Practice Issues in Sexuality and Learning Disabilities explores the sexual behaviour of people with learning difficulties and addresses issues of concern such as sexual abuse, HIV and AIDS, service provision for those from ethnic minorities, the development of policy guidelines and the implementation of such guidelines in this intensely personal area. Ann Craft draws upon professional expertise from a broad range of backgrounds including social work, psychology, and medicine. She offers practical ideas and suggestions for service responses which acknowledge and respect the right of people with learning disabilities to express their sexuality in ways that are valued by other members of their society.
Practice Issues in Sexuality and Learning Disabilities will be of interest to all whose work or relationship brings them into contact with people with learning disabilities - professionals, carers, parents, advocates. It will be invaluable to social workers, practitioners in social work and health, trainees, training officers and voluntary organizations.

Individuals with disabilities are often "desexualized" in our society, yet they have the same need for intimacy, self-worth, and social belonging as people without disabilities. Sexuality and Disabilities addresses persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and cognitive disabilities and their concerns in the areas of intimacy, family issues, sexuality, and sexual functioning. It offers suggestions for professionals who work with persons with these disabilities to help them work more competently with disabled persons in the sexuality arena. These concrete ideas are excellent for staff training and education and for enhancing professional development for those working with persons with physical disabilities.The contributing authors create an awareness that all people need individualized consideration and that the special needs of all individuals are important, especially for those who may have previously been left to discover things on their own--usually unsuccessfully. Sexuality and Disabilities focuses on a wide range of disabilities, including physical, developmental, and learning disabilities, mental retardation, and conditions that may have an impact on people later in life such as strokes, heart disease, or other chronic illness. Chapters discuss education and support issues for both practitioners and clients. Some of the topics examined include: components of a staff training program on sexuality and disability specific recommendations for sexuality education and counseling with people with spinal cord injuries and other acquired severe neurological disabilities a program model serving parents with mental retardation and their children specific ways educational programming, social work intervention, and policy efforts can address the special learning needs of people with cognitive impairments sources of support and stress for families caring for developmentally disabled children an analysis of special vulnerabilities and challenges relating to sexual victimization that confront people with disabilitiesAn extremely helpful tool for human service practitioners, Sexuality and Disabilities is also a valuable resource for graduate and undergraduate students who have an interest in working with people with physical, cognitive, or mental disabilities and helping them explore this basic facet of their lives.

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.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the social and spatial experiences of people with dwarfism, an impairment that results in a person being no taller than 4' 10". This book engages with the concept that dwarfism's most prominent feature - body size and shape - can form the basis of social discrimination and disadvantages within society. By ignoring body size as a disability, it is hard to see the resulting disabling consequences of the built environment. Using a mixed-methods approach and drawing on the work undertaken by human geographers and disability studies academics, this book analyses how the relationship between harmful cultural stereotypes and space shapes everyday experiences of people with dwarfism and works to socially exclude them in diverse ways. Showing how spatial and social barriers are not mutually exclusive but can influence one another, this book responds to the limited academic work on the subject of dwarfism, whilst also contributing to the study of geographies of body size. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, human geography, the built environment, sociology and medical humanities.

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

This book investigates how being diagnosed with various disabilities impacts on identity. Once diagnosed with a disability, there is a risk that this label can become the primary status both for the person diagnosed as well as for their family. This reification of the diagnosis can be oppressive because it subjugates humanity in such a way that everything a person does can be interpreted as linked to their disability. Drawing on narrative approaches to identity in psychology and social sciences, the bio-psycho-social model and a holistic approach to disabilities, the chapters in this book understand disability as constructed in discourse, as negotiated among speaking subjects in social contexts, and as emergent. By doing so, they amplify voices that may have otherwise remained silent and use storytelling as a way of communicating the participants' realities to provide a more in-depth understanding of their point of view. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, medical humanities, disability research methods, narrative theory, and rehabilitation studies.

This significant volume provides broad coverage of the spectrum of problems confronted by patients with developmental disabilities and the many kinds of occupational therapy services these individuals need. Experts identify exemplary institutional and community service programs for treating patients with autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and mental retardation. A welcome contribution to the meager professional literature on the subject, Developmental Disabilities: A Handbook for Occupational Therapists will be an enormously helpful resource for therapists who work with both children and adults, ranging from mild to severe levels of impairment. You will learn how to establish a therapeutic environment for children with autism, develop a pre-vocational program in a pediatric skilled care facility, use qualitative research to obtain insight into the world of adults with significantly limiting cerebral palsy, and provide early intervention for your developmentally disabled patients.

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.

