Disability, Obesity and Ageing offers an engaging account of a new area of pressing concern, analysing the way in which 'spurned' identities are depicted and reacted to in televisual genres and online forums. Examining the symbolic power of the media, this book presents case studies from drama, situation comedies, reality and documentary television programmes popular in the UK, USA and Australia to shed light on the representation of disability, obesity and ageing, and the manner in which their status as unwanted and unwelcome identities is perpetuated. A theoretically sophisticated exploration of television as a translator of identity, and the exploration of identity categories in allied virtual spaces, this book will be of interest to sociologists, as well as scholars of popular culture, and cultural and media studies.

The deaf world is a complex one, divided by the allegiance of some to Deaf Culture, which emphasizes communication by sign-language, and by others to oralism, which emphasizes speech as the primary means of communication, and still others to a program called Total Communication, which stresses both signing and speaking. Today, more and more deaf people, especially children, are choosing oralism because it helps them fit into mainstream society better. This work presents interviews with fourteen extraordinary oral deaf role models from diverse backgrounds and professions. Wall Street banker Ralph Marra, paralegal Kristin Buehl, 1984 Olympic gold medalist Jeff Float, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, engineer George Oberlander, university mathematics professor Dr. David James, law professor Bonnie Poitras Tucker, executive Carolyn Ginsburg, foundation head Mildred Oberkotter, architect Tom Fields, accountant and institute executive director Ken Levinson, finance manager Michael Janger, school administrator Kathleen Suffridge Treni, and teacher Karen Kirby tell of their experiences and stories, discuss what helped and what hindered them, and offer advice to parents of deaf children. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

The first book to explore food allergies in the United States from the perspective of disability and race Are food allergies disabilities? What structures and systems ensure the survival of some with food allergies and not others? Allergic Intimacies is a groundbreaking critical engagement with food allergies in their cultural representations, advocacy, law, and stories about personal experiences from a disability studies perspective. Author Michael Gill questions the predominantly individualized medical approaches to food allergies, pointing out that these approaches are particularly problematic where allergy testing and treatments are expensive, inconsistent, and inaccessible for many people of color. This thought-provoking book explores the multiple meanings of food allergies and eating in the United States, demonstrating how much more is at stake than we realize, at a critical time when food allergies are on the rise: An estimated 32 million Americans, including one in thirteen children, have food allergies. Diagnoses of food allergies in children have increased by 50 percent since 1997. Yet as the author makes clear, the whiteness of the food allergy community and single-identity disability theory is inherently limiting and insufficient to address the complex choices that those with food allergies make. Gill argues that racism and ableism create unique precarity for disabled people of color that food allergic communities are only beginning to address. There is a huge disparity in access to testing and treatment, with African American and Latinx children having higher risk of adverse outcomes than white children, including more rates of anaphylaxis. Food allergy professionals have a responsibility to move beyond individualized approaches to more robust coalitional efforts grounded in disability and racial justice to undo these patterns of exclusion. Allergic Intimacies celebrates the various creative ways food allergic communities are challenging historical and current practice of exclusion, while identifying the depth of work that still needs to be done to shift focus from a white allergic experience toward a more representative understanding of the racial, ethnic, religious, and economic diversity of those in the United States. Gill's book is a discerning and vital exploration of the key debates about risks, dangers, safety, representations, and political concerns affecting the lives of individuals with food allergies.

