This powerful book presents a series of perspectives on the process of self-organisation of disabled people which has taken place over the last thirty years. The 1980s saw a transformation in our understanding of the nature of disability, and consequently the kinds of policies and services necessary to ensure the full economic and social integration of disabled people. At the heart of this transformation has been the rise in the number of organisations controlled and run by disabled people themselves. Through a series of interviews with disabled people who have been centrally involved in the rise of the disability movement, the authors present a new collective history which throws light on the politics of the 1980s, and offers insights into future political developments in the 1990s and on into the 21st century.

This unique monograph, based on empirical research, used the oral history approach to explore the careers of 31 intellectual disability nurses from England and the Republic of Ireland; each with at least 30 years' experience. We sought to understand motives for such long service to nursing practice. Some had worked in the intellectual disability hospitals of the 19th and 20th Centuries. In both jurisdictions these have almost closed and been replaced with smaller living configurations; subsequently few such nurses have experience of these institutions. This makes it important to hear their stories, which were digitally recorded; now forming a unique collection in the Royal College of Nursing's archives. These oral histories when synthesised with prevailing discourse of intellectual disability nursing from literature, and research put into perspective contemporary nursing workforce challenges faced by these nurses in both jurisdictions. Their stories are testament, amongst other things, to a strong 'sense of justice... doing the right thing and making a difference'. Some reported a 'very early interest in working with people with intellectual disabilities'. And at 'journey's end' sadly, almost universally, they reported a sense of being 'undervalued'. Their narratives articulate enormous health and social care change witnessed over three decades or more. But above all else they give voice to commitment, dedication, and kindness to a vulnerable, and often marginalised people, those with intellectual disabilities, as such it gives voice to otherwise 'Untold Stories'.

First Published in 1996. The study makes an important contribution to newly emerging participative research methodologies in that it places the parents' view of the world at the centre of the analysis and in so doing, articulates the kinds of changes they think are necessary to improve the quality of life for their families and themselves. Due to an application of a social model, the book is important not just to families with deaf children and the professionals who work with them but to anyone who has an interest in disability issues.

Drawing on the work of George Lakoff, this book provides a detailed analysis of the organism metaphor, which draws an analogy between the national or social body and a physical body. With attention to the manner in which this metaphor conceives of various sub-groups as either beneficial or detrimental to the (social) body's overall functioning, the author examines the use of this metaphor to view marginalized sub-populations as invasive or contagious entities that need to be treated in the same way as harmful bacteria or pathogens. Analyzing the organism metaphor as it was employed in the service of social injustice through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States, Contagion and the National Body focuses on the alarm eras of the restrictive immigration period (1890-1924), the agitation against Chinese and Japanese populations on the West Coast, the eugenic period's targeting of feeble-minded persons and other "defectives," periods of anti-Semitism, the anti-Communist movements, and various forms of racial animosity against African-Americans.

This is a detailed analysis of the Mental Handicap Registers in the North West Thames Region, London. It gives insights into the problems faced by handicapped individuals, their parents and the authorities responsible for providing services.;The incidence of mental handicap has remained fairly static over the decades, but there is an increase in life expectancy, with a resulting increase in prevalence. Quality of life is an important factor. The challenge is to create an environment where individuals can attain their maximum potential without prejudicing others. With its extensive discussion of the issues involved, this text should be beneficial to all professionals involved in implementing changes in services and anyone with an interest in improving quality of life for mentally handicapped people.

Undoing Ableism is a sourcebook for teaching about disability and anti-ableism in K-12 classrooms. Conceptually grounded in disability studies, critical pedagogy, and social justice education, this book provides both a rationale as well as strategies for broad-based inquiries that allow students to examine social and cultural foundations of oppression, learn to disrupt ableism, and position themselves as agents of social change. Using an interactive style, the book provides tools teachers can use to facilitate authentic dialogues with students about constructed meanings of disability, the nature of belongingness, and the creation of inclusive communities.

Disability and the Posthuman is the first study to analyse cultural representations and deployments of disability as they interact with posthumanist theories of technology and embodiment. Working across a wide range of texts, many new to critical enquiry, in contemporary writing, film and cultural practice from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Japan, it covers a diverse range of topics, including: contemporary cultural theory and aesthetics; design, engineering and gender; the visualisation of prosthetic technologies in the representation of war and conflict; and depictions of work, time and sleep. While noting the potential limitations of posthumanist assessments of the technologized body, the study argues that there are exciting, productive possibilities and subversive potentials in the dialogue between disability and posthumanism as they generate dissident crossings of cultural spaces. Such intersections cover both fictional/imagined and material/grounded examples of disability and look to a future in which the development of technology and complex embodiment of disability presence align to produce sustainable yet radical creative and critical voices.

