Inclusive design not only ensures that products, services, interfaces and environments are easier to use for those with special needs or limitations, but in doing so also makes them better for everyone. Design for Inclusivity, written by a team that has pioneered inclusive design practice internationally, reviews the recent social trends and pressures that have pushed this subject to the fore, and assesses design responses to date in an international context. The authors make the business case for inclusive design and explain the formalisation of the approach in standards and legislation. The text includes case studies which describe transport, product development, IT and service projects, as well as industry-university collaborative projects, and highlights lessons that have been learned. This is very much a practical book. It offers tools, techniques, guidelines and signposts for the reader to key resources, as well as including advice on research methods, and working with users and industry partners.

This comprehensive ground-breaking southern African-centred collection spans the breadth of disability research and practice. Reputable and emerging scholars, together with disability advocates adopt a critical and interdisciplinary stance to prove, challenge and shift commonly held social understanding of disability in traditional discourses, frontiers and practices in prominent areas such as inter/national development, disability studies, education, culture, health, religion, gender, sports, tourism, ICT, theatre, media , housing and legislation. This handbook provides a body of interdisciplinary analyses suitable for the development of disability studies in southern Africa. Through drawing upon and introducing resources from several disciplines, theoretical perspectives and personal narratives from disability activists, it reflects on disability and sustainable development in southern Africa. It also addresses a clear need to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives and narratives on disability and sustainable development in ways that do not undermine disability politics advanced by disabled people across the world. The handbook further acknowledges and builds upon the huge body of literature that understands the social, cultural, educational, psychological, economic, historical and political facets of the exclusion of disabled people. The handbook covers the following broad themes: * Disability inclusion, ICT and sustainable development * Access to education, from early childhood development up to higher education * Disability, employment, entrepreneurship and community-based rehabilitation * Religion, gender and parenthood * Tourism, sports and accessibility * Compelling narratives from disability activists on societal attitudes toward disability, media advocacy, accessible housing and social exclusion. Thus, this much-awaited handbook provides students, academics, practitioners, development partners, policy makers and activists with an authoritative framework for critical thinking and debates that inform policy and practice in incomparable ways, with the view to promoting inclusive and sustainable development.

Gain insight into the importance of advocacy for the disabled within various religious and secular organizations You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Romans 13:9) Through the years, religious organizations have worked to fulfill this biblical mandate. Disability Advocacy Among Religious Organizations: Histories and Reflections chronicles the progress of different ministries' advocacy for the disabled since 1950 as they worked toward fulfilling this mission. This enlightening history of several religious organizations' efforts charts the trends in advocacy while offering readers insight into ways to assist people with disabilities both within religious organizations and in society. Issues are explored by drawing upon numerous documents, communications, and in-depth reviews of the advocates' work. This book draws together in a single volume the stories of various religious organizations and their struggles to advocate for the disabled. Because of society's tendency to isolate and fear them, special needs individuals such as the mentally and physically disabled have long found it difficult to be accepted, understood, or to receive proper care. However, ministries strive to be advocates for all of their members and their needs, including education, treatment, and appropriate legislation. Disability Advocacy Among Religious Organizations: Histories and Reflections recounts the steps organizations have taken to focus on ending isolation and fear through inclusion and appropriate care of members with various disabilities. These historical accounts examine the depth, breadth, and on-going need for disability advocacy in religious organizations. Disability Advocacy Among Religious Organizations: Histories and Reflections discusses the advocacy backgrounds of: the World Council of Churches the National Council of Churches National Catholic Partnership on Disability National Apostolate for Inclusion Ministry American mainline Protestant denominationsthe American Baptist Convention, Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Church, and the United Church of Christ the Christian Reformed Church American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR) Religion and Spirituality Division Bethesda Lutheran homes and Services, Inc. the Christian Council on Persons with Disabilities (CCPD) Friendship Ministries Joni and Friends the Mennonite advocacy for persons with disabilities the Religion and Disability Program of the National Organization on Disability Disability Advocacy Among Religious Organizations: Histories and Reflections is valuable reading for clergy and laypeople in disability advocacy in religious organizations, educators, students, seminary students preparing for ministries, and religious historians.

