Using an autoethnographic approach, as well as multiple first-person accounts from disabled writers, artists, and scholars, Jan Doolittle Wilson describes how becoming disabled is to forge a new consciousness and a radically new way of viewing the world. In Becoming Disabled, Wilson examines disability in ways that challenge dominant discourses and systems that shape and reproduce disability stigma and discrimination. It is to create alternative meanings that understand disability as a valuable human variation, that embrace human interdependency, and that recognize the necessity of social supports for individual flourishing and happiness. From her own disability view of the world, Wilson critiques the disabling impact of language, media, medical practices, educational systems, neoliberalism, mothering ideals, and other systemic barriers. And she offers a powerful vision of a society in which all forms of human diversity are included and celebrated and one in which we are better able to care for ourselves and each other.

Bringing together scholars from film and television studies, media and cultural studies, literary studies, medical humanities, and disability studies, Discourses of Care collectively examines how the analysis of media texts and practices can contribute to scholarship on and understandings of health and social care, and how existing research focusing on the ethics of care can inform our understanding of media. Featuring a critical introductory essay and 13 specially commissioned original chapters, this is the first edited collection to address the relationship between media and the concept and practice of care and caregiving. Contributors consider the representation of care and caregiving through a range of forms and practices - the television documentary, photography, film, non-theatrical cinema, tabloid media, autobiography, and public service broadcasting - and engage with the labour, as well as the practical and ethical dimensions of media production. Together, they offer an original and wide ranging exploration of the various ways in which media forms represent, articulate and operate within caring relationships and practices of care; whether this is between individuals, communities as well as audiences and institutions.

* The book explores the mental health experiences of suffering and healing of accident survivors with locomotor disability in India. * It provides a holistic understanding of disability experience by delving deeper into the socio-political discourses of having an impairment * Will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers of psychology, health psychology, disability studies, sociology, mental health, and well-being across UK and US. It will also be of interest to psychologists, counsellors, mental health professionals, policymakers and those interested in disability studies.

Beckett's plays have attracted a striking range of disability performances - that is, performances that cast disabled actors, regardless of whether their roles are explicitly described as 'disabled' in the text. Grounded in the history of disability performance of Beckett's work and a new theorising of Beckett's treatment of the impaired body, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance examines four contemporary disability performances of Beckett's plays, staged in the UK and US, and brings the rich fields of Beckett studies and disability studies into mutually illuminating conversation. Pairing original interviews with the actors and directors involved in these productions alongside critical analysis underpinned by recent disability and performance theory, this book explores how these productions emphasise or rework previously undetected indicators of disability in Beckett's work. More broadly, it reveals how Beckett's theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body.

The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader's tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.

Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy offers fresh perspectives on how dramaturgs can support a production beyond rigid disciplinary expectations about what information and ideas are useful and how they should be shared. The sixteen contributors to this volume offer personal windows into dramaturgy practice, encouraging theater practitioners, students, and general theater-lovers to imagine themselves as dramaturgs newly inspired by the encounters and enquiries that are the juice of contemporary theater. Each case study is written by a dramaturg whose body of work explores important issues of race, cultural equity, and culturally-specific practices within a wide range of conventions, venues, and communities. The contributors demonstrate the unique capacity of their craft to straddle the ravine between stage and stalls, intention and impact. By unpacking, in the most up-to-date ways, the central question of "Why this play, at this time, for this audience?," this collection provides valuable insights and dramaturgy tools for scholars and students of Dramaturgy, Directing, and Theater Studies.

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind's military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. The war's new weaponry, from tanks to shrapnel, enabled slaughter on an industrial scale, and given the nature of trench warfare, thousands of soldiers sustained facial injuries. Medical advances meant that more survived their wounds than ever before, yet disfigured soldiers did not receive the hero's welcome they deserved. In The Facemaker, award-winning historian Lindsey Fitzharris tells the astonishing story of the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to restoring the faces - and the identities - of a brutalized generation. Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world's first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction in Sidcup, south-east England. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of doctors, nurses and artists whose task was to recreate what had been torn apart. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero, but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of the wounded but also their spirits. Meticulously researched and grippingly told, The Facemaker places Gillies's ingenious surgical innovations alongside the poignant stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine and art can merge, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

This book explores the series of issues that emerge at the intersection of disability, care and family law. Disability studies is an area of increasing academic interest. In addition to a subject in its own right, there has been growing concern to ensure that mainstream subjects diversify and include marginalised voices, including those of disabled people. Family law in modern times is often based on an "able-bodied autonomous norm" but can fit less well with the complexities of living with disability. In response, this book addresses a range of important and highly topical issues: whether care proceedings are used too often in cases where parents have disabilities; how the law should respond to children who care for disabled parents - and the care of older family members with disabilities. It also considers the challenges posed by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, particularly around the different institutional and state responsibilities captured in the Convention, and around decision-making for both disabled adults and children. This interdisciplinary collection - with contributors from law, criminology, sociology and social policy as well as from policy and activist backgrounds - will appeal to academic family lawyers and disability scholars as well as students interested in issues around family law, disability and care.

