How does one investigate a child maltreatment case when the victim is blind, mute, deaf, mentally retarded, or confined to an institution? Special Children, Special Risks presents analysis, recommendations, and related research from social work, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and education essential for establishing and maintaining safe environments for handicapped children.

This book brings together a diverse group of experts to pool their knowledge and share their concerns about the risks of abuse faced by handicapped children. The contributors' perspectives come from the fields of medicine, social work, developmental psychology, psychiatry, clinical psychology, education, child welfare, law, public policy, and journalism.

Within the medical professions, the notion of the family as the basic unit of medical care has attracted a wide following, especially from physicians committed to a psychosocial orientation. Collaborative family-oriented primary care rests on interaction between family physicians and family therapists or counselors. Fundamental to this view is the conviction that one cannot understand a patient's illness without knowing the social, emotional, and biological context in which he or she lives. In addition, the author provides a much-needed examination of the rationale for instituting this type of medical care organization, and how such care can be cost effective, satisfying to patients, and a means to further understanding and research into health and illness.

Winner of the 2016 ICQI Outstanding Qualitative Book Award Acclaimed qualitative scholar Jane Speedy's world was upended completely after suffering a severe stroke when only in her late 50s. After returning home from the hospital, Speedy took to her iPad to write and draw as a way of making sense of her experience and to aid her recovery. The stunning, fragmented, poetic text and images comprising Staring at the Park depict the events of this difficult journey. It provides an alternative model of engaging the self in a research project in an evocative and artistic way. This highly original book: -uses the seemingly ordinary motif of the park opposite the author's house as the catalyst for a wildly creative autoethnography;-includes three narratives of the author's experience of staring at the park-an imagined murder mystery in the park, a realist ethnography of the park, and the life story (both imagined and real) of her facing her illness and recovery; -offers readers a poetic and performative inquiry into the author's new reality.

This valuable book deals with the recreation activities for the disabled, including skiing, horseback riding, running, camping, water sports, and team sports. Experts examine competitive spirit, training, and the psychological benefits of recreational activities for the disabled child. Program development, evaluation, and instruction are discussed.

This volume examines the shift toward positive and more accurate portrayals of mental illness in entertainment media, asking where these succeed and considering where more needs to be done. With studies that identify and analyze the characters, viewpoints, and experiences of mental illness across film and television, it considers the messages conveyed about mental illness and reflects on how the different texts reflect, reinforce, or challenge sociocultural notions regarding mental illness. Presenting chapters that explore a range of texts from film and television, covering a variety of mental health conditions, including autism, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and more, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, and mental health.

This handbook provides the reader with the applied knowledge essential for initiating, building, and continuing community service programs for the mentally retarded. Applied to specific populations, and to both urban and rural settings, the model also offers a blueprint for establishing successful service systems.

This book is about the social condition of Deaf people, told through a Deaf woman's autobiography and a series of essays investigating how hearing societies relate to Deaf people. Michel Foucault described the powerful one as the beholder who is not seen. This is why a Deaf woman's perspective is important: Minorities that we don't even suspect we have power over observe us in turn. Majorities exert power over minorities by influencing the environment and institutions that simplify or hinder lives: language, mindsets, representations, norms, the use of professional power. Based on data collected by Eurostat, this volume provides the first discussion of statistics on the condition of Deaf people in a series of European countries, concerning education, labor, gender. This creates a new opportunity to discuss inequalities on the basis of data. The case studies in this volume reconstruct untold moments of great advancement in Deaf history, successful didactics supporting bilingualism, the reasons why Deaf empowerment for and by Deaf people does and does not succeed. A work of empowerment is effective if it acts on a double level: the community to be empowered and society at large, resulting in a transformation of society as a whole. This book provides instruments to work towards such a transformation.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"Nielsen has compiled an outstanding collection, including many letters and photos that are being published for the first time. And even if you didn't grow up in Alabama, you may still marvel about how a little girl from Tuscumbia not only beat the odds but also blazed trails."
--"Dallas Morning News"

"Stunning final chapter."
--"The Yale Review"

