This book examines the role of disability in the right to political and social participation, an act of citizenship that many disabled people do not enjoy. The disability rights movement does not accept the use of disability to create limits on citizenship, which poses challenges for contemporary societies that will become ever greater as the science and technology of enhancing human abilities evolves. Comprised of eight chapters, four interludes, and a postscript written by leading scholars and disability rights activists, the book explores citizenship for people with disabilities from an interdisciplinary perspective using the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD) as a point of departure and the concept of universal design as a strategy for actualizing full citizenship for all. Situating disability in its historical and cultural contexts, the authors offer directions for rethinking citizenship, including implications for access to the built environment, information and communication systems, education, work, community life and politics. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies, planning, architecture, public health, rehabilitation, social work, and education.

Bringing together a range of authors from the multidisciplinary field of disability studies, this book uses disability and the experiences of disabled people living in the United States and Canada to explore and analyze dynamic sites of human interaction in both historical and contemporary contexts to provide readers with new ways of envisioning home, care, and family. Contributors to Disabling Domesticity focus on the varied domestic sites where intimate - and interdependent - human relations are formed and maintained. Analyzing domesticity through the lens of disability forces readers to think in new ways about family and household forms, care work, an ethic of care, reproductive labor, gendered and generational conflicts and cooperation, ageing, dependence, and local and global economies and political systems, in part by bringing the notion of interdependence, which undergirds all of the chapters in this book, into the foreground.

This volume offers a rare mix of interpretive chapters and primary sources that