This interdisciplinary volume links dis/ability and agency by exploring LatDisCrit's theory and activist emancipatory practice. It uses the author's experiential and analytical views as a blind brown Latinx engaged scholar and activist from the global south living and struggling in the highly racialized global north context of the United States. LatDisCrit integrates critically LatCrit and DisCrit which look at the interplay of race/ethnicity, diasporic cultures, historical sociopolitics and disability within multiple Latinx identities in mostly global north contexts, while incorporating global south epistemologies. Using intersectional analysis of key concepts through critical counterstories, following critical race theory methodological traditions, and engaging possible decoloniality treatments of material precarity and agency, this book emphasizes intersectionality's complex underpinnings within and beyond Latinidades. Through a careful interplay of dis/ability identity and dis/ability rights/empowerment, the volume opens avenues for intersectional solidarity and spaces for radical transformational learning. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies; intersectional disability justice activists; critical Latinx/Chicanx studies; critical geographies; intersectional political philosophy; and political and public sociology.

In this period of upheaval of our nation's health care system, this timely work serves to increase awareness of and knowledge about the problems of societal living among the chronically disabled elderly. To meet the goal of optimal social functioning of the chronically disabled, past and present attitudes and practices of education, health care, and social service providers need to be examined and in many cases changed or discarded. Focusing on macro and micro contexts--and using examples to highlight actual experiences and processes--the need for a comprehensive approach to chronic disabling conditions is illustrated. This work has important implications for institutions of education in health and social sciences, policy makers in health care and social services, advocacy groups for the elderly and disabled, and individuals and families facing the care of the chronically disabled.

Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom integrates knowledge and practice from the fields of disability studies and special education to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of inclusive education. Now in its third edition, this critical volume has been revised and updated to include expanded discussion of disability models and contemporary perspectives on disability. Each chapter features a dilemma to capture the complexities of the field of educational practice to inspire critical thinking and contemplation of inclusive education.

Includes 29 newly written chapters from scholars and activists around the world. First book to provide an overview of Critical Autism Studies and explore the different kinds of knowledges and their articulations, similarities and differences across cultural contexts and key tensions within this sub-discipline. Of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, education, health, social care and political science as well as members of the autistic community and activists.

In this book we are interested in patterns of education, rehabilitation service, socialization, and ideas about blindness that in large part produce the above-mentioned distinct patterns. We will examine the economic interests of professional groups and the patterns of domination and subordination, which are present in most rehabilitation relationships. Our central tenet is that the behavior of blind people is not a product of the physical condition of blindness or the amount of residual vision a blind person has. Rather, the behavior of blind people in our society is governed by socialization. Blindness is a social problem arising from erroneous, socially constructed negative beliefs about the capacities of blind people involuntarily assimilated from the broader society by the blind. People learn to live independently or they learn to be dependent. The reactions of parents, teachers, peers, the health professionals, rehabilitation counselors and the general public have defined the choices available to blind people. This is the case in every culture and society around the world. Differences result from different cultural values, levels of economic development, and historical traditions.

The rising cost of illness and disability benefits are one of today's biggest social and labour market challenges. The promise of activation-oriented work disability policies was labour market engagement for all people, regardless of illness, injury or impairment. However, the reality has been more complex. The Science and Politics of Work Disability Policy addresses social and political economic contexts driving state work disability reform in 13 countries. In this first attempt to explain the history and future of work disability policy, this book asks new questions about work disability policy design, focus, and effects. It details how work disability policies have evolved with jurisdictions, why these take their current shape, and where they are heading. The well positioned authors draw on their insider knowledge and expertise in law, medicine, and social science to provide detailed case studies of their jurisdictions. This pathbreaking volume will be of interest to social security system policy makers, scholars, and students in the health and social sciences.

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.

A resource for progressing current research into disability sport. Brings together an eclectic mix of contributing authors. This includes disabled and able-bodied academics, and particularly for the sections in which we address intersectionality, authors who themselves have lived experiences of living with multiple identities. Bridge important gaps between disability studies and sport sociology through offering thorough interrogations between theory, method and empiricism progressing research in the field.

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.

This book uses previously unknown archive materials to explore the meaning of the term 'incapable of work' over a hundred years (1911-present). Nowadays, people claiming disability benefits must undergo medical tests to assess whether or not they are capable of work. Media reports and high profile campaigns highlight the problems with this system and question whether the process is fair. These debates are not new and, in this book, Jackie Gulland looks at similar questions about how to assess people's capacity for work from the beginning of the welfare state in the early 20th century. Amongst many subject areas, she explores women's roles in the domestic sphere and how these were used to consider their capacity for work in the labour market. The book concludes that incapacity benefit decision making is really about work: what work is, what it is not, who should do it, who should be compensated when work does not provide a sufficient income and who should be exempted from any requirement to look for it.

