"Don taught us how to be a real independent living center. Nothing was easy; every issue that came up on the road to Don's independence was a challenge and a struggle, but the experience pushed us and we learned from it. We were not going to let Don down; all of us were committed to Don's freedom and independence." --Kathleen Kleinman, Executive Director, TRPIL (Transitional Paths to Independent Living) Profoundly deafened as an infant, Don Fulk didn't learn his name or go to school until the age of ten. When he was eighteen years old and a budding superstar on his football and basketball teams, he broke his neck in a swimming accident, and became paralyzed. After his injury, he was confined to a bed in his parents' home for eight years, unable to move and barely able to communicate. After his family could no longer care for him, he spent nine years in a nursing home where he suffered from abuse and neglect. Yet through a life marred by isolation and frustration, Fulk endured with strength, humor, and grace. He never gave up pursuing his dreams for independence and self-worth, and improving the lives of others. He fought a system that was unfair and discriminatory, and helped pave the way for people with disabilities to live independently. Don Fulk signed his story to author Janet Allen, describing his difficult home life, the incredible friends who changed his life, and his dramatic escape from an abusive nursing home. An Invincible Spirit is a story of hope, empowerment, and the battles people with disabilities have fought--and continue to fight--to improve the quality of their lives.

Bringing to life the voices of children, families, and school personnel, this bestseller describes in detail the school climates and social processes that place many children of color at risk of being assigned inappropriate disability labels. Now in its third edition, this powerful ethnographic study examines the placement of Black and Hispanic students in the subjectively determined, high-incidence disability categories of special education. The authors present compelling narratives representing the range of experiences faced by culturally and linguistically diverse students who fall under the liminal shadow of perceived disability. This edition updates the literature on disproportionality, highlighting the deeply embedded and systemic nature of this decades-old pattern in which reforms represent mere shifts across disability categories, while disproportionality remains. Applying lenses of cultural-historical and critical disability theories, this edition expands on the authors' previous theoretical insights with updated recommendations for improving educational practice, teacher training, and policy renewal.Book Features: A unique examination of the school-based contributors to disproportionality based on research conducted in a large, culturally diverse school district. Holistic views of the referral and placement process detailing students' trajectories across 4 years from initial instruction to referral, evaluation, and placement in special education. An update on the patterns and literature related to disproportionality. Analysis of the cultural-historical nature of disproportionality and the socially constructed nature of the high-incidence disability categories. Recommendations for changing the conceptualization of children's learning difficulties, moving away from the presumption of children's intrinsic deficits toward evaluations based on human variation.

This is the only text to examine the experience of disability in relation to theories of human growth and development. It provides a foundational and comprehensive examination of disability that encompasses the intellectual, psychiatric, physical, and social arenas. The second edition is updated to underscore its versatility as an introductory text about the developmental tasks of people with disabilities for all the helping professions. Reorganized to illuminate the book's interdisciplinary focus, it includes new demographics, new case studies and first-person accounts, discussions on cultural aspects of disabilities, family concerns, and more.The text delivers practice guidelines for each of the conventional life stages and describes the developmental tasks of individuals with disabilities (IWDs) and the difficulties they may have in completing them. It emphasizes the positive trend in the perception of individuals with disabilities as normal and underscores the fact that IWDs have the same motivations, emotions, and goals as those without disabilities. Learning activities, suggestions for writing exercises, and websites for further study reinforce learning, as do graphs, charts, and photos to illustrate trends and demographics. New to the Second Edition: Introductory chapter on understanding disability Demographic updates New case studies and first-person accounts Expanded discussions about cultural issues, and intersectionality, trauma related to disability, financial abuse, and psychiatric disabilities New and expanded learning activities to help students apply concepts Updated Instructor's Manual with sample syllabus, suggested guest speakers, Test Bank, and PowerPoints Key Features: Examines the conventional stages of human growth and development from the perspective of individuals with disabilities Integrates disability concepts with developmental theories and stages of the lifespan Addresses common ethical issues to illuminate the real-world implications faced by individuals with disabilities and their families Includes learning activities, suggestions for writing exercises, and websites for further study

In Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication, Joshua St. Pierre flips the script on communication disability, positioning the unruly, disabled speaker at the center of analysis to challenge the belief that more communication is unquestionably good. Working with Gilles Deleuze's suggestion that "[w]e don't suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we've nothing much to say," St. Pierre brings together the unlikely trio of the dysfluent speaker, the talking head, and the troll to show how speech is made cheap-and produced and repaired within human bodies-to meet the inhuman needs of capital. The book explores how technologies, like social media and the field of speech-language pathology, create smooth sites of contact that are exclusionary for disabled speakers and looks to the political possibilities of disabled voices to "de-face" the power of speech now entwined with capital.