Disability Studies is an area of study which examines social, political, cultural, and economic factors that define 'disability' and establish personal and collective responses to difference. This insightful new text will introduce readers to the discipline of Disability Studies and enable them to engage in the lively debates within the field. By offering an accessible yet rigorous approach to Disability Studies, the authors provide a critical analysis of key current issues and consider ways in which the subject can be studied through national and international perspectives, policies, culture and history. Key debates include: The relationship between activism and the academy Ways to study cultural and media representations of disability The importance of disability history and how societies can change National and international perspectives on children, childhood and education Political perspectives on disability and identity The place of the body in disability theory This text offers real-world examples of topics that are important to debates and offers a much needed truly international scope on the questions at hand. It is an essential read for any individual studying, practising or with an interest in Disability Studies.

In Black Disability Politics Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism. She points out that this work has not been recognized as part of the legacy of disability justice and liberation because Black disability politics differ in language and approach from the mainstream white-dominant disability rights movement. Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women's Health Project alongside interviews with contemporary Black disabled cultural workers, Schalk identifies common qualities of Black disability politics, including the need to ground public health initiatives in the experience and expertise of marginalized disabled people so that they can work in antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist ways. Prioritizing an understanding of disability within the context of white supremacy, Schalk demonstrates that the work of Black disability politics not only exists but is essential to the future of Black liberation movements.

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.

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 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.

In a tradition extending from the medieval era to the early twentieth century, visually disabled Japanese women known as goze toured the Japanese countryside as professional singers and contributed to the vitality of rural musical culture. The goze sang unique narratives (many requiring several hours to perform) as well as a huge repertory of popular ballads and short songs, typically accompanied by a three-stringed lute known as the shamisen. During the Edo period (1600-1868) goze formed guild-like occupational associations and created an iconic musical repertory. They were remarkably successful in fighting discrimination accorded to women, people with physical disabilities, the poor, and itinerants, using their specialized art to connect directly to the commoner public. The best documented goze lived in Echigo province in the Japanese northwest. Although their activities peaked in the nineteenth century, some women continued to tour until the middle of the twentieth. The last active goze survived until 2005. In Goze: Blind Women and Musical Performance in Traditional Japan, author Gerald Groemer argues that goze activism was primarily a matter of the agency of performance itself. Groemer shows that the solidarity goze achieved with the rural public through narrative and music was based on the convergence of the goze's desire to achieve social autonomy and the wish of lower-class to mitigate the cultural deprivation to which they were otherwise so often subject. It was this correlation of emancipatory interests that allowed goze to flourish and attain a degree of social autonomy. Far from being pitied as helpless victims, goze were recognized as masterful artisans who had succeeded in transforming their disability into a powerful social tool and who could act as agents of widespread cultural development. As the first full-length scholarly work on goze in English, this book is sure to prove an invaluable resource to scholars and students of Japanese culture, Japanese music, ethnomusicology, and disability studies worldwide.

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.

Disability and illness are not easy subjects to write about in a direct manner. These are, however, the domains that most of us will eventually inhabit. It is a simple fact that our bodies fail, though our culture protests this at every occasion. The bodies of disabled people have been deemed unworthy of textual representation beyond the texts of medicine. The life stories of those who are suffering are seen as tragic, fodder for stories of what happens to the "other." The author (Nancy Halifax, assistant professor of critical disability studies at York University) posits that the sociopolitical structures of our culture limit the range of disabled people's positions in the world; their absence in books and other cultural products points to the absence of social equity. The subjective experience of illness, impairment, and disability is poorly reflected in most current models of health and disease used in the practices and policies of medical and health institutions. Those with illness, impairment, and disability see this deficiency as a serious problem. This type of work that is called into creation by its subjects exemplifies the notion that writers are ethically preoccupied with telling stories, not only for oneself, but also for others. This book defies and celebrates academic writing; it presents a story of illness and disability, experiences that collectively enrich and challenge our understandings of embodiment, narrative, social structures, identity, and politics-the full continuum of what it means and has meant, to be human. This is a remarkable and important book for both arts-informed researchers and educators and non-arts-informed researchers and educators in cultural studies, critical disability studies, education, health, and qualitative research.