Examining representations of speech disorders in works of literature, this first collection of its kind founds a new multidisciplinary subfield related but not limited to the emerging fields of disability studies and medical humanities. The scope is wide-ranging both in terms of national literatures and historical periods considered, engaging with theoretical discussions in poststructuralism, disability studies, cultural studies, new historicism, gender studies, sociolinguistics, trauma studies, and medical humanities. The book's main focus is on the development of an awareness of speech pathology in the literary imaginary from the late-eighteenth century to the present, studying the novel, drama, epic poetry, lyric poetry, autobiography and autopathography, and clinical case studies and guidebooks on speech therapy. The volume addresses a growing interest, both in popular culture and the humanities, regarding the portrayal of conditions such as stuttering, aphasia and mutism, along with the status of the self in relation to those conditions. Since speech pathologies are neither illnesses nor outwardly physical disabilities, critical studies of their representation have tended to occupy a liminal position in relation to other discourses such as literary and cultural theory, and even disability studies. One of the primary aims of this collection is to address this marginalization, and to position a cultural criticism of speech pathology within literary studies.

Contends that disability is a central but misunderstood element of global austerity politics. Broadly attentive to the political and economic shifts of the last several decades, Robert McRuer asks how disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or "crip times." Throughout Crip Times, McRuer considers how transnational queer disability theory and culture-activism, blogs, art, photography, literature, and performance-provide important and generative sites for both contesting austerity politics and imagining alternatives. The book engages various cultural flashpoints, including the spectacle surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; the murder trial of South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius; the photography of Brazilian artist Livia Radwanski which documents the gentrification of Colonia Roma in Mexico City; the defiance of Chilean students demanding a free and accessible education for all; the sculpture and performance of UK artist Liz Crow; and the problematic rhetoric of "aspiration" dependent upon both able-bodied and disabled figurations that emerged in Thatcher's England. Crip Times asserts that disabled people themselves are demanding that disability be central to our understanding of political economy and uneven development and suggests that, in some locations, their demand for disability justice is starting to register. Ultimately, McRuer argues that a politics of austerity will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined "us" in need of protection from "them."

The United States is engaged in a critically important and contentious debate on how to overhaul the way it delivers and pays for long-term care. Most families that are confronted with caring for a disabled elderly relative are often guaranteed financial catastrophe. The authors of this book examine a wide range of financing approaches to reforming long-term care and the impacts they would have over the next twenty-five years. The central issues in the debate about reforming long-term care concerns the relative roles of the public and private sectors. The authors urge that private insurance be encouraged and predict it will grow. Nevertheless, they conclude, private insurance will probably play only a modest role in financing nursing home and at-home care. For that reason, careful attention must also be given to reforming public programs. They recommend a strategy that includes expanded social insurance covering more at-home care and some limited nursing home coverage, the liberalization of Medicaid eligibility requirements so that complete impoverishment is not required before benefits are given, and an enhanced role for private insurance to provide asset protection to the upper-middle- income and wealthy elderly. The authors examine the cost of public and private initiatives and who would pay for them. Their answers emerge from a large computer simulation model that the authors developed. This book is accessible to non-specialists and is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of American health care.

This volume in "The SAGE Reference Series on Disability "explores ethical, legal, and policy issues of people with disabilities, and is one of eight volumes in the cross-disciplinary and issues-based series, which examines topics central to the lives of individuals with disabilities and their families. With a balance of history, theory, research, and application, specialists set out the findings and implications of research and practice for others whose current or future work involves the care and/or study of those with disabilities, as well as for the disabled themselves. The presentational style (concise and engaging) emphasizes accessibility. Taken individually, each volume sets out the fundamentals of the topic it addresses, accompanied by compiled data and statistics, recommended further readings, a guide to organizations and associations, and other annotated resources, thus providing the ideal introductory platform and gateway for further study. Taken together, the series represents both a survey of major disability issues and a guide to new directions and trends and contemporary resources in the field as a whole.