"If you have not read Kim Nielsen's "The Radical Lifes of Helen Keller," then I highly recommend it. As a person who has labored through numerous thick volumes on the life of this remarkable deaf-blind woman, I am delighted with Nielsen's concise and refreshing scholarly work. She examines Keller's life from a Disability Studies perspective. The book is enjoyable and easy to read, and it captures Keller's political dimension with great detail, based on such additional-and sometimes chilling-sources as military intelligence and FBI files. Nielsen does great justice to both the subject of her book and to Disability Studies as an emerging field."
--"Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education"

"This is an important book."
-- "Altar Magazine"

"Nielsen's study challenges our impoverished cultural memories of Keller, which may have for too long served to "flatten" both our understanding not just of Keller's complex, contradictory life, but also the politics of disability, U.S. racialism, and women's political activities."
--"On Campus with Women"

""The Radical Lives of Helen Keller" thus is an important, essential guide for any who would receive a well-rounded survey of her life."
--"The Midwest Book Review"

""Radical Lives" fills out an important dimension ofour cultural memory of the adult Helen Keller."
--"www.msmagazine.com"

"Nielsen's account is thoroughly researched, well organized and extremely well written....a truly important and exciting work."
--"Ragged Edge Online"

"Nielson examines Helen Keller's radical politics and the various reasons her politcal views were so often neglected."
--"Library Journal"

"Based on expansive research in wide-ranging materials, including military intelligence and FBI files, Kim Nielsen unveils Helen Keller's political life. This finely written biography helps us understand the movement for disability rights in our own time."
--Linda K. Kerber, author of "No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship"

"The book's compactness, straightforward writing style, and revolutionary approach make "The Radical Lives of Helen Keller"invaluable for both teachers and scholars. Keller would be delighted that Nielsen allowed her her Scotch." --"Journal of American History"

"Nielsen's book gives us a Helen Keller for our times. We meet a complex person whose politics defy our reductionist knowledge about her, whose lived experience makes for compelling reading. "The Radical Lives of Helen Keller" renders three-dimensional, perhaps for the first time, a figure who all too often is known to the world, but known in minimalist flatness merely as a symbol of overcoming disability. Nielsen shows us that there is so much more to Keller--a political activist, theorist, and intellectual with unconventional, and, yes, even uncomfortable, opinions. She forthrightly explores these contradictions, in lucid, readable prose, to allow a very real version of Helen Keller toemerge from the darkness."
--Lennard J. Davis, author of "Bending Over Backwards: Essays on Disability and the Body"

Several decades after her death in 1968, Helen Keller remains one of the most widely recognized women of the twentieth century. But the fascinating story of her vivid political life--particularly her interest in radicalism and anti-capitalist activism--has been largely overwhelmed by the sentimentalized story of her as a young deaf-blind girl.

Keller had many lives indeed. Best known for her advocacy on behalf of the blind, she was also a member of the socialist party, an advocate of women's suffrage, a defender of the radical International Workers of the World, and a supporter of birth control--and she served as one of the nation's most effective but unofficial international ambassadors. In spite of all her political work, though, Keller rarely explored the political dimensions of disability, adopting beliefs that were often seen as conservative, patronizing, and occasionally repugnant. Under the wing of Alexander Graham Bell, a controversial figure in the deaf community who promoted lip-reading over sign language, Keller became a proponent of oralism, thereby alienating herself from others in the deaf community who believed that a rich deaf culture was possible through sign language. But only by distancing herself from the deaf community was she able to maintain a public image as a one-of-a-kind miracle.

Using analytic tools and new sources, Kim E. Nielsen's political biography of Helen Keller has many lives, teasing out the motivations for and implications of her political and personal revolutions to reveal a more complex and intriguing woman than the HelenKeller we thought we knew.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Foreword.