Examining mothers of newly diagnosed disabled children within the context of new reproductive technologies and the discourse of choice, this book uses anthropology and disability studies to revise the concept of "normal" and to establish a social environment in which the expression of full lives will prevail.

This sequel to the influential 2016 work DisCrit-Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education explores how DisCrit has both deepened and expanded, providing increasingly nuanced understandings about how racism and ableism circulate across geographic borders, academic disciplines, multiplicative identities, intersecting oppressions, and individual and cultural resistances. Following an incisive introduction by DisCrit intellectual forerunner Alfredo Artiles, a diverse group of authors engage in inward, outward, and margin-to-margin analyses that raise deep and enduring questions about how we as scholars and teachers account for and counteract the collusive nature of oppressions faced by minoritized individuals with disabilities, particularly in educational contexts. Contributors ask readers to consider incisive questions such as: What are the affordances and constraints of DisCrit as it travels outside of U.S. contexts? How can DisCrit, as a critical and intersectional framework, be used to support and extend diverse forms of activism, expanded solidarities, and collective resistance? How can DisCrit inform and be augmented by engagements with other critical theories and modes of inquiry? How can DisCrit help to illuminate agency and resistance among learners with complex learning needs? How might DisCrit inform legal studies and other disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts? How can DisCrit be a critical friend to interrogations involving issues of citizenship, language, and more? Book Features: Expands the discussion on DisCrit to include issues of language, citizenship, and post-secondary education, and more. Presents a robust engagement with DisCrit that reaches across disciplines, geographies, and temporalities. Highlights the lived experience of people with disabilities as knowledge generators fighting against the collusive power of racism and ableism. Recognizes that disability is complex, multifaceted, and not bound by labels for Black people, Indigenous People, and other People of Color in educational experiences and throughout the lifespan Further explores the discussion on DisCrit while encouraging disability scholars to substantially integrate racism into their analyses, and for race scholars to do the same with ableism.

A memoir by a disability rights activist Such a Pretty Girl is Nadina LaSpina's story-from her early years in her native Sicily, where still a baby she contracts polio, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness; to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in hospitals, where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her; to her rebellion and her activism in the disability rights movement. LaSpina's personal growth parallels the movement's political development-from coming together, organizing, and fighting against exclusion from public and social life, to the forging of a common identity, the blossoming of disability arts and culture, and the embracing of disability pride. While unique, the author's journey is also one with which many disabled people can identify. It is the journey to find one's place in an ableist world-a world not made for disabled people, where disability is only seen in negative terms. La Spina refutes all stereotypical narratives of disability. Through the telling of her life's story, without editorializing, she shows the harm that the overwhelming focus on pity and on a cure that remains elusive has done to disabled people. Her story exposes the disability prejudice ingrained in our sociopolitical system and denounces the oppressive standards of normalcy in a society that devalues those who are different and denies them basic rights. Written as continuous narrative and in a subtle and intimate voice, Such a Pretty Girl is a memoir as captivating as a novel. It is one of the few disability memoirs to focus on activism, and one of the first by an immigrant.

This book seeks to explore how disability is understood and the position and experiences of disabled people both within and across different societies. The authors explore the question of politics in relation to specific struggles, providing a wealth of insights and ideas, and examine the nature and value of a social model of disability. They criticize exclusionary barriers while advancing a more democratic and participatory society based on principles of equality, offer cross-cultural insights and present stimuli for debate and further research. The text is accessible, topical, and provides new and innovatory thinking. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, lecturers and researchers with interests in education, social policy, sociology and disability studies.

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds-the intertwinement of the mental and the physical-in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson-where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic-destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler's Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.

