Feminist Perspectives on Disability provides a unique introduction to the key debates in relation to both feminism and disability. The author considers contemporary similarities, differences and contentious areas and how concepts drawn from postmodern feminism can be usefully applied to the disability arena. The book explores many important aspects of the field, including: biological debates; issues of power, knowledge, equality, difference, subjectivity and the body; interface of public and private/care and community; medical and social barriers; politics, citizenship and identity. Feminist Perspectives on Disability will be compulsory reading for students of all levels in Women's Studies, Gender Relations, Social Policy, Social Work/Social Care and social Science.

In The Social Nature of Mental Illness, Len Bowers offers an objective and philosophical critique of the theories of mental illness as a social construct. His purpose is to examine the rationality of these theories, what they might mean, and in which cases they are to be accepted or rejected. Previous work on this issue has concentrated upon empirical evidence. All that has been generated from this are opposing interpretations rather than solutions. This book examines the common ground between the apologists for and critics of psychiatry and discusses how debate on this issue affects research into and treatment of mental illness. Len Bowers argues that many of the assertions made about the social nature of mental illness are misguided or wrong, but he concludes that they cannot be wholly rejected.


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eBook available with sample pages: 0203361229

This book presents chapters by many eminent researchers and interventionists, all of whom address the development of deaf and hard-of-hearing children in the context of family and school. A variety of disciplines and perspectives are provided in order to capture the complexity of factors affecting development of these children in their diverse environments. Consistent with current theory and educational practice, the book focuses most strongly on the interaction of family and child strengths and needs and the role of educational and other interventionists in supporting family and child growth. This work, and the authors represented in it, have been influenced by the seminal work of Kathryn P. Meadow-Orlans, whose work continues to apply a multidisciplinary, developmental approach to understanding the development of deaf children.
The book differs from other collections in the degree to which the chapters share ecological and developmental theoretical bases. A synthesis of information is provided in section introductions and in an afterword provided by Dr. Meadow-Orlans. The book reflects emerging research practice in the field by representing both qualitative and quantitative approaches. In addition, the book is notable for the contributions of deaf as well as hearing authors and for chapters in which research participants speak for themselves--providing first-person accounts of experiences and feelings of deaf children and their parents. Some chapters in the book may surprise readers in that they present a more positive view of family and child functioning than has historically been the case in this field. This is consistent with emerging data from deaf and hard of hearing children who have benefitted from early identification and intervention. In addition, it represents an emerging recognition of strengths shown by the children and by their deaf and hearing parents.
The book moves from consideration of child and family to a focus on the role and effects of school environments on development. Issues of culture and expectations pervade the chapters in this section of the book, which includes chapters addressing effects of school placement options, positive effects of learning about deaf culture and history, effects of changing educational practice in developing nations, and the need for increased knowledge about ways to meet individual needs of the diverse group of deaf and hard of hearing students.
Thus, the book gives the reader a coherent view of current knowledge and issues in research and intervention for deaf and hard of hearing children and their families. Because the focus is on child and family instead of a specific discipline, the book can serve as a helpful supplemental text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in a variety of disciplines, including education, psychology, sociology, and language studies with an emphasis on deaf and hard of hearing children.

"From Disability to Possibility will change the way you look at your students with disabilities. And when you make that shift, the way those students look to you will change. You will see the possibilities, and in that vision, you will see the power of the inclusive classroom. " -Kylene Beers

Three decades after landmark special education legislation promised a better learning experience for students, special education is still just that-a promise. In America we have earned a failing grade in educating diverse learners, as evidenced by their overwhelming underemployment or joblessness after graduation. We can do better by adopting a new model - one that honors varied teaching and learning styles, transforming disability into possibility. Only then can we finally fulfill the promise of special education.

"From Disability to Possibility" leads the way presenting the specific kinds of teaching, classroom practices, and support approaches that will make this new model of possibility a reality. Drawing on the stories of learners, both with and without disabilities, as well as families and teachers, Patrick Schwarz shows you not only why many current special education frameworks don't work, but also how they damage children, often for life. Then he demonstrates how possibility studies offers a meaningful, practical, and doable alternative to traditional special education practices both during the school years and after.