Stay up-to-date with the latest innovative methods of meeting the spiritual needs of the elderly Spiritual Assessment and Intervention: Current Directions and Applications examines current state-of-the-art efforts in the development and implementation of spiritual interventions for older adults. Academics and practitioners working in social work, social welfare, medicine, and mental health and aging present innovative approaches to meeting major challenges in the field of gerontology, including elder abuse, dementia, care giving, palliative care, and intergenerational relationships. The book provides practical methods for dealing with the problems and pitfalls of starting and evaluating interventions of a spiritual nature in a variety of community-based and institutional settings. Spiritual Assessment and Intervention: Current Directions and Applications provides you with an overview of current and future methods and means of providing spiritual support to the elderly as they struggle with the problems and possibilities of aging in today's complex world.Growing interest in the positive effects that religiousness and spirituality can have on life stress has created a growing need for research and practice models that strengthen, reinforce, or promote the spiritual well-being of older adults. This collection first presented in 2003 at the 56th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America addresses the important care giving and practice issues involving the physical and psychological health of older adults.Spiritual Assessment and Intervention: Current Directions and Applications examines: how older adults use narrative therapy to manage adversity and maintain self-efficacy how faith-based communities can be enlisted as important social resources a pilot government-funded project to raise awareness of elder abuse in faith communities an intergenerational project involving a preschool and a retirement community spiritual activities for adults with Alzheimer's disease the Creating Alternative Relaxing Environment (CARE) Cabinet intervention Spiritual Assessment and Intervention: Current Directions and Applications is an essential resource for gerontological practitioners from the biological, clinical (including physicians, physician assistants, nurses, and dentists), behavioral and social sciences (including anthropologists, psychologists, social workers, sociologists, and researchers), and for health care administrators.

First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare's revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation. With a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the root of Clare's exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone. With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can be realized, loved, and embraced.

This impressive volume presents a thorough examination of all aspects of physical impairment and disability in medieval Europe. Examining a popular era that is of great interest to many historians and researchers, Irene Metzler presents a theoretical framework of disability and explores key areas such as:

• medieval theoretical concepts
• theology and natural philosophy
• notions of the physical body
• medical theory and practice.

Bringing into play the modern day implications of medieval thought on the issue, this is a fascinating and informative addition to the research studies of medieval history, history of medicine and disability studies scholars the English-speaking world over.

Learn how to include multiculturalism in disability-related social work! International Perspectives on Disability Services: The Same but Different presents different cultural and societal contexts on services for people with disabilities. This book covers a range of topics on disabilities related to physical status, emotional conditions, and community settings. This useful introductory reference will help you develop culturally sensitive disability services both locally and overseas, and it will promote better understanding of people with disabilities. This book is a unique examination of services for people with disabilities as they exist in several countries. Until recently, cultural context was used to describe race or ethnicity, but this innovative text recognizes people with disabilities as a worldwide community that is advocating for equality and respect. International Perspectives on Disability Services focuses on the need for human and social services that endorse capability and empowermentpromoting the person rather than the disability. In International Perspectives on Disability Services, you'll learn about: using the term culture to describe the community of people with disabilitieshow cultural sensitivity and competency can be applied to the disability culture the dynamics of a transcultural relationship between psychotherapist and deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals the recent development in aphasia treatmentLife Participation Approach to Aphasia (LPAA)and the international perspective of communication therapy a comparison of attitudes among social work students in the United States and Japan toward people with disabilitiespeople with disabilities are not yet integrated into Japanese society, but both groups showed room for needed improvement a comparison of disability-related services and experiences in the United States and in Germanychild-raising leave, child-raising money, and Kindergeld (child money) helps support parents financially for the first few years, but the United States has more options for integrated schooling later in life Hong Kong's 25-year-old objective to encourage community integration and normalization for people with disabilities to live in the community the primary support network of family, community leaders, and shaman for people with disabilities among Hmong Americans in Northern California The informative reports, research findings, case studies, and international comparisons offer new directions for human service professionals and students to help them better meet the social, psychological, and cultural needs of people with disabilities. International Perspectives on Disability Services provides clear-cut evidence that disability-oriented social workers need to improve their perspectives as the disability culture gains momentum as a social entity. This book is a must-read for anyone who works or provides disability-related services, as well as for people with disabilities who need more information on other countries' services.