Winner of the 2007 Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the MLA

aThe members of the Committee were especially impressed by McRuer's original intervention in the area of queer studies, one that not only sheds light on the important new area of disability studies, but brings it into conversation with a variety of disciplinary perspectives, from composition studies to performance art. McRuer's book combines the public and the private work of queer studies in surprisingly new ways.a
--Ed Madden, Gay and Lesbian Caucus for the MLA

aA wonderful combination of humor, theory, intellectual, and personal insights... A valuable and well-written study.a
--Disability Studies Quarterly

"A compelling case that queer and disabled identities, politics, and cultural logics are inexorably intertwined, and that queer and disability theory need one anothera]. Makes clear that no cultural analysis is complete without attention to the politics of bodily ability and alternative corporealities."
--Elizabeth Freeman, author of "The Wedding Complex"

"Important and significant for its attempt to find the common ground between disability studies and queer studies. This deftly written and very readable book will appeal to a wide range of readers who are increasingly fascinated by the biocultural interplay between the body, sexuality, gender, and social identity."
--Lennard Davis, author of "Bending Over Backwards"

Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, andidentities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.

Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.

This book provides insight into the globally interlinked disability rights community and its political efforts today. By analysing what disability rights activism contributes to a global power apparatus of disability-related knowledge, it demonstrates how disability advocacy influences the way we categorise, classify, distribute, manipulate, and therefore transform knowledge. By unpacking the mutually constitutive relations between (practical) moral knowledge of international disability advocates and (formal) disability rights norms that are codified in international treaties such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the author shows that the disability rights movement is largely critical of statements that attempt to streamline it. At the same time, cross-cultural disability rights advocacy requires images of uniformity to stabilise its global legitimacy among international stakeholders and retain a common meta-code that visibly identifies its means and aims. As an epistemic community, disability rights advocates simultaneously rely on and contest the authority of international human rights infrastructure and its language. Proving that disability rights advocates contribute immensely to a global culture that standardises what is considered morally and legally 'right' and 'wrong', thereby shaping the human body and the body politic, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of critical disability studies, sociology of knowledge, legal and linguistic anthropology, social inequality, and social movements.

This is the first book to offer a philosophical engagement with microaggressions. It aims to provide an intersectional analysis of microaggressions that cuts across multiple dimensions of oppression and marginalization, and to engage a variety of perspectives that have been sidelined within the discipline of philosophy. The volume gathers a diverse group of contributors: philosophers of color, philosophers with disabilities, philosophers of various nationalities and ethnicities, and philosophers of several gender identities. Their unique frames of analysis articulate both how the concept of microaggressions can be used to clarify and sharpen our understanding of subtler aspects of oppression and how analysis, expansion, and reconceiving the notion of a microaggression can deepen and extend its explanatory power. The essays in the volume seek to defend microaggressions from common critiques and to explain their impact beyond the context of college students. Some of the guiding questions that this volume explores include, but are not limited to, the following: Can microaggressions be established as a viable scientific concept? What roles do microaggressions play in other oppressive phenomena like transphobia, fat phobia, and abelism? How can epistemological challenges around microaggressions be addressed via feminist theory, critical race theory, disability theory, or epistemologies of ignorance? What insights can be gleaned from intersectional analyses of microaggressions? Are there domain-specific analyses of microaggressions that would give insight to features of that domain, i.e. microaggressions related to sexuality, athletics, immigration status, national origin, body type, or ability. Microaggressions and Philosophy features cutting-edge research on an important topic that will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars across disciplines. It includes perspectives from philosophy of psychology, empirically informed philosophy, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, disability theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and social and political philosophy.

The Disability Bioethics Reader is the first introduction to the field of bioethics presented through the lens of critical disability studies and the philosophy of disability. Introductory and advanced textbooks in bioethics focus almost entirely on issues that disproportionately affect disabled people and that centrally deal with becoming or being disabled. However, such textbooks typically omit critical philosophical reflection on disability. Directly addressing this omission, this volume includes 36 chapters, most appearing here for the first time, that cover key areas pertaining to disability bioethics, such as: state-of-the-field analyses of modern medicine, bioethics, and disability theory health, disease, and the philosophy of medicine issues at the edge- and end-of-life, including physician-aid-in-dying, brain death, and minimally conscious states enhancement and biomedical technology invisible disabilities, chronic pain, and chronic illness implicit bias and epistemic injustice in health care disability, quality of life, and well-being race, disability, and healthcare justice connections between disability theory and aging, trans, and fat studies prenatal testing, abortion, and reproductive justice. The Disability Bioethics Reader, unlike traditional bioethics textbooks, also engages with decades of empirical and theoretical scholarship in disability studies-scholarship that spans the social sciences and humanities-and gives serious consideration to the history of disability activism.