Ideal for general educators, special educators, administrators, educational leaders, related service professionals, paraeducators and self-advocates, "From Disability to Possibility" illustrates, through stories of struggle and success, how creative, conscientious teachers can work with everyone involved in a student's learning to make special education work. In addition Patrick Schwarz will show you that special education is a service, not a sentence, and that labels hurt. His ideas and passion will inspire you to look at diverse learners, their instruction, and their support in the classroom, the curriculum, and the social world of school from a new perspective: the "possibility of disability."

A third of poor people are disabled in the developing world. How much do we know about their livelihood with hard data? Are they entirely powerless and dependent on family members? How do they earn income? These questions have become more important than ever, now that persons with disabilities (PWDs) in developing countries have awakened to rights and entitlements and that the international community started considering the incorporation of disability into the context of poverty reduction. This book highlights opportunities and challenges faced by PWDs in the developing countries. This book also illustrates the analyses with a case study which was conducted in the Philippines and this case study has made a good progress in legislation for PWDs. A field survey was jointly conducted by the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan, and the Philippine Institute for Development Studies in Metro Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, in 2008. Around 400 PWDs were interviewed, and the data was investigated with econometrics. The book highlights a remarkable disparity in earnings and education among PWDs. The book also examines the positive role of organizations such as Disabled People's Organizations and how empowerment of PWDs is made through dissemination of useful information such as programs given by the central and local governments. The book concludes that all measures, i.e. education, training, DPOs and institutional preferences, must be mobilized harmoniously to boost the livelihood of PWDs sinking in the bottom stratum in income.

Full Contributors:
Professor Philip Bean, Director of the Midlands Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, Loughborough University; Paul Cavadino, Director of Policy and Information for the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO); Daniel Grant, specialist practioner in child protection; Professor Robert Harris, University of Hull; Jill Peay London School of Economics; Judith Pitchers, Loughborough University; Professor Michael Preston-Shoot, Liverpool John-Moores University; David Webb, Dean of Faculty of Economics and Social Science, Nottingham Trent University; Sir John Wood, Emeritus Professor in Law, University of Sheffield; Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC

In this ground-breaking book, Jenny Slater uses the lens of 'the reasonable' to explore how normative understandings of youth, dis/ability and the intersecting identities of gender and sexuality impact upon the lives of young dis/abled people. Although youth and disability have separately been thought within socio-cultural frameworks, rarely have sociological studies of 'youth' and 'disability' been brought together. By taking an interdisciplinary, critical disability studies approach to explore the socio-cultural concepts of 'youth' and 'disability' alongside one-another, Slater convincingly demonstrates that 'youth' and 'disability' have been conceptualised within medical/psychological frameworks for too long. With chapters focusing on access and youth culture, independence, autonomy and disabled people's movements, and the body, gender and sexuality, this volume's intersectional and transdisciplinary engagement with social theory offers a significant contribution to existing theoretical and empirical literature and knowledges around disability and youth. Indeed, through highlighting the ableism of adulthood and the falsity of conceptualising youth as a time of becoming-independent-adult, the need to shift approaches to research around dis/abled youth is one of the main themes of the book. This book therefore is a provocation to rethink what is implicit about 'youth' and 'disability'. Moreover, through such an endeavour, this book sits as a challenge to Mr Reasonable.

This book concerns the process of transition that we all make throughout our lifetime, and the necessary skills individuals with disabilities need to function outside of school. The book illustrates that the problems of transition are not just for persons with disabilities, but for everyone. Acceptance of differences, understanding that our perceptions may not be accurate, and the ability to be honest with one another are shown to be key elements in assisting transition.

This comprehensive collection provides a fascinating summary of the debates on the growth of institutional care during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Revising and revisiting Foucault, it looks at the significance of ethnicity, race and gender as well as the impact of political and cultural factors, throughout Britain and in a colonial context. It questions historically what it means to be mad and how, if at all, to care.

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eBook available with sample pages: 0203025784

First published in 1984, this book focuses on the support and reassurance needed by parents of children with handicaps. It provides a practical guide in relation to daily care and is equally as relevant to professionals, therapists, teachers, doctors and psychologists who must advise parents. Written by an Occupational Therapist, the book highlights the need to make such children as independent as possible and gives advice on care of a special baby, modifications to the home environment, the needs of a child with a physical handicap, problems of educational handicap, and the place of a child in the family and community.

First published in 1986, this book reviews research on the role parents play in fostering the early development of children with mental handicaps. Professionals and parents must work together to give such children the chance of living as ordinary lives as possible and here, the author develops a broadly-based conceptual framework for the involvement of parents as teachers of their young handicapped children. McConachie identifies characteristics of parents which seem of particular relevance to the design and success of intervention programmes. Although written in the 1980s, this book discusses topics that are still important today.