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 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.

Create pathways in theological education and congregational practice for people with disabilities! Graduate Theological Education and the Human Experience of Disability examines graduate schools of theology and their limited familiarity with the study of disabilityand the presence of people with disabilities in particularon their campuses. Dubbed a missing note by one theologian, this text offers critical research and illuminates new pathways for theologia and practice in the community of faith. Reviews of previous literature, theology, and practices illuminate how people with disabilities have historically been marginalized by the religious community. Theologians, people with disabilities, and researchers offer suggestions for incorporating disability studies into theological education and religious life. This text contains firsthand testimony from people with disabilities who are the necessary sources of wisdom for overcoming barriers. By infusing education into existing theological curriculum, seminaries may better prepare their students for leadership and ministry in their congregations. People with disabilities number 18% of the population, yet represent only 5-7% of congregational membership. This book explores aspects of theology and disability such as: the challenges faced by theological schools that desire to improve both theological curriculum and facilities a review of literature that connects theology and disabilityfrom sources such as scripture, history, faith traditions, and social theory the various ideologies that shape the way the human body is understoodredefining normal in theological education an overview of critical boundaries that mark the limits and possibilities for theological inquiry about the human experience of disability creative concepts that religious communities may use to better include people with disabilities and their families how the religious community may benefit from the gifts, talents, and leadership of people with disabilities Graduate Theological Education and the Human Experience of Disability contains a reprint of Dr. Harold Wilke's landmark 1978 article from Theological Education (published by the Association of Theological Schools). Dr. Wilke, born without arms, was the theologian, minister and scholar who first articulated the need to address the human experience of disability in both theological education and congregational life. With extensive biographies and inclusive liturgies, this innovative text is a valuable resource for seminary professors and leaders, clergy, and disability advocates.

This book provides a timely reappraisal of one of the most enduring subjects in the history of art - the naked body. Beginning with reflections on what denuding entails and means, the volume then shifts to a consideration of body politics in the context of Black political empowerment, disability, and queer and Indigenous politics of representation. Themes including the animal nude, the male nude, and nudity in childhood are also considered. The final section examines the nude from the perspective of the artist and the artist's model. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, screen studies, and trans studies.

This book explores the economic situation of disabled people in developing countries focusing on rehabilitation and uses particpatory framework to community development. Although dealing specifically with a case study from Jordan, this needs assessment study provides comparisons with other developing societies. The author considers the prospect for future improvement in disability policy at a time when state budgets are already over stretched by widespread poverty, unemployment and poor health conditions. The book is divided into three parts. Part one explores disability and economic rehabilitation within global context and sets the scene for understanding what disability is and the impact of having disability across cultures with emphasis on the experience of discrimination. Part two deals with disability theory and practice in Jordan in terms of economic policies and provisions available for disabled people. Part three presents concluding remarks on the rise of disability politics in developing countries and the development of a participatory policy agenda.