In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of "debility"-bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors-to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.

In Brilliant Imperfection Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure-the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds. The stories he tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, Clare weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, he adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure. Ultimately Brilliant Imperfection reveals cure to be an ideology grounded in the twin notions of normal and natural, slippery and powerful, necessary and damaging all at the same time.

Introduces key ideas and offers a sense of the new frontiers and questions in the emerging field of disability media studies Disability Media Studies articulates the formation of a new field of study, based in the rich traditions of media, cultural, and disability studies. Necessarily interdisciplinary and diverse, this collection weaves together work from scholars from a variety of disciplinary homes, into a broader conversation about exploring media artifacts in relation to disability. The book provides a comprehensive overview for anyone interested in the study of disability and media today. Case studies include familiar contemporary examples-such as Iron Man 3, Lady Gaga, and Oscar Pistorius-as well as historical media, independent disability media, reality television, and media technologies. The contributors consider disability representation, the role of media in forming cultural assumptions about ability, the construction of disability via media technologies, and how disabled audiences respond to particular media artifacts. The volume concludes with afterwords from two different perspectives on the field-one by disability scholar Rachel Adams, the other by media scholars Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne-that reflect upon the collection, the ongoing conversations, and the future of disability media studies. Disability Media Studies is a crucial text for those interested in this flourishing field, and will pave the way for a greater understanding of disability media studies and its critical concepts and conversations.

R. Leidl, P. Potthoff, and D. Schwefel Health is a most vital resource represented in the degree of our well-being and our ability to conduct active and satisfactory lives. Acute and chronic illnesses diminish such well-being and abilities and may require resources for medical or nursing care. The improvement in health status, a major objective of health policy, requires the measurement of the severity of diseases and their consequences as essential elements of information. In application, the measurement approaches are gaining in relevance as they become more feasible and as more experience is gathered about their implementation and utilization. The feasibility of these new information tools is supported by developments in data processing technologies that permit broadly based empirical applications. Wider applications lead to improvements in the management use of this information. At the European level, better indicator systems of diseases and their various aspects are facing an increasing demand for patient-based health and health system comparisons and analyses. The measurement of health status and its implications can comprise a number of dimensions: various concepts of health and disease, types of diseases, methodological approaches of measurement, purposes of application and states of implementation.

This edited collection uses a critical theory perspective and draws on expertise from a range of contemporary policy and practice areas. Contributors include people with disabilities, family members, researchers, academics and practitioners. This book is an ideal text for students of social work, human services, child and youth care and disability studies. Chapters include first-person accounts from persons with disabilities, perspectives of families and historical perspectives, as well as a critical exploration of demographics, human rights issues, disability legislation and policy in Canada, theoretical approaches to disability, intersectionality and disability, Aboriginal people and disability, mental health disability, principles of anti-ableist practice, advocacy and strategies for change. This book offers as a fresh Canadian perspective on disAbility from a critical lens, challenging and inspiring students and practitioners alike to think outside the box and to examine their own attitudes and values toward disAbility, ensuring that they do not inadvertently impose ableist and oppressive practices on one of Canada s most marginalized populations."

In Attachments to War Jennifer Terry traces how biomedical logics entangle Americans in a perpetual state of war. Focusing on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2002 and 2014, Terry identifies the presence of a biomedicine-war nexus in which new forms of wounding provoke the continual development of complex treatment, rehabilitation, and prosthetic technologies. At the same time, the U.S. military rationalizes violence and military occupation as necessary conditions for advancing medical knowledge and saving lives. Terry examines the treatment of war-generated polytrauma, postinjury bionic prosthetics design, and the development of defenses against infectious pathogens, showing how the interdependence between war and biomedicine is interwoven with neoliberal ideals of freedom, democracy, and prosperity. She also outlines the ways in which military-sponsored biomedicine relies on racialized logics that devalue the lives of Afghan and Iraqi citizens and U.S. veterans of color. Uncovering the mechanisms that attach all Americans to war and highlighting their embeddedness and institutionalization in everyday life via the government, media, biotechnology, finance, and higher education, Terry helps lay the foundation for a more meaningful opposition to war.