This collection reflects on the development of disability studies in German-speaking Europe and brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on disability in German, Austrian, and Swiss history and culture. Ableism remains the most socially acceptable form of intolerance, with pejoratives referencing disability - and intellectual disability in particular - remaining largely unquestioned among many. Yet the understanding, depiction, and representation of disability is also clearly in a process of transformation. This volume analyzes that transformation, taking a close look at attitudes toward disability in historical and contemporary German-speaking contexts. The volume begins with an overview of the emergence and growth of disability studies in German-speaking Europe against the background of the field's emergence a decade or so earlier in the US and UK. The differences in timing, methodology, and research concentrations bring into focus how each cultural context has shaped the field of disability studies in its multiple and diverse approaches. Building on recent scholarship that uses a cultural studies approach, the volume's three sections analyze constructs of disability and ability in history, memory, and culture. The essays in the history section examine how the emotions, morality, and power have played into - and still do play into - the individual's experience of disability. Those in the memory section grapple with the origins of the Nazi persecution of people with disabilities, the fight for recognition of this genocide, and the politics of its commemoration. Finally, the culture section offers close readings of disability in literary and filmic texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This volume represents a compilation of critically reflexive thinkers in adaptive physical activity (APA) who have willingly embraced the uncomfortable issues of ableism, disableism, and ethically questionable professional practices in the field. From an unprecedented, frank, and introspective stance, the authors make the comfortable and taken-for-granted, uncomfortable. International researchers and educators bring reflexion to ableism in higher education - including curriculum making, textbooks as artefacts of the professional landscape in APA, and the models of disability that unconsciously frame post-secondary instruction in APA.

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.

Sexuality, Disability, and the Law approaches issues of sexual autonomy and disability from multiple perspectives, including constitutional law, international human rights, therapeutic jurisprudence, history, cognitive psychology, dignity studies, and theories and findings on gender constructs and societal norms. Perlin and Lynch determine that if our society continues to assert that persons with mental disabilities possess a primitive morality, we allow ourselves to censor their feelings and their actions. By denying their ability and desires to show love and affection, we justify this disparate treatment. Our reliance on stereotypes has warped our attitudes and our policies, and has allowed us to avoid important issues of humanity and of dignity that should be at the basis of any policies that affect this population.

Takes the recent wave of German autobiographical writing on illness and disability seriously as literature, demonstrating the value of a literary disability studies approach. In the German-speaking world there has been a new wave - intensifying since 2007 - of autobiographically inspired writing on illness and disability, death and dying. Nina Schmidt's book takes this writing seriously as literature,examining how the authors of such personal narratives come to write of their experiences between the poles of cliche and exceptionality. Identifying shortcomings in the approaches taken thus far to such texts, she makes suggestions as to how to better read their narratives from the stance of literary scholarship, then demonstrates the value of a literary disability studies approach to such writing with close readings of Charlotte Roche's Schossgebete(2011), Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (2009), Verena Stefan's Fremdschlafer (2007), and - in the final, comparative chapter - Christoph Schlingensief's So schoen wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (2009) and Wolfgang Herrndorf's blog-cum-book Arbeit und Struktur (2010-13). Schmidt shows that authors dealing with illness and disability do so with an awareness of their precarious subject position in the public eye, a position they negotiate creatively. Writing the liminal experience of serious illness along the borders of genre, moving between fictional and autobiographical modes, they carve out spaces from which they speak up and share their personal stories in the realm of literature, to political ends. Nina Schmidt is a postdoctoral researcher in the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universitat Berlin.

For many people with a disability, either visible or invisible, that experience is hard to navigate in the context of work. Champion change, for yourself and others, challenge stigma and become Positively Purple. Sharing a compelling personal story, Kate Nash offers practical advice for how employers can build environments of trust and support for those with disabilities, how employees with disabilities can advocate for themselves and flourish in the workplace and how those without disabilities can be true allies. Don't become guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to disabled colleagues, employees and customers. Build disability confidence and help create spaces where people with disabilities feel valued and included.

This much-needed volume fills an overlooked gap in adult safeguarding - the digital arena - in providing a comprehensive overview of policy and practice in supporting vulnerable adults online. Providing an essential analysis illustrated by recent court rulings and case studies, the authors advocate for the effective support of adults with learning disabilities and/or mental capacity issues in their digital lives without compromising their privacy and participation rights. The text balances a theoretical exploration of the tensions between participation and protection, legislation, human rights, professional biases and social wrongs. It encourages a critical approach in adopting both a practical and realistic understanding for policy makers, professionals and students in social work, law and adult social care.

The first collection of its kind, Transgender Marxism is a provocative and groundbreaking union of transgender studies and Marxist theory. Exploring trans lives and movements, the authors delve into the experience of surviving as transgender under capitalism. They explore the pressures, oppression and state persecution faced by trans people living in capitalist societies, their tenuous positions in the workplace and the home, and give a powerful response to right-wing scaremongering against 'gender ideology'. Reflecting on the relations between gender and labour, these essays reveal the structure of antagonisms faced by gender non-conforming people within society. Looking at the history of transgender movements, Marxist interventions into developmental theory, psychoanalysis and workplace ethnography, the authors conclude that for trans liberation, capitalism must be abolished.

The London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics were seen as a success and the hosts were praised for the promotion of equality, tolerance and unity as well as inspiring a legacy to continue these values. This volume contains a collection of sociological case studies which critically assess the diverse impacts of London 2012 and its key controversies.