Increase your awareness of the concerns facing the black disabled community!
Disability and the Black Community addresses physical, mental, and learning disabilities experienced across age, gender, and ethics groups by the black race in the United States. This unique book works to increase understanding and awareness of those working with the disabled by mobilizing advocates, providing alternatives for successful intervention and planning, and encouraging research in disability and rehabilitation. A distinguished panel of researchers and practitioners provide commentary on topics that include selected physical disabilities, disabled children learning and program concerns, welfare reform, public housing issues, domestic violence, and disability curriculum content--all in accordance with the broadening of the definition of disability as supported by the American Disabilities Act.
Disability and the Black Community raises the level of understanding and awareness of the complex and diverse concerns facing the disabled and their families in the community and the workplace. The book is at once motivational, influential, and empowering, examining social and political issues that compound the ordeals confronting the black disabled. Topics addressed include: learning disabilities, academic achievements, and mental health issues of children health disparities and access to care welfare reform, disability, and race practice, program, and curriculum models and much more! Disability and the Black Community is an essential resource for health professionals and advocates who work with the black disabled. The book keeps practitioners up to date on what is needed in terms of funding, facilities, and resources in order to keep the larger society and significant resource systems appraised of the needs of the disabled.

Illustrating actual building design solutions that have been created to improve accessibility for disabled patrons and performers, the 'Journey Sequence' outlines the best examples of design innovation produced in response to new and upcoming legislation.

A knowledge of how to design for the disabled can be crucial in winning contracts and having designs accepted. This book shows how the practical implications have already been successfully approached.
Covering the whole sequence from parking, to entry, and including details of facilities for the visually and hearing impaired users, advice is given on the methods designers should use in assessing the requirements of disabled people. This is not a publication giving theoretical prescription but rather an illustrated record of achievements in buildings of all sizes where proper access to the disabled has been created. It includes 14 case studies and examples that illustrate the diverse ways that accessibility has been incorporated into arts buildings throughout the UK. This includes Cinemas, Theatres, Concert Halls, Opera Houses, Museums and Libraries. The author team highlights specific design details that are particularly unique, to stimulate the reader and show that creating better accessibility for the disabled both demands and creates innovative design.
* Be informed about the latest design solutions for disabled access
* Case studies show best practice to inspire your designs
* Gain an insight into unique solutions used by designers to make their venues inclusive

Get an inside perspective on life as a disabled gay man! Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories reverberates with the sound of cripgay voices rising to be heard above the din of indifference and bias, oppression and ignorance. This unique collection of compelling first-person narratives is at once assertive, bold, and groundbreaking, filled with charactersand character. Through the intimacy of one-on-one storytelling, gay men with mobility and neuromuscular disorders, spinal cord injury, deafness, blindness, and AIDS, fight isolation from societyand each otherto establish a public identity and a common culture. Queer Crips features more than 30 first-hand accounts from a variety of perspectives, illuminating the reality of the everyday struggle disabled gay men face in a culture obsessed with conformist good looks. Themes include rejection, love, sex, dating rituals, gaycrip married life, and the profound difference between growing up queer and disabled, and suffering a life-altering injury or illness in adulthood. Co-edited by Bob Guter, creator and editor of the webzine BENT: A Journal of Cripgay Voices, the book includes: two performance pieces from acclaimed author and actor Greg Walloch poetry from Chris Hewitt, Joel S. Riche, Raymond Luczak, Mark Moody, and co-editor John Killacky essays from BENT contributors Blaine Waterman, Raymond J. Aguilera, Danny Kodmur, Thomas Metz, Max Verga, and Eli Clare interviews with community activist Gordon Elkins and Alan Sable, one of the first self-identified gay psychotherapists in the United States and much more! Queer Crips is a forum for neglected cripgay voices speaking words that are candid, edgy, bold, dreamy, challenging, and sexy. The book is essential reading for academics and students working in lesbian and gay studies, and disability studies, and for anyone who's ever visited the place where queerness and disability meet.