Intellectual disability is often overlooked within mainstream disability studies, and theories developed about disability and physical impairment may not always be appropriate when thinking about intellectual (or learning) disability. This pioneering book, in considering intellectually disabled people's lives, sets out a care ethics model of disability that outlines the emotional caring sphere, where love and care are psycho-socially questioned, the practical caring sphere, where day-to-day care is carried out, and the socio-political caring sphere, where social intolerance and aversion to difficult differences are addressed. It does so by discussing issue-based everyday life, such as family, relationships, media representations and education, in an evocative and creative manner. This book draws from an understanding of how intellectual disability is represented in all forms of media, a feminist ethics of care, and capabilities, as well as other theories, to provide a critique and alternative to the social model of disability as well as illuminate care-less spaces that inhabit all the caring spheres. The first two chapters of the book provide an overview of intellectual disability, the debates surrounding disability, and outline the model. Having begun to develop an innovative theoretical framework for understanding intellectual disability and being human, the book then moves onto empirical and narrative driven issue-based chapters. The following chapters build on the emergent framework and discuss the application of particular theories in three different substantive areas: education, mothering and sexual politics. The concluding remarks draw together the common themes across the applied chapters and link them to the overarching theoretical framework. An important read for all those studying and researching intellectual or learning disability, this book will be an essential resource in sociology, philosophy, criminology (law), social work, education and nursing in particular.

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression comes a monumental new work, a decade in the writing, about family. In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so. Solomons startling proposition is that diversity is what unites us all. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, as are the triumphs of love Solomon documents in every chapter. All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on forty thousand pages of interview transcripts with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges. Whether considering prenatal screening for genetic disorders, cochlear implants for the deaf, or gender reassignment surgery for transgender people, Solomon narrates a universal struggle toward compassion. Many families grow closer through caring for a challenging child; most discover supportive communities of others similarly affected; some are inspired to become advocates and activists, celebrating the very conditions they once feared. Woven into their courageous and affirming stories is Solomons journey to accepting his own identity, which culminated in his midlife decision, influenced by this research, to become a parent. Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original thinker, Far from the Tree explores themes of generosity, acceptance, and tolerance--all rooted in the insight that love can

In this book I present a series of eleven essays written between 1978 and 1987 on subjects relevant to the anthropology of health and international health. The issues addressed in these essays were investigated during 38 months of fieldwork in rural southwest peninsular India (197 4-86) and 15 months of fieldwork in southwest Sri Lanka (1983-84 ).;During various periods of this time I conducted ethnographic fieldwork, explored the feasibility of participatory community research, facilitated the development of a postgraduate health education training program, and served as a consultant to various international health organizations. The essays document my ongoing attempts to integrate academic interests in the anthropology of health with applications of anthropology for international health and development. The volume is divided into four sections structured around the themes of: ethnophysiology, illness ethnography, pharmaceutical related behavior, and health communication. Included are studies of fertility and pregnancy (Chapters 1 and 2), states of malnutrition and approaches to nutrition education (Chapters 5 and 11 ), diarrheal disease and water boiling behavior (Chapters 6 and 1 0), and lay perceptions of fertility control methods and medicines (Chapters 3 and 7). Emerging from these studies is a recognition that perceptions of ethnophysiology and contingent health concerns signifi cantly influence health behavior and the use as well as demand for traditional and modern health resources."

Americans spend more than five billion dollars a year on cosmetics. In such a culture, to be unattractive is to be at a disadvantage; to have a physical abnormality that impairs one's appearance is to be stigmatized and rejected. Destructive to adults, this rejection can be devastating to children.In Beauty is the Beast, Ann Hill Beuf examines the stigmatization of children who deviate from American standards of acceptable physical appearance. Children impaired by birth defects, dermatological disorders, excessive obesity, and similar disorders are frequently regarded as inferior and often repulsive, and they suffer rejection by strangers, peers, the professionals who are supposed to help them, and their own families.Using theory and methodology from sociology, anthropology, and psychology, as well as her own extensive interviews with children and their caretakers, Beuf analyzes both the effects of this stigmatization on children and the strategies they use to cope with it.Beauty is the Beast will interest parents and professionals who work with appearance-impaired children, as well as scholars and graduate students in the fields of nursing, sociology, social work, and psychology.

First published in 1979, this book concerns itself primarily with the mothers of mentally handicapped children. It discusses the problems of assistance that they may have experienced from their families, the community, or the available services. Whilst arguing for far more support for mothers when they are the main carer, this book also suggests reasons why some families are more easily able to cope with the problems of caring for severely handicapped children. This study is based on research that was conducted for and funded by the Department of Health and Social Security between 1973 and 1976.

First published in 1981, this book was written to help parents and teachers to participate in child-based mobility programmes, covering the needs of visually-handicapped children from pre-school to adulthood. It gives insight into ways in which these figures can make the world meaningful to young children, as well as making them aware of the special training that is necessary to develop the social skills of daily living that a sighted child acquires through imitation. Travel techniques must be learnt to enable these children to move independently and the book describes various methods that can be used by the blind traveller. It also examines the role of physical education and dance, both of particular importance for the visually-handicapped child at school age.

