of the rights to education and employment of people with autism, the book provides an in-depth analysis of domestic legislative, judicial and administrative practice of the EU Member States in these fields. Each chapter identifies the good practices on inclusive education and employment of people with autism consistent with principles and obligations enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Articles 24 and 27). The book contains the scientific results of the European Project "Promoting equal rights of people with autism in the field of employment and education" aimed at supporting the implementation of the UN Convention in the fields of inclusive education and employment.