The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century explores disabled people who lived in the eighteenth century. The first four essays consider philosophical writing dating between 1663 and 1788, when the understanding of disability altered dramatically. We begin with Margaret Cavendish, whose natural philosophy rejected ideas of superiority or inferiority between individuals based upon physical or mental difference. We then move to John Locke, the founder of empiricism in 1680, who believed that the basis of knowledge was observability, but who, faced with the lack of anything to observe, broke his own epistemological rules in his explanation of mental illness. Understanding the problems that empiricism set up, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, turned in 1711 to moral philosophy, but also founded his philosophy on a flaw. He believed in the harmony of "the aesthetic trinity of beauty, truth, and virtue" but he could not believe that a disabled friend, whom he knew to have been moral before his physical alteration, could change inside. Lastly, we explore Thomas Reid who in 1788 returned to the body as the ground of philosophical enquiry and saw the body as a whole-complete in itself and wanting nothing, be it missing a sense (Reid was deaf) or a physical or mental capacity. At the heart of the study of any historical artifact is the question of where to look for evidence, and when looking for evidence of disability, we have largely to rely upon texts. However, texts come in many forms, and the next two essays explore three types-the novel, the periodical and the pamphlet-which pour out their ideas of disability in different ways. Evidence of disabled people in the eighteenth century is sparse, and the lives the more evanescent. The last four essays bring to light little known disabled people, or people who are little known for their disability, giving various forms of biographical accounts of Susanna Harrison, Sarah Scott, Priscilla Poynton and Thomas Gills, who are all but forgotten in the academic world as well as to public consciousness.

Since the 1970s, the international disability rights movement, the United Nations and national governments across the world have attempted to ameliorate the status of the disabled population through a range of legislative and policy measures primarily in the areas of health, education, employment, accessible environments and social security. While the discourse in the disability sector in India has shifted from charity and welfare to human rights and entitlements, disability studies as an interdisciplinary academic terrain that focuses on the contributions, experiences, history and culture of persons with disabilities has not yet taken root.

This volume collates some of the most recent pioneering work on disability studies from across the country. The essays presented here engage with the concept of disability from a variety of disciplinary positions, sociocultural contexts and subjective experiences within the overarching framework of the Indian reality. The contributors including some with disabilities themselves provide a well-rounded perspective, in shifting focus from disability as a medical condition only needing clinical intervention to giving it due social and academic legitimacy.

This book outlines key issues that would be germane to any disability studies endeavour in India and South Asia, and will appeal to academics, activists, institutions, laypersons and professionals involved in social welfare, sociology, disability studies, women s studies, psychiatry, rehabilitation, and social and preventive medicine.

What was it like to be disabled in the Middle Ages? How did people become disabled? Did welfare support exist? This book discusses social and cultural factors affecting the lives of medieval crippled, deaf, mute and blind people, those nowadays collectively called "disabled." Although the word did not exist then, many of the experiences disabled people might have today can already be traced back to medieval social institutions and cultural attitudes.

This volume informs our knowledge of the topic by investigating the impact medieval laws had on the social position of disabled people, and conversely, how people might become disabled through judicial actions; ideas of work and how work could both cause disability through industrial accidents but also provide continued ability to earn a living through occupational support networks; the disabling effects of old age and associated physical deteriorations; and the changing nature of attitudes towards welfare provision for the disabled and the ambivalent role of medieval institutions and charity in the support and care of disabled people.

Disability and chronic illness represents a special kind of cultural diversity, the "other" to "normal" able-bodiedness. Most studies of disability consider disability in North American or European contexts; and studies of diversity in Japan consider ethnic and cultural diversity, but not the differences arising from disability. This book therefore breaks new ground, both for scholars of disability studies and for Japanese studies scholars. It charts the history and nature of disability in Japan, discusses policy and law relating to disability, examines caregiving and accessibility, and explores how disability is viewed in Japan. Throughout the book highlights the tension between individual responsibility and state intervention, the issues concerning how care for disability is paid for, and the special problem of how Japan is providing care for its large and increasing population of elderly people.