The provision of assistive technology is an important individual and collective service of the welfare state. The state plays a significant role towards linking users and products, and the matching of devices and users is both a science and an art. However, many people feel it is stigmatising to use individually designed assistive technologies as they often, in a subtle way, convey discriminating barriers in society. The major challenges of assistive technology are thus to reduce social exclusion and marginalisation and, importantly, to reduce individual risks and societal costs related to non-use due to deficiencies in usability, aesthetics and design of the technologies. This groundbreaking book discusses the relationships among society, disability and technology by using different empirical examples (e.g., school, everyday life) to show why the combination of disability studies and STS-studies (science, technology and society) is a fruitful approach to understanding and meeting these challenges. The book explores the significance of the technologies for users, society and the field; identifies challenges to designing, adopting and using assistive technologies; and points at theoretical challenges in research as well as professional challenges in assistive technology service provision. The book also scrutinises the role of assistive technology devices, as well as the organisational structure of the assistive technology market, in relation to disabled people's lives. This book will be valuable reading for students, academics, teachers and social educators interested in Disability Studies, STS Studies, Product Design, Sociology, Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy, as well as engineers working in the field of assistive technology.

In Attachments to War Jennifer Terry traces how biomedical logics entangle Americans in a perpetual state of war. Focusing on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2002 and 2014, Terry identifies the presence of a biomedicine-war nexus in which new forms of wounding provoke the continual development of complex treatment, rehabilitation, and prosthetic technologies. At the same time, the U.S. military rationalizes violence and military occupation as necessary conditions for advancing medical knowledge and saving lives. Terry examines the treatment of war-generated polytrauma, postinjury bionic prosthetics design, and the development of defenses against infectious pathogens, showing how the interdependence between war and biomedicine is interwoven with neoliberal ideals of freedom, democracy, and prosperity. She also outlines the ways in which military-sponsored biomedicine relies on racialized logics that devalue the lives of Afghan and Iraqi citizens and U.S. veterans of color. Uncovering the mechanisms that attach all Americans to war and highlighting their embeddedness and institutionalization in everyday life via the government, media, biotechnology, finance, and higher education, Terry helps lay the foundation for a more meaningful opposition to war.

Published over twenty years ago, Regina G. Lawrence's The Politics of Force was the first scholarly book to look at the way in which media coverage of unexpected, dramatic events shaped public consciousness about important social and political problems. At a time when police brutality was rarely discussed in the news, Lawrence examined police use of force in over 500 incidents, with an in-depth look at the Rodney King case. In doing so, she showed that when incidents of police brutality became news, they offered one of the few real opportunities for marginalized voices and activists to find a public platform and take on the powerful. In the intervening years, the empirical and theoretical contributions of The Politics of Force have become more significant, not only because police brutality is back in the news, but because the media system itself has changed. In this updated edition, Lawrence contextualizes and extends these contributions, while including a closer look at race and racial justice in incidents of police use of force. Reflecting on the context in which the book was written-a time when race and policing received limited coverage in the news and in the field of political communication-Lawrence considers what has changed in media studies since the year 2000, what things haven't changed, and why. Moreover, Lawrence examines coverage of more recent incidents of police violence and the ways in which the voices of citizen activists are treated in the news today. In turn, she addresses the important question of how defining political problems through such events might or might not produce more lasting policy change. Expanding on her landmark publication, Lawrence provides an accessible update on news production dynamics and police use of force for a new generation of scholars, students, and activists.

It is not easy to summarize the studies that have dealt with the health effects of un employment on the unemployed. The main problem impeding a comparison of their results is the diversity of theoretical constructs associated with physical and especially mental health and, above all, an apparently inexhaustible variety of op erationalizations of these constructs. It is significant that the six conclusions drawn from the present state of unemployment research by the organizers of a re cent conference on the individual and social consequences of unemployment in cluded the following request: "In view of the relevant constructs, it seems to be most urgent to find or to develop operationalizations which can be agreed upon, in order to guarantee comparability of research results" (Kieselbach and Wacker 1985, p. XX; my translation). Nevertheless, the results of these studies allow the statement that a negative in fluence of job loss on psychological well-being can be regarded as a validated finding. The influence on physical health, however, must be assessed very careful ly and in a differentiated manner. The few investigations dealing with this ques tion arrive at different conclusions; moreover, possibly relieving effects of unem ployment on health come into sight."