This text assembles together advances in knowledge about dementia, Alzheimers disease and related disorders as they affect persons with intellectual disabilities. Diagnosis, assessment, treatment, management and care practices are detailed in a practical manner for both students and professionals.

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Author Biography:
Brendan Gleeson is a Research Fellow at the Urban Research Program, Australian National University

'Some years ago I read the phrase "the spontaneous revulsion to the deformed". The phrase seemed to be both potent and provocative: Was there a spontaneous revulsion to disabilities in children or did such conditions evoke a more compassionate response?' Originally published in 1978, the problems of the disabled were no longer confined to the medical and educational professionals, but had become the concern of the community as a whole. Using terminology very much of the time, the author shows how attitudes towards different kinds of disability had developed at the time; they varied both regionally and by social class, sometimes calling into question the accepted 'facts' about the distribution of a particular condition. Most importantly, the author examines these attitudes together with many other social and psychological factors in relation to their impact on the social behaviour and developing self-image of the disabled child. It becomes clear that the dangers of categorization and the difficulties in overcoming stigma have a profound influence on the education and socialization of disabled children. This book will be of historical interest to students and teachers of psychology, education, social work and rehabilitation; and it will provide insight for parents and all those concerned with the care and development of the disabled child about how far we have come.

The London 2012 Paralympic Games - the biggest, most accessible and best-attended games in the Paralympics' 64-year history - came with an explicit aim to "transform the perception of disabled people in society," and use sport to contribute to "a better world for all people with a disability." This social agenda offered the potential to re-frame disability; to symbolically challenge "ableist" ideology and to offer a reinvention of the (dis)abled body and a redefinition of the possible. This edited collection investigates what has and is happening in relation to these ambitions. The book is structured around three key questions: 1. What were the predominant mediated narratives surrounding the Paralympics, and what are the associated meanings attached to them? 2. How were the Paralympics experienced by media audiences (both disabled and non-disabled)? 3. To what extent did the 2012 Paralympics inspire social change? Each section of this book is interspersed with authentic "voices" from outside academia: broadcasters, athletes and disabled schoolchildren.

Literary Nonfiction. Disability Studies. Poetry. Art. This collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various disabilities. The women speak frankly about the societal barriers they encounter in their everyday lives due to social attitudes and physical and systemic inaccessibility. They bring to light the discrimination they experience through sexism, because they are women, and through ableism, because they have disabilities. For them, the personal is definitely political. Here, Canadian women discuss their lives in the areas of employment, body image, sexuality and family life, society's attitudes, and physical, sexual and emotional abuse. While society traditionally views having a disability as "weakness" and that women are the "weaker" sex, this collection points to the strength, persistence, and resilience of disabled women living the edges.

This guide for professionals to aid adults with mental retardation in dealing with grief first covers background information on the universal grief process, then addresses grief issues specific to the mentally retarded adult population, and next provides practical guidelines for interacting and providing support over 100 specific ideas. It features original artwork of adults with mental retardation working through the grief process.

How can managers motivate their employees? After conducting detailed field studies of work groups in settings as diverse as insurance company offices and regatta sailboats, Judith Komaki has identified two key behaviours that seem to distinguish effective from ineffective managers; monitoring workers' performance and communicating consequences. Drawing on her research over the last ten years, Komaki combines behavioural and cognitive theories of leadership and puts forward a new model for the study of leadership from an operant perspective.

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Our lives are preoccupied with bodily maintenance. We spend many of our waking hours eating, exercising, washing, grooming and dressing in order to maintain our sense of self. What happens after major physical impairment? How do we relate to a damaged body?
Wendy Seymour interviews men and women who have suffered profound bodily paralysis, and explores how they deal with their appearance, relationships, sexuality, incontinence and sport. She finds that even major impairment hasn't annihilated these people's experience of an embodied self. She shows that the process of self-reconstruction is interwoven with social expectations and argues that the experience of disability highlights the continuous work involved in embodiment for everyone.
Remaking the Body is a major contribution to the field of the sociology of the body and essential reading for rehabilitation professionals and students.