Sarah D. Phillips examines the struggles of disabled persons in Ukraine and the other former Soviet states to secure their rights during the tumultuous political, economic, and social reforms of the last two decades. Through participant observation and interviews with disabled Ukrainians across the social spectrum rights activists, politicians, students, workers, entrepreneurs, athletes, and others Phillips documents the creative strategies used by people on the margins of postsocialist societies to assert claims to "mobile citizenship." She draws on this rich ethnographic material to argue that public storytelling is a powerful means to expand notions of relatedness, kinship, and social responsibility, and which help shape a more tolerant and inclusive society."

Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing. Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.

Disability is often mentioned in discussions of slave health, mistreatment and abuse, but constructs of how "able" and "disabled" bodies influenced the institution of slavery has gone largely overlooked. This volume uncovers a history of disability in African American slavery from the primary record, analyzing how concepts of race, disability, and power converged in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Slaves with physical and mental impairments often faced unique limitations and conditions in their diagnosis, treatment, and evaluation as property. Slaves with disabilities proved a significant challenge to white authority figures, torn between the desire to categorize them as different or defective and the practical need to incorporate their "disorderly" bodies into daily life. Being physically "unfit" could sometimes allow slaves to escape the limitations of bondage and oppression, and establish a measure of self-control. Furthermore, ideas about and reactions to disability-appearing as social construction, legal definition, medical phenomenon, metaphor, or masquerade-highlighted deep struggles over bodies in bondage in antebellum America.

What challenges are posed by changing transnational trends, agendas and movements that affect disabled people's lives, and what can disabled people, their representative organisations and their governments do to advance the agenda for self-determination and inclusion? This book draws together the writing of academics and activists to depict the experience and perspective of disabled people in relation to a range of contemporary social changes, with a focus firmly on ways in which disabled people and their allies can act to counter disabling policies and practices. Throughout the book there is an emphasis on disabled people's own voices and activism as the critical driver of theoretical critique and practical change. Chapters address a wide range of cultural, institutional and personal arenas to explore and contest the boundaries that disabled people seek to move beyond, from cross-border labour movements in Korea to experience of day services in England, from continuing and long-lasting realities of wars in Lebanon, Cambodia and Somalia to the beauty of harmony in Navajo traditions for understanding disability, from collective activism to individual participation in the Olympics. This book is recommended reading for students, researchers and activists interested in Disability Studies and is directly relevant to policy makers and practitioners in a position to reshape rights, spaces and innovations in response to the priorities disabled people feel and articulate are important for their lives. It was originally published as a special issue of Disability & Society.

How do you become an 'amputee', 'war-wounded', 'victim' or 'disabled' person? This book describes how an amputee and war-wounded community was created after a decade long conflict (1991-2002) in Sierra Leone. Beginning with a general socio-cultural and historical analysis of what is understood by impairment and disability, it also explains how disability was politically created both during the conflict and post-conflict, as violence became part of the everyday. Despite participating in the neoliberal rebuilding of the nation state, ex-combatants and the security of the nation were the government's main priorities, not amputee and war-wounded people. In order to survive, people had to form partnerships with NGOs and participate in new discourses and practices around disability and rights, thus accessing identities of 'disabled' or 'persons with disabilities'. NGOs, charities and religious organisations that understood impairment and disability were most successful at aiding this community of people. However, since discourse and practice on disability were mainly bureaucratic, top-down, and not democratic about mainstreaming disability, neoliberal organisations and INGOs have caused a new colonisation of consciousness, and amputee and war-wounded people have had to become skilled in negotiating these new forms of subjectivities to survive.

This volume presents a state of the art account of the clinical specialty of mental health care of deaf people. Drawing upon some of the leading clinicians, teachers, administrators, and researchers in this field from the United States and Great Britain, it addresses critical issues from this specialty such as Deaf/hearing cross cultural dynamics as they impact treatment organizations Clinical and interpreting work with deaf persons with widely varying language abilities Adaptations of best practices in inpatient, residential, trauma, and substance abuse treatment for deaf persons Overcoming administrative barriers to establishing statewide continua of care University training of clinical specialists The interplay of clinical and forensic responses to deaf people who commit crimes An agenda of priorities for Deaf mental health research Each chapter contains numerous clinical case studies and places a heavy emphasis on providing practical intervention strategies in an interesting, easy to read style. All mental health professionals who work with deaf individuals will find this to be an invaluable resource for creating and maintaining culturally affirmative treatment with this population.