This book addresses the ways in which individualised, market-based models of disability support provision have been mobilised in and across different countries through cross-national investigation of individualised funding (IF) as an object of neoliberal policy mobility. Combining rich theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives with extensive empirical research, the book provides a timely examination of the policy processes and mechanisms driving the spread of IF amongst countries at the forefront of disability policy reform. It is argued that IF's mobility is not attributable to neoliberalism alone but to the complex intersections between neoliberal and emancipatory agendas and to the transnational networks that have blended the two agendas in new ways in different institutional contexts. The book shows how disability rights struggles have synchronised with neoliberal agendas, which explains IF's propensity to move and mutate between different jurisdictions. Featuring first-hand accounts of the activists and advocates engaged in these struggles, the book illuminates the consequences and risks of the dangerous liaisons and political trade-offs that seemed necessary to get individualised funding on the policy agenda for disabled people. It will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies, social policy, sociology and political science more generally.

NOW a NETFLIX series entitled Special from Executive Producer JIM PARSONS starring RYAN O'CONNELL as himself. From the beloved blogger turned voice of an online generation, an unforgettable and hilarious memoir-meets-manifesto exploring what it means to be a millennial gay man living with cerebral palsy, which VICE calls "a younger, gay version of Mary Karr's Lit." People are obsessed with Ryan O'Connell's blogs. With tens of thousands reading his pieces on Thought Catalog and Vice, watching his videos on YouTube, and hanging on to each and every #dark tweet, Ryan has established himself as a unique young voice who's not afraid to dole out some real talk. He's that candid, snarky friend you consult when you fear you're spending too much time falling down virtual k-holes stalking your ex on Facebook or when you've made the all-too-common mistake of befriending a psycho while wasted at last night's party and need to find a way to get rid of them the next morning. But Ryan didn't always have the answers to these modern-day dilemmas. Growing up gay and disabled with cerebral palsy, he constantly felt like he was one step behind everybody else. Then the rude curveball known as your twenties happened and things got even more confusing. Ryan spent years as a Millennial cliche: he had dead-end internships; dabbled in unemployment; worked in his pajamas as a blogger; communicated mostly via text; looked for love online; spent hundreds on "necessary" items, like candles, while claiming to have no money; and even descended into aimless pill-popping. But through extensive trial and error, Ryan eventually figured out how to take his life from bleak to chic and began limping towards adulthood. Sharp and entertaining, I'm Special will educate twentysomethings (or other adolescents-at-heart) on what NOT to do if they ever want to become happy fully functioning grown-ups with a 401k and a dog.

Outlines how in modern societies hearing, health and sound technologies are entangled in multi-faceted ways. The book brings together, for the first time, historians, scholars from media studies, social sciences, cultural studies, acoustics and neuroscientists to show and discuss how modern technologies play a decisive role in the ways 'normal', enhanced or 'smart' hearing as well as hearing impairment have been configured and experienced. Addresses current hearing practices that become increasingly mediated by personalized hearing technologies and aids that engage with continuously changing sonic situations along advanced algorithms and intuitive apps.

Alcantara, Shinohara, and their contributors evaluate the current state of diversity and inclusion (D&I) within business and higher education in Japan, and the importance of D&I to the growth of Japan's economy and the enrichment of its society. Japan is widely understood to be a homogenous and patriarchal society, and while this is changing and was never wholly accurate, it certainly faces challenges in becoming more diverse and inclusive, particularly in its business and higher educational cultures. Grounded in research and offering best practices, the chapters in this book analyze critical issues relating to D&I in Japan at the individual, organizational, and industry levels. They present both a longitudinal analysis of the evolution and performance outcomes of D&I policies in Japanese corporations across industries, and rich studies of different underrepresented groups in Japan. These groups include immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. The contributors prescribe policies for promoting D&I in higher education, within businesses and at the governmental level. This book is an essential contribution to D&I discourse in the Japanese context that will be of great value to scholars of Japanese society and business, and an important extended case study for those looking at D&I more widely. CC BY NC ND

This ground-breaking volume considers what it means to make claims of disability membership in view of the robust Disability Rights movement, the rich areas of academic inquiry into disability, increased philosophical attention to the nature and significance of disability, a vibrant disability culture and disability arts movement, and advances in biomedical science and technology. By focusing on the statement, "We are all disabled", the book explores the following questions: What are the philosophical, political, and practical implications of making this claim? What conceptions of disability underlie it? When, if ever, is this claim justified, and when or why might it be problematic or harmful? What are the implications of claiming "we are all disabled" amidst this global COVID-19 pandemic? These critical reflections on the boundaries of disability include perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, law, and the arts. In exploring the boundaries of disability, and the ways in which these lines are drawn theoretically, legally, medically, socially, and culturally, the authors in this volume challenge particular conceptions of disability, expand the meaning and significance of the term, and consider the implications of claiming disability as an identity. It will be of interest to a broad audience, including disability scholars, advocates and activists, philosophers and historians of disability, moral theorists, clinicians, legal scholars, and artists.

Argues for a return to a positive view of the other via a personalist philosophy of being offered by Mounier, Marcel, and Wojtyla, and deepened by participation, belonging, and possibility of contributing to the good of all. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, philosophy and anthropology. Disability studies are often regarded as practical studies as opposed to the apparently inevitable theorizing of philosophy or theology. However, this book's methodology of explicitly linking disability studies with philosophy and theology demonstrates their complementarity.