Get an inside perspective on life as a disabled gay man! Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories reverberates with the sound of cripgay voices rising to be heard above the din of indifference and bias, oppression and ignorance. This unique collection of compelling first-person narratives is at once assertive, bold, and groundbreaking, filled with charactersand character. Through the intimacy of one-on-one storytelling, gay men with mobility and neuromuscular disorders, spinal cord injury, deafness, blindness, and AIDS, fight isolation from societyand each otherto establish a public identity and a common culture. Queer Crips features more than 30 first-hand accounts from a variety of perspectives, illuminating the reality of the everyday struggle disabled gay men face in a culture obsessed with conformist good looks. Themes include rejection, love, sex, dating rituals, gaycrip married life, and the profound difference between growing up queer and disabled, and suffering a life-altering injury or illness in adulthood. Co-edited by Bob Guter, creator and editor of the webzine BENT: A Journal of Cripgay Voices, the book includes: two performance pieces from acclaimed author and actor Greg Walloch poetry from Chris Hewitt, Joel S. Riche, Raymond Luczak, Mark Moody, and co-editor John Killacky essays from BENT contributors Blaine Waterman, Raymond J. Aguilera, Danny Kodmur, Thomas Metz, Max Verga, and Eli Clare interviews with community activist Gordon Elkins and Alan Sable, one of the first self-identified gay psychotherapists in the United States and much more! Queer Crips is a forum for neglected cripgay voices speaking words that are candid, edgy, bold, dreamy, challenging, and sexy. The book is essential reading for academics and students working in lesbian and gay studies, and disability studies, and for anyone who's ever visited the place where queerness and disability meet.

Hotly contested, normality remains a powerful, complex category in contemporary law and culture. What is little realized are the ways in which disability underpins and shapes the operation of norms and the power dynamics of normalization. This pioneering collection explores the place of law in political, social, scientific and biomedical developments relating to disability and other categories of 'abnormality'. The contributors show how law produces cultural meanings, norms, representations, artefacts and expressions of disability, abnormality and normality, as well as how law responds to and is constituted by cultures of disability. The collection traverses a range of contemporary legal and political issues including human rights, mercy killing, reproductive technologies, hate crime, policing, immigration and disability housing. It also explores the impact and ongoing legacies of historical practices such as eugenics and deinstitutionalization. Of interest to a wide range of scholars working on normality and law, the book also creates an opening for critical scholars and activists engaged with other marginalized and denigrated categories, notably contesting institutional violence in the context of settler colonialism, neoliberalism and imperialism, to engage more richly and politically with disability. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Continuum journal.

We are all fascinated by blindness: partly from fear of how we would cope - and partly from the curiosity of experiencing the world without sight. Any mention of the word 'blind' or 'blindness' comes with an elusive coat of mystery and a sense of the unknown. Life Unseen is the first accessible history of the subject written in over fifty years - a powerful and erudite investigation of how the physical state of not seeing, either from birth or during life, affects the life of an individual, a community and a civilization. Selina Mills, journalist and BBC producer, was born blind in one eye and is now losing - completely - the remaining sight she has. In this book, she provides an unsentimental social history of blindness and the blind, with a uniquely personal slant, investigating how the absence of vision has affected our lives, our senses and society from antiquity to the present. Combining her own experience with an examination of the history of blindness in the Western world, she shows that sightlessness has been an 'active' force in history, rather than the passive condition which is too readily assumed.

This ground-breaking book aims to take a new and innovative view on how disability and architecture might be connected. Rather than putting disability at the end of the design process, centred mainly on compliance, it sees disability - and ability - as creative starting points for the whole design process. It asks the intriguing question: can working from dis/ability actually generate an alternative kind of architectural avant-garde? To do this, Doing Disability Differently: explores how thinking about dis/ability opens up to critical and creative investigation our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and space argues that design can help resist and transform underlying and unnoticed inequalities introduces architects to the emerging and important field of disability studies and considers what different kinds of design thinking and doing this can enable asks how designing for everyday life - in all its diversity - can be better embedded within contemporary architecture as a discipline offers examples of what doing disability differently can mean for architectural theory, education and professional practice aims to embed into architectural practice, attitudes and approaches that creatively and constructively refuse to perpetuate body 'norms' or the resulting inequalities in access to, and support from, built space. Ultimately, this book suggests that re-addressing architecture and disability involves nothing less than re-thinking how to design for the everyday occupation of space more generally.