The most up-to-date history of Greek literature from its Homeric origins to the age of Augustus. Greek literary production throughout this period of some eight centuries is embedded in its historical and social context, and Professor Dihle sees this literature as a historical phenomenon, a particular mode of linguistic communication, with its specific forms developing both in an organic way and in response to the changing world around. In this it differs from conventional humanist approaches to Greek and Latin literature which analyse the works as objects of timeless value independent of any historical setting or purpose. This magisterial survey by one of the leading European authorities on classical literature will establish itself, as it already has in Germany, as the standard account of the subject.

* This anthology has been curated by a seasoned playwright, academic, director and actor who has lived experience of being deaf. * Would be recommended reading in deaf studies and deaf culture courses across the world. * This book is the first anthology of its kind.

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

This volume brings together the work of several outstanding scholars on the critical subject of human resource management in the health care sector. As the contributors note, the combined pressures of an aging population, higher costs, and reduced Medicare reimbursement formulas have made more efficient delivery of services a primary concern for health care facilities of all kinds. Because of the labor-intensive nature of health services, this goal cannot be achieved without more effective human resource management. Here, noted authorities in the field present the latest techniques and practical applications of human resource management specifically tailored to the needs of health care professionals. Broadly comprehensive in scope, this volume addresses each of the major concerns in human resources: planning, staffing, equal employment, performance appraisal, compensation, training, safety, employee rights, and industrial and labor relations.

The book begins by presenting a conceptual framework for human resource management, the strategic choice model. Subsequent chapters build upon this model by presenting a systems approach to strategic human resource planning and demonstrating the importance of job design and job analysis in this context. The contributors then discuss recruitment strategies, performance-based pay systems, employee evaluations, and the design of compensation systems, focusing throughout on issues of particular relevance in the health care sector. Finally, a number of chapters explore topics of increasing concern to both health care workers and administrators, including quality of work life, the burgeoning home health care industry, collective bargaining and legislation, managing change in the health care environment, and the challenges posed by information technology. An indispensable reference source for health practitioners, researchers, and students, "Human Resource Management in the Health Care Sector" is also a valuable text for courses in health, business, nursing, and management.

Presents examples of Mad Studies in action; initiatives that have been taken, what they have achieved and what can be learned from them Offers examples and insights from the perspectives of those who have (had) those experiences, and will also explore ways of supporting people oppressed by conventional understandings and systems. Comprised of 31 chapters written by leading experts, activists and academics

Outlining the key developments of the Disability Hate Crime policy agenda, Seamus Taylor brings together a unique consideration of the theoretical and practical questions at its heart. This book analyses the contributions of activists, politicians, policymakers and criminal justice system practitioners to policy development, and critiques both the under-recognition of disability prejudice fuelled by ableism and the challenge of vulnerability in addressing disability hostility. Concluding that a critically reflective approach on the part of policymakers and practitioners can lead to progress, the author gives clear policy recommendations to address current challenges in the criminal justice system.

This text is a critical and empirically-based introduction to disability studies. It offers a comprehensive, book-length analysis of disability through the lens of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and presents a practice-oriented discussion of how bodies, senses and things are linked in everyday life and configure "enabling" and "disabling" scenarios. Relevant to a broad spectrum of medical practitioners and practicing social service workers, the book will also be essential reading in the fields of disability studies, sociology of the body/senses, medical sociology and STS.

This volume of essays explores the varied, but distinctive, experiences of disabled children. The authors start from the premise that the care, and control, of such individuals was historically governed by factors that differentiated their experiences from those of 'normal' children and 'disabled' adults.