The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) is the first human rights treaty to explicitly acknowledge the right to education for persons with disabilities. In order to realize this right, the convention's Article 24 mandates state parties to ensure inclusive education systems that overcome outright exclusion as well as segregation in special education settings. Despite this major global policy change to tackle the discriminations persons with disabilities face in education, this has yet to take effect in most school systems worldwide.Focusing on the factors undermining the realization of disability rights in education, Julia Biermann probes current meanings of inclusive education in two contrasting yet equally challenged state parties to the UN CRPD: Nigeria, whose school system overtly excludes disabled children, and Germany, where this group primarily learns in special schools. In both countries, policy actors aim to realize the right to inclusive education by segregating students with disabilities into special education settings. In Nigeria, this demand arises from the glaring lack of such a system. In Germany, conversely, from its extraordinary long-term institutionalization. This act of diverting from the principles embodied in Article 24 is based on the steadfast and shared belief that school systems, which place students into special education, have an innate advantage in realizing the right to education for persons with disabilities. Accordingly, inclusion emerges to be an evolutionary and linear process of educational expansion that depends on institutionalized special education, not a right of persons with disabilities to be realized in local schools on an equal basis with others. This book proposes a refined human rights model of disability in education that shifts the analytical focus toward the global politics of formal mass schooling as a space where discrimination is sustained.

A comprehensive and practical resource for all speech and language therapists and students, this book covers all aspects of working with this client group. Written by the author of the hugely successful "Talkabout", each section gives the reader a theoretical background of the subject under discussion, practical suggestions and formats for assessment, a guide to intervention as well as a clear and worked-out example. In addition, the author addresses staff training, group therapy, accessing the criminal justice system and working with a multi-disciplinary team.

Working futures? looks at the current effectiveness and future scope for enabling policy in the field of disability and employment. By addressing the current strengths and weaknesses of disability and employment policy, the book asks Is the dichotomy of 'work for those who can and support for those who cannot' appropriate to the lives of disabled people? Does current and recent policy reduce or reinforce barriers to paid employment? What lessons from other welfare regimes can we draw on to further disabled people's working futures? The book is original in bringing together a wide range of policy insights to bear on the question of disabled people's working futures. It includes analyses of recent policy initiatives as diverse as the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, Draft Disability Bill, the benefits system, New Deal for Disabled People, job retention policy, comparative disability policy, the role of the voluntary sector and 'new policies for a new workplace'. Contributions from academics, NGOs, the OECD and the disabled peoples' movement bring multiple theoretical, professional and user perspectives to the debates at the heart of the book.

Disabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists explore how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a variety of contexts, including within the labour market, the workers' compensation system, the immigration process, and the legal system (both as litigants and as lawyers). The contributors encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to transform their environment by changing the discourse surrounding disablement.

This volume explores how disability is seen, written about, read and understood through literature and translation. Foregrounding the asymmetrical world of power relations, it delves into the act of translation to exhibit how disability is constructed and deployed in language and culture. The essays in the volume reflect and theorise on experiences of translating various Indian-language stories (into English) which have disability as their subject. They focus on recovering and empowering marginal voices, as well as on the mechanics of translating idioms of disability. Furthermore, the book goes on to engage the reader to demonstrate how disability, and the space it occupies in our lives, can be reinforced or deconstructed in translation. A major intervention in translation and disability studies, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, culture, and sociology.

What is life like for women with learning disabilities detained in a secure unit? This book presents a unique ethnographic study conducted in a contemporary institution in England. Rebecca Fish takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on both the social model of disability and intersectional feminist methodology, to explore the reasons why the women were placed in the unit, as well their experiences of day-to-day life as played out through relationships with staff and other residents. She raises important questions about the purpose of such units and the services they offer. Through making the women's voices heard, this book presents their experiences and unique perspectives on topics such as seclusion, restraint, and resistance. Exploring how the ever present power disparity works to regulate women's behaviour, the book shows how institutional responses replicate women's bad experiences from the past, and how women's responses are seen as pathological. It demonstrates that women are not passive recipients of care, but shape their own identity and futures, sometimes by resisting the norms expected of them (within allowed limits) and sometimes by transgressing the rules. These insights thus challenge traditional institutional accounts of gender, learning disability and deviance and highlight areas for reform in policy, practice, methodology, and social theory. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to scholars, students, policymakers and advocates working in the fields of learning disability and disability studies more widely, gender studies and sociology.

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.

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

This book offers an account of how mentally disordered offenders are treated when they come into contact with the criminal justice system. It traces the historical developments and analyses the existing mental health and criminal provisions. It includes a theoretical overview of the law and an analysis of some of the theoretical issues surrounding the treatment and detention of mentally disordered offenders.