This book seeks to explore how disability is understood and the position and experiences of disabled people both within and across different societies. The authors explore the question of politics in relation to specific struggles, providing a wealth of insights and ideas, and examine the nature and value of a social model of disability. They criticize exclusionary barriers while advancing a more democratic and participatory society based on principles of equality, offer cross-cultural insights and present stimuli for debate and further research. The text is accessible, topical, and provides new and innovatory thinking. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, lecturers and researchers with interests in education, social policy, sociology and disability studies.

The first book to be written on the Judge Rotenberg Center and their use of painful interventions to control the behavior of children and adults with disabilities. For more than forty years, professionals in the field of disability studies have engaged in debates over the use of aversive interventions (such as electric shock) like the ones used at the Judge Rotenberg Center. Advocates and lawyers have filed complaints and lawsuits to both use them and ban them, scientists have written hundreds of articles for and against them, and people with disabilities have lost their lives and, some would say, lived their lives because of them. There are families who believe deeply in the need to use aversives to control their children's behavior. There are others who believe the techniques used are torture. All of these families have children who have been excluded from numerous educational and treatment programs because of their behaviors. For most of the families, placement at the Judge Rotenberg Center is the last resort. This book is a historical case study of the Judge Rotenberg Center, named after the judge who ruled in favor of keeping its doors open to use aversive interventions. It chronicles and analyzes the events and people involved for over forty years that contributed to the inability of the state of Massachusetts to stop the use of electric shock, and other severe forms of punishment on children and adults with disabilities. It is a long story, sad and tragic, complex, filled with intrigue and questions about society and its ability to protect and support its most vulnerable citizens.

Disability Welfare Policy in Europe:Cognitive Disability and the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic analyses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on persons with cognitive disabilities and their families. Written from a Disability Studies perspective, this edited collection investigates education, employment, social and health care services in European case studies. Recognising how Covid-19 health surveillance has limited the rights of all persons, the chapters demonstrate how its impact has been even more severe on persons with cognitive disabilities and their families. Outlining the changes in welfare services during the Covid-19 pandemic that have led to new forms of segregation and hindered full participation of persons with disabilities in society on an equal basis with others, the collection chronicles a setback in the process of implementing the UN Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Within the framework of public sociology, Disability Welfare Policy in Europe:Cognitive Disability and the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic shows the failure of the attempts aimed at shifting disability policy into the mainstream. The authors highlight how persons with disabilities, their families, as well as personnel working in disability welfare policy have fought to keep the perspectives and rights of persons with disabilities on the policy agenda. If the Covid-19 health surveillance has rendered persons with disabilities invisible, how can they be made visible once again?

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Disability Studies and Spanish Culture is the first book to apply the tenets of Disability Studies to the Spanish context. In particular, this work is an important corrective to existing cultural studies of disability in Spain that tend to largely ignore intellectual disabilities. Taking on the representation of Down syndrome, autism, alexia/agnosia as well as childhood disability, its chapters combine close readings of a number of Spanish cultural products (films, novels, the comic/graphic novel and the public exhibition) with a broader socio-cultural take on the state of disability in Spain. Fraser is just as comfortable with the work of disability theorists who advocate a social model of disability (such as Lennard J. Davis, Licia Carlson, Eva Feder Kittay, David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder and more) as he is with the analysis of film and literature in the Spanish context. While researchers and students of cinema will be particularly interested in the book's detailed analyses of the formal aspects of the films, comics, and novels discussed, readers from backgrounds in history, political science and sociology will all be able to appreciate discussions of contemporary legislation, advocacy groups, cultural perceptions, models of social integration and more. The book is directed, also, toward those readers more familiar with the growing field of Disability Studies itself-making the argument that the specific case of Spanish culture and society speaks to shifts in the social attitudes and theoretical understandings of disability more broadly considered.