the generative and resistant value of human vulnerability the importance of vulnerability in motivating engagement with social networks and material ecologies for productive thinking, communication, and community how relational ethics emerge as important for social and communicative life

A wide variety of medical conditions that qualify as disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act are explained in accurate, non-medical terminology. The book clearly details how the condition is acquired, what happens in the body to create the disability, how the person may look or act, what social accommodations are necessary and helpful, as well as guidelines for adapting the environment. This book's unique approach to disabilities will make anyone more comfortable when interfacing with a person who has a disability. People with disabilities are gaining access to jobs, education, recreation, and other facets of everyday life that able-bodied people take for granted. Legally the barriers are down, but psychologically and sociologically, the barriers are still in place. With this book, knowledge replaces uncertainty. Designed as an easy reference book, each medical condition is treated independently so the reader only needs to spend a few minutes to gain insight on a particular condition. Also included are a background chapter on anatomy, accommodating disabilities, and interrelating with someone who has a disability. This unique book provides a concise yet comprehensive examination, in non-medical terms, of a wide range of physical disabilities. The book emphasizes the source of the condition, the effects on a person's lifestyle, physical appearance, prospects for recovery or remission, psychological and social accommodation as well as environmental accommodations. It is an excellent reference for anyone who may come in contact with a person who has a physical disability, including human resource personnel, teachers, therapists, and people who deal with the general public.

In Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the stereotyping they are subject to in the very public spaces and places where this stereotyping typically plays out.

When confronted with the large amount of research about the autism spectrum one can be forgiven for believing that every conceivable aspect has been studied. However, despite the abundance of research, there still remains several autism topics that are not yet comprehensively understood. Addressing Underserved Populations in Autism Spectrum Research: An Intersectional Approach highlights five areas of autism spectrum research that currently lack a substantial body of literature. These include, autistic seniors, autistic women, fathers raising autistic children, autistics with intellectual disabilities, and autistics from ethnic minorities. Bennett and Goodall explore each area, offering explanations for why they have been overlooked in the existing literature and recommendations and strategies for further research to help us better understand these parts of the autistic community. They also explore and address systemic racism within the autism research community and explain strategies that scholars can use to conduct research that is both respectful of autistics and methodologically rigorous. Readers will gain an understanding of some of the gaps in our knowledge about the autism spectrum and will obtain the tools needed to conduct robust and appropriate research that addresses these gaps.

This unique guidebook presents a comprehensive analysis of the new Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the most significant federal civil rights law in almost 30 years, and its impact on over four million American businesses, state and local governments, nonprofit associations, 87 percent of America's private sector jobs, and 22.7 million working-age people with disabilities.

Written by two Washington-based experts on the new federal mandate, the book relies on extensive interviews with federal officials and the expert opinion of business leaders, leaders in the disability community, and the authors of the legislation. Fersh and Thomas provide a clear analysis of the final federal regulations and their implications for businesses, nonprofit associations, state and local governments, and managers and employers who need to make modifications to physical barriers in places of public accommodation, such as stores and restaurants, and in barriers to equal employment in the workplace. The book uses case histories and Congressional reports and testimony to illustrate new employment procedures--from applications, testing, and insurance benefits to job descriptions, reasonable accommodation, and new rights in telecommunications and public ground transportation. The social, legislative, and economic history that led to the laW's enactment is illustrated through photographs and 18 tables. Included are specific guidelines on how to interview and work with people with disabilities, containing specific sections on people who use wheelchairs, and people with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, hearing and visual impairments, AIDS, speech impairments, learning disabilities, and mental illness. Also featured are how to sections for developing a compliance plan, implementing reasonable accommodation, and how to create an ADA awareness program for employees. The book explores the successful use of workers with disabilities in companies over the last twenty years, and the high costs of unemployment among working-age people with disabilities in tax revenues and lost productivity. Leaders and experts, such as I. King Jordan, Ph.D., president of Gallaudet University, provide short articles on their perspective of the ADA.