Hearing loss is a common chronic condition which is often poorly recognized but can have multiple negative impacts, not just on the lives of those directly affected, but also those living with them. People with impaired hearing may begin a long and uncertain journey involving a number of key stages, from emerging awareness and help-seeking, to diagnosis, adjustment, and self-evaluation. Based on a model of person-centered audiological rehabilitation, this book explains why it is important to understand both patients' own experiences, and those of their communication partners, over time. It focuses particularly on the human dynamics of hearing loss, exploring the broader consequences of hearing loss for the individual, family members, and wider society. In particular the book: gives insight into the patients' and their communication partners' experiences and perspectives through clear and telling first-hand narrative accounts; examines how people understand their own hearing loss, reflect on their experiences with hearing aids - both positive and negative - and evaluate treatment options; considers the changes needed to conversations in order to include all communication partners, whether with impaired hearing or not; and discusses consequences of hearing loss using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). With its explicit aim to increase awareness of the need to include the patient and close relatives in the process of rehabilitation, this new text makes an important contribution to further improve evidence-based practice in the field of audiological rehabilitation. An ideal text for audiology, ENT, and nursing students of all levels.

Looking at schizophrenia from the point of view of individuals actually suffering from the disease, this text gives a first-hand insight into the process and effects of the disease. Throughout the narratives, poetry and artwork, Kaplan and Harrow add comments illuminating the meaning and pyschological significance of the stories.

Hearing loss is a common chronic condition which is often poorly recognized but can have multiple negative impacts, not just on the lives of those directly affected, but also those living with them. People with impaired hearing may begin a long and uncertain journey involving a number of key stages, from emerging awareness and help-seeking, to diagnosis, adjustment, and self-evaluation. Based on a model of person-centered audiological rehabilitation, this book explains why it is important to understand both patients' own experiences, and those of their communication partners, over time. It focuses particularly on the human dynamics of hearing loss, exploring the broader consequences of hearing loss for the individual, family members, and wider society. In particular the book: gives insight into the patients' and their communication partners' experiences and perspectives through clear and telling first-hand narrative accounts; examines how people understand their own hearing loss, reflect on their experiences with hearing aids - both positive and negative - and evaluate treatment options; considers the changes needed to conversations in order to include all communication partners, whether with impaired hearing or not; and discusses consequences of hearing loss using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). With its explicit aim to increase awareness of the need to include the patient and close relatives in the process of rehabilitation, this new text makes an important contribution to further improve evidence-based practice in the field of audiological rehabilitation. An ideal text for audiology, ENT, and nursing students of all levels.

The formerly established medically-based idea of disability, with its charity-based approach to treatment and services, is being replaced by a human rights-based approach in which people with impairments are no longer considered medical problems, totally dependent on the beneficence of non-impaired people in society, but have fundamental rights to support, inclusion, and participation. This interdisciplinary book examines the diverse concerns that people with impairments face in the context of human rights, provides insights into new developments on important issues relating human rights to disability, and features new approaches and solutions to vital problems in the current debate.

Disability: The Basics is an engaging and accessible introduction to disability which explores the broad historical, social, environmental, economic and legal factors which affect the experiences of those living with an impairment or illness in contemporary society. The book explores key introductory topics including: the diversity of the disability experience; disability rights and advocacy; ways in which disabled people have been treated throughout history and in different parts of the world; the daily realities of living with an impairment or illness; health, education, employment and other services that exist to support and include disabled people; ethical issues at the beginning and end of life. Disability: The Basics aims to provide readers with an understanding of the lived experiences of disabled people and highlight the continuing gaps and barriers in social responses to the challenge of disability. This book is suitable for lay people, students of disability studies as well as students taking a disability module as part of a wider course within social work, health care, sociology, nursing, policy and media studies.

This book is a case study which narrates the history of the National Organization of the Spanish Blind (ONCE), established in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Contrary to other affluent countries where most blind people live on welfare benefits, the Spanish blind enjoy full employment. Furthermore, the average income of the Spanish blind is higher than that of the sighted. Why is this so? Why the blind, and not the deaf mute, or any other group of disabled people? This book shows that ONCE answers these questions. The book explains ONCE'S origins, the shifting strategies that the organization has pursued to adapt to an ever-changing environment, its original goals and the way they have mutated and been interpreted, its conflicting relationship with an authoritarian regime, its struggle to find its place in a democratic regime, and its relations with other groups of disabled people. A historical narrative, the book lies at the intersection between disability and organization studies, history and sociology. It will be of interest to all scholars of disability studies, the sociology of work, the history of medicine and contemporary Spanish history.