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.

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.

"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

Long Lives Are for the Rich is the title of a silent ominous program that affects the lives of millions of people. In all developed countries disadvantaged and, especially, poor people die much earlier than the most advantaged. During these shorter lives they suffer ten to twenty years longer from disabilities or chronic disease. This does not happen accidentally: health inequalities – including those between healthy and unhealthy life styles – are mainly caused by social inequalities that are reproduced over the life course. This crucial function of the life course has become painfully visible during its neoliberal reorganization since the early 1980s. Studies about aging over the life course, from birth to death, show the inhumane consequences as people get older. In spite of the enormous wealth that has been piled up in the US for a dwindling percentage of the population, there has been growing public indifference about the needs of those in jobs with low pay and high stress, but also about citizens from a broad middle class who can hardly afford high quality education or healthcare. However, this ominous program affects all: recent mortality rates show that all Americans, including the rich, are unhealthier and dying earlier than citizens of other developed countries. Moreover, the underlying social inequalities are tearing the population apart with nasty consequences for all citizens, including the rich. Although the public awareness of the consequences has been growing, neoliberal policies remain tempting for the economic and political elites of the developed world because of the enormous wealth that is flowing to the top. All this poses urgent questions of social justice. Unfortunately, the predominant studies of social justice along the life course help to reproduce these inequalities by neglecting them. This book analyzes the main dynamics of social inequality over the life course and proposes a theory of social justice that sketches a way forward for a country that is willing to invest in its greatest resource: the creative potential of its population.

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.

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.

This book explores the intricate connections that link the current digitalization of manufacturing to our daily lives and identities as members of highly technologized societies. Based on extensive research on the prosthetics industry in Germany, the USA, Canada, and Haiti, the author demonstrates the socio-material construction of users, examining the ways in which the introduction of 3D printing changes how artificial limbs are designed, manufactured, distributed and used. Addressing questions surrounding the capacity of flexible production to afford greater diversity of user roles, and the likelihood of 3D printing allowing for open-source hardware and the democratization of production, the author presents a theory of digitalization that sheds light on the dynamics of industrial transformation and the future of use. An empirically grounded and conceptually informed study, The Socio-Material Construction of Users will appeal to researchers in the fields of sociology, science and technology studies and organization studies, as well as readers interested in 3D printing and the digitalization of society.

Social Order/Mental Disorder represents a provocative and exciting exploration of social response to madness in England and the United States from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Scull, who is well-known for his previous work in this area, examines a range of issues, including the changing social meanings of madness, the emergence and consolidation of the psychiatric profession, the often troubled relationship between psychiatry and the law, the linkages between sex and madness, and the constitution, character, and collapse of the asylum as our standard response to the problems posed by mental disorder. This book is emphatically not part of the venerable tradition of hagiography that has celebrated psychiatric history as a long struggle in which the steady application of rational-scientific principles has produced irregular but unmistakable evidence of progress toward humane treatments for the mentally ill. In fact, Scull contends that traditional mental hospitals, for much of their existence, resembled cemeteries for the still breathing, medical hubris having at times served to license dangerous, mutilating, even life-threatening experiments on the dead souls confined therein. He argues that only the sociologically blind would deny that psychiatrists are deeply involved in the definition and identification of what constitutes madness in our world - hence, claims that mental illness is a purely naturalistic category, somehow devoid of contamination by the social, are taken to be patently absurd. Scull points out, however, that the commitment to examine psychiatry and its ministrations with a critical eye by no means entails the romantic idea that the problems it deals with are purely the invention of the professional mind, or the Manichean notion that all psychiatric interventions are malevolent and ill-conceived. It is the task of unromantic criticism that is attempted in this book.

The collective volume seeks to respond to these questions by exploring crip time in disability performance as both a concept and a phenomenon. Out of time has many different meanings, amongst them outmoded, out of step, under time pressure, no time left, or simply delayed. In the disability context it may also refer to resistant attitudes of living in "crip time" that contradict time as a linear process with a more or less predictable future. According to Alison Kafer, "crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds." What does this mean in the disability arts? What new concepts of accessibility, crip futures, and crip resistance can be staged or created by disability performance? And how does the notion of "out of time" connect crip time with pandemic time in disability performance? The book tackles the topic from two angles: on the one hand from a theoretical point of view that connects performance analysis with crip and performance theory, on the other hand from a practice-based perspective of disability artists who develop new concepts and dramaturgies of crip time based on their own lived experiences and observations in the field of the performing and disability arts. The book gathers different types of text genres, forms and styles that mirror the diversity of their authors. Besides theoretical and academic chapters on disability performance the book also includes essays, poems, dramatic texts, and choreographic concepts that reflect upon the alternative knowledge in the disability arts.