"Mark has been given twice the gift of life, and this book delivers for both. So doing his teachings justice demands us to think with our hearts as much as our minds and move forward with a passionate and productive life." Tyler Hayden - Author - Livin' Life Large & Chasing the Carrot In LIVE LIFE FROM THE HEART, Mark Black (Heart and Double-Lung Transplant Recipient, 3-Time Marathoner and Motivational Speaker), has created a definitive guide to creating the life you've always wanted. Based on twenty-nine years of battling illness and overcoming obstacles, LIVE LIFE FROM THE HEART, is chock full of real-world wisdom and powerful life principles that will change the way you look at your life and the challenges you face. In fifty-two easy-to-read chapters, you'll learn how to: * Release the powerful potential hidden within you * Set goals that will help you get what you really want * Alter your habits so that you can alter your reality * Recognize what's really important to you Mark Black has been inspiring audiences with his powerful presentations since 2002. He is the founder of his own speaking and consulting firm, Mark Black Speaks. Mark's powerful inspirational programs have impacted thousands of people across North America. Mark's presentations are in high demand by corporations, associations and educational institutions. His story of courage and perseverance inspires people to live their lives with passion and purpose. For information about booking Mark or to learn what he can do for your organization, go to his website: www.MarkBlackSpeaks.com

Dyslexia is a condition that is widely misunderstood in the world of work.

Adult Dyslexia: A Guide for the Workplace shows why small and large employers should be aware of European laws on anti-discrimination and dyslexia. It provides practical advice on how to identify dyslexics in the workplace, how to create the right environment for them to thrive and how organizations can make the transition from a framework that perceives dyslexia as a problem to one that perceives it as a solution.

Throughout the book, real-life case studies illustrate the points being made and a number of invaluable practical resources are available including an appendix of useful organizations, an adult dyslexia screening check list and a seven-step procedure for counselling adult dyslexics.

Gary Fitzgibbon and Brian O'Connor have varied and extensive experience of both advising organizations on adult dyslexia issues and providing assessment, counselling and training services to adult dyslexics. Their book is an essential resource for disability specialists, occupational psychologists, counsellors, HR managers, teachers/lecturers of adults and importantly, dyslexics and their families.

This book explores the intersection of gender and disability in the context of tourism. In part, the book foregrounds feminist theorising of intersectionality by examining how gender can overlap with other social identities to contribute to more systemic oppression, domination, discrimination, and marginalisation of certain categories of people. Our point of departure is that disability does not operate in isolation as it is constituted and experienced within an already gendered social and tourism environment. With substantial research on the intersection of gender and tourism on the one hand, and the intersection of disability and tourism on the other hand, the interconnectedness of gender and disability and the implications this has on tourism policy and practice remains understudied. Thus, the book provides a critical lens that helps unpack underlying assumptions about gender and disability while questioning the dominant ideas about gender and disability reproduced through tourism policies and institutional practices in an African context. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in Gender Studies, Disability Studies, and Tourism Studies, particularly those with a research interest in Africa.

As medical insurance costs continue to increase, so do the numbers of Americans who carry no health insurance. This situation, exacerbated by federal budgetary pressures, has stepped up the conflict among all those who have a stake in health benefits: the government, employers, insurers, health providers, and citizens who need affordable health care. Westerfield examines the dilemmas behind the conflict over mandated health care, the strategies employed, and the costs--both social and economic--that must ultimately be borne.

In Part I, the author looks at the impact of existing health care legislation and the vigorously debated issues surrounding the allocation of benefits to specific groups or for specific needs. Part II focuses on the conflicting goals of those who must pay for health care, those who provide it, and those who receive it. The final part begins by addressing major areas of health care, such as AIDS, chemical dependency, child care, and mental health care. Describing the strategies and counterstrategies in the struggle over benefits and costs, the author stresses that it is those most in need--the underclass and the underemployed--who are in danger of becoming the ultimate losers in the battle. This book clarifies and brings a constructive perspective to bear on an issue of concern to a large professional audience as well as to special interest groups representing health care consumers.