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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

What has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactility, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: "All black life is neurodiverse life." This is not an equation, but an "approximation of proximity." Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity "schizz" around the baseline, uselessly, pragmatically, figuring a more-than of life living. Manning, in dialogue with Felix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition's accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality, proposes a "schizoanalysis" of the more-than, charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning.

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.

This is the first book of its kind to feature interdisciplinary art history and disability studies scholarship. Art historians have traditionally written about images of figures with impairments and artworks by disabled artists, without integrating disability studies scholarship, while many disability studies scholars discuss works of art, but do not necessarily incorporate art historical research and methodology. The chapters in this volume emphasize a shift away from the medical model of disability that is often scrutinized in art history by considering the social model and representations of disabled figures from a range of styles and periods, mostly from the twentieth century. Topics addressed include visible versus invisible impairments; scientific, anthropological, and vernacular images of disability; and the theories and implications of looking/staring versus gazing. They also explore ways in which art responds to, envisions, and at times stereotypes and pathologizes disability. The insights offered in this book contextualize understanding of disability historically, as well as in terms of medicine, literature, and visual culture.

Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between "wild" and "built" environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing "disability." Designed as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference.

This book looks anew at the tort remedy and reform proposals surrounding the modern debate on compensation for personal injuries. Arguing that serious distortions underlie the debate because of its focus on victims of traumatic accidents, the author calls for the consideration of other legally neglected but highly publicized sources of disability including man-made health hazards such as asbestos, tobacco, and Agent Orange, and socially-spread diseases such as AIDS. This ground-breaking study demonstrates that attention to such crucial issues explodes much of the conventional wisdom about just how to tackle reform and reveals that a fundamental rethinking of the compensation debate is urgently needed.

Is deafness a disability to be prevented or the uniting trait of a cultural community to be preserved? Combining the history of eugenics and genetics with deaf and disability history, this book traces how American heredity researchers moved from trying to eradicate deafness to embracing it as a valuable cultural diversity. It looks at how deafness came to be seen as a hereditary phenomenon at all, how eugenics became part of progressive reform at schools for the deaf, and how, from the 1950s on, more sociocultural approaches to disability and minority led to new cooperative projects between professionals and local signing deaf communities. Analysing the transformative effects of exchange between researchers and objects of research, this book offers new insight to changing ideas about medical ethics, reproductive rights, the meaning of scientific progress and cultural diversity. -- .

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.

Disability, like questions of race, gender, and class, is one of the most provocative topics among theorists and philosophers today. This volume, situated at the intersection of feminist theory and disability studies, addresses questions about the nature of embodiment, the meaning of disability, the impact of public policy on those who have been labeled disabled, and how we define the norms of mental and physical ability. The essays here bridge the gap between theory and activism by illuminating structures of power and showing how historical and cultural perceptions of the human body have been informed by and contributed to the oppression of women and disabled people.

Disability history exists outside of the institutions, healers, and treatments it often brings to mind. It is a history where the disabled live not just as patients or cure-seekers, but rather as people living differently in the world-and it is also a history that helps define the fundamental concepts of identity, community, citizenship, and normality. The Oxford Handbook of Disability History is the first volume of its kind to represent this history and its global scale, from ancient Greece to British West Africa. The twenty-seven articles, written by thirty experts from across the field, capture the diversity and liveliness of this emerging scholarship. Whether discussing disability in modern Chinese cinema or on the American antebellum stage, this collection provides new and valuable insights into the rich and varied lives of the disabled across time and place.

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.

The content of news has not changed much over the last century-politicians, celebrities, wars, crime, and sports dominate past and present headlines. Yet, the ways in which journalists both gather and disseminate information have been turned on their head. Gone are the days of editors assigning stories to writers, who then research, inquire, and present what they found in a compelling yet accurate fashion. Today's journalists are coding, programming, running analytics, and developing apps. These "news nerds" are industry professionals working in jobs at the intersection of traditional journalism and technologically intensive positions that were once largely separate. Consequently, news nerds have changed the institutionalized view of journalism, which now accounts for these professionals. News Nerds explores how technological, economic, and societal changes are impacting the institutionalized profession of journalism. Allie Kosterich draws on a mixed-methods research design that blends interviews, social network analysis of LinkedIn data, job postings, and industry publications to make sense of how skills and practices become entrenched throughout the news industry. Taken together, these data reveal the ways in which the profession is evolving to incorporate new technological skillsets and new routines of production. In telling these stories and sharing these findings, Kosterich directly confronts what happens when new skillsets and new ways of understanding and producing news start to collide with the old routines of journalism. News Nerds introduces the notion of institutional augmentation-a process of institutional change that is not restricted to the expected binary outcome of the reinstitutionalization of something new or failure as a fleeting fad. Instead, as in the case of news nerds and journalism, there exists an alternative possibility in the coexistence of supplementary institutions. News Nerds provides a timely and relevant analysis of contemporary journalism and a model for understanding how industries react to the emergence of new career trajectories and new categories of employment.

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.

In Building Theory in Political Communication, Gadi Wolfsfeld, Tamir Sheafer, and Scott Althaus present the first generalizable conceptual framework for political communication that is also falsifiable, explaining how media performance contributes to successful political performance across nations, regime types, and information systems. The book identifies three tensions in the current literature that have thus far prevented a general theory of political communication. The first is a vague understanding of what it means for media to exercise independence from politics. The second is a focus on media in wealthy, Western, and democratic countries. The third is a tendency to build interpretive frameworks that pose as theories, but that cannot be tested. To address these three tensions, this book adapts, refines, and extends the Politics-Media-Politics (PMP) principle, which states that variations in political ecosystems have a major impact on media systems, values, practices, and resources, which can then have dependent, independent, and conditional effects on political processes. With an emphasis on international comparative studies encompassing diverse political systems, the authors move beyond the field's Western focus to show that PMP is useful in a wide range of contexts and subfields. A sophisticated and timely intervention in the field of political communication, this volume presents the PMP principle to help political communication researchers adopt a broader perspective when attempting to ascertain the roles that communication plays in political processes.

This groundbreaking text makes an intervention on behalf of disability studies into the broad field of qualitative inquiry. Ronald Berger and Laura Lorenz introduce readers to a range of issues involved in doing qualitative research on disabilities by bringing together a collection of scholarly work that supplements their own contributions and covers a variety of qualitative methods: participant observation, interviewing and interview coding, focus groups, autoethnography, life history, narrative analysis, content analysis, and participatory visual methods. The chapters are framed in terms of the relevant methodological issues involved in the research, bringing in substantive findings to illustrate the fruits of the methods. In doing so, the book covers a range of physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments. This work resonates with themes in disability studies such as emancipatory research, which views research as a collaborative effort with research subjects whose lives are enhanced by the process and results of the work. It is a methodological approach that requires researchers to be on guard against exploiting informants for the purpose of professional aggrandizement and to engage in a process of ongoing self-reflection to clear themselves of personal and professional biases that may interfere with their ability to hear and empathize with others.