Politics, Disability, and Education Reform in the South explores how race, gender, disability, and politics all came together to impact the career of one State Superintendent of Education in South Carolina who fought to improve educational conditions for African-Americans, women, and millworkers' children in South Carolina.

First published in 1992, The Creatures Time Forgot examines the representation of disabled people - in advertising, particularly that produced by disability charities, and in the work of photographers such as Diane Arbus and Gary Winogrand. He shows how such images construct disabled people as 'creatures,' the tragic-but-brave objects of photographic gaze, or as the ''appy 'andicapped' of 'positive imagery' advertising. As a disabled photographer and writer, David Hevey has been a pioneer in challenging such visual representations of disabled people. His work advocates a move away from medical, charity or impairment-fixated imagery towards a visual equivalent of 'Rights not Charity'. The book outlines David Hevey's own photographic practice and includes wide-ranging selections from his work to create a visual form which reflects the new social presence of disabled people. This book will be of interest to students of media studies, cultural studies, and disability studies.

Although disability imagery is ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible, characters with disabilities are not. The presence of the former does not guarantee the presence of the later. While interpreters explain away disabilities in specific characters, they celebrate the rhetorical contributions that disability imagery makes to the literary artistry of biblical prose and poetry, often as a trope to describe the suffering or struggles of a presumably nondisabled person or community. This situation contributes to the appearance (or illusion) of a Hebrew Bible that uses disability as a rich literary trope while disavowing the presence of figures or characters with disabilities.
Isaiah 53 provides a wonderful example of this dynamic at work. The "Suffering Servant" figure in Isaiah 53 has captured the imagination of readers since very early in the history of biblical interpretation. Most interpreters understand the servant as an otherwise able bodied person who suffers. By contrast, Jeremy Schipper's study shows that Isaiah 53 describes the servant with language and imagery typically associated with disability in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature. Informed by recent work in disability studies from across the humanities, it traces both the disappearance of the servant's disability from the interpretative history of Isaiah 53 and the scholarly creation of the able bodied suffering servant.

Fleeing from Nazi Europe in the late 1930s, Austrian-born Karl Koenig and his colleagues founded the first Camphill community, for children with special needs, outside Aberdeen in the north of Scotland. The seven essays by Koenig in this book explain the principles behind what would grow to become a worldwide movement. The insights in this book reveal the inner motivations that drove Koenig and his team to persevere with their social project, and help modern-day readers to understand how they succeeded in building a network that now numbers over one hundred communities in twenty countries around the world. Includes extensive diary excerpts, documents and photographs from the Karl Koenig Archive.

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.

Nearly 20% of the population has a disability. Despite this, mainstream research often does not explicitly address the methodological and practical issues that can act as barriers to disabled people's participation in social research. In this book, Aidley and Fearon provide a concise, practical introduction to making it easier for everyone to take part in research. Requiring no prior knowledge about accessible research methods, the book: * explains how removing barriers to participation will improve the quality of the research; * covers the research process from design, to collecting data, to dissemination and publication; * includes checklists and further reading, as well as useful examples and vignettes to illustrate how issues play out in practice. This book will be invaluable to researchers from a variety of backgrounds looking to increase participation in their research, whether postgraduate students, experienced academic researchers, practitioners or professionals.

This volume of essays attempts to identify the shared experiences of disabled children and examine the key debates about their care and control. The essays follow a chronological progression while focusing on the practices in a number of different countries.

This text provides an analysis of the development and consequences of disability policies, contrasting policies grounded in medical definitions of disability with a social model of disability supported by disability rights campaigners in their pursuit of anti discrimination legislation. British policies are compared with the civil rights approach adopted in America and Australia and the welfare orientated stance of countries like Sweden, and the impacts of policy on disabled people according to their class, gender, age and ethnicity are explored.

Amit Patel is working as a trauma doctor when a rare condition causes him to lose his sight within thirty-six hours. Totally dependent on others and terrified of stepping outside with a white cane after he's assaulted, he hits rock bottom. He refuses to leave home on his own for three months. With the support of his wife Seema he slowly adapts to his new situation, but how could life ever be the way it was? Then his guide dog Kika comes along . . .

But Kika’s stubbornness almost puts her guide dog training in jeopardy – could her quirky personality be a perfect match for someone? Meanwhile Amit has reservations – can he trust a dog with his safety? Paired together in 2015, they start on a journey, learning to trust each other before taking to the streets of London and beyond. The partnership not only gives Amit a renewed lease of life but a new best friend. Then, after a video of an irate commuter rudely asking Amit to step aside on an escalator goes viral, he sets out with Kika by his side to spread a message of positivity and inclusivity, showing that nothing will hold them back.

From the challenges of travelling when blind to becoming a parent for the first time, Kika & Me is the moving, heart-warming and inspirational story of Amit’s sight-loss journey and how one guide dog changed his world.