Estimates suggest that up to 20% of employees, customers and clients might have a neurodivergent condition - such as dyslexia, autism, Asperger's, ADHD or dyspraxia - yet these individuals often struggle to gain and maintain employment, despite being very capable. This practical, authoritative business guide will help managers and employers support neurodiverse staff, and gives advice on how to ensure workplaces are neuro-friendly. The book demonstrates that neurodiversity is a natural aspect of human variation to be expected and accepted, rather than a deficit to be accommodated. Employer responsibilities are highlighted, including the 2010 Equality Act, and a range of strategies and policies are provided, including recruitment advice and the benefits of neurodiverse employees, along with advice on physical environments, interaction and communication, and working with clients and customers. This book is an ideal resource for all employers wanting to support and empower people with specific needs to help create a more inclusive workplace, benefiting both neurodiverse individuals and the companies employing them.

A radical critique of architecture that places disability at the heart of the built environment Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but The Architecture of Disability calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for "the construction of disability," this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world. Stressing the connection between architectural form and the capacities of the human body, David Gissen demonstrates how disability haunts the history and practice of architecture. Examining various historic sites, landscape designs, and urban spaces, he deconstructs the prevailing functionalist approach to accommodating disabled people in architecture and instead asserts that physical capacity is essential to the conception of all designed space. By recontextualizing the history of architecture through the discourse of disability, The Architecture of Disability presents a unique challenge to current modes of architectural practice, theory, and education. Envisioning an architectural design that fully integrates disabled persons into its production, it advocates for looking beyond traditional notions of accessibility and shows how certain incapacities can offer us the means to positively reimagine the roots of architecture.

A little-known fact about the prominent US psychologist and educator Carl E. Seashore (1866-1949) is that he was deeply involved in the American eugenics movement. He was among the US academics to support eugenics long before German Nazis embraced it. A titan in a host of disciplines and a proponent of radical education reform, Seashore used his positional power to promote a constellation of education reforms consistent with central precepts of eugenics. Many of these reforms, including tracking, gifted and talented programs, and high-stakes standardized testing, were adopted and remain standard practice in the United States today. He promulgated the idea that musical talent is biologically inheritable, and he developed the first standardized tests of musical talent; these tests were used by early-twentieth-century researchers in their attempts to determine whether there are race differences in musical talent. Seashore's ideas and work profoundly shaped music education's research trajectory, as well as enduring 'commonsense' beliefs about musical ability. An intersectional analysis, Destined to Fail focuses on the relationship between eugenics and Seashore's views on ability, race, and gender. Koza concludes that Seashore promoted eugenics and its companion, euthenics, because he was a true believer. She also discusses the longstanding silences surrounding Seashore's participation in eugenics. As a diagnosis and critique of the present, Destined to Fail identifies resemblances and connections between past and present that illustrate the continuing influence of eugenics-and the systems of reasoning that made early-twentieth-century eugenics imaginable and seem reasonable-on education discourse and practice today. It maps out discursive, citational, and funding connections between eugenicists of the early twentieth-century and contemporary White supremacists; this mapping leads to some of Donald Trump's supporters and appointees.

Incorporating scholarship that addresses the social, economic, cultural, and historical facets of the experience of disability in South Asia, this book presents the reader with a comprehensive, cogent, and nuanced view of the constructions of disability in this region. In doing so, it focuses on the lived experiences of people with disabilities and their families, analyzing such disabling barriers as poverty, caste, and other inequities that limit their access to education, employment, equity, and empowerment. It addresses the interpretations of disability within different South Asian contexts including policy, family, educational systems, films, and literary narratives. Situated in an interdisciplinary perspective that spans areas such as cultural studies, law, disability studies in education, sociology, and historiography, South Asia and Disability Studies presents a rich and complex understanding of the disability experience in South Asia. The organization of topics parallels the discourse in areas within disability studies such as identity construction, language, historical constructions of disability, and cultural representations of disability.

This book is intended both as a comprehensive review and discussion of the major studies of language development and functioning in mentally retarded (MR) persons over the last fifty years, and as an exploration of a number of important issues in this field. *The use of the term 'mental retardation' is in line with the recommendations of the American Association on Mental Retardation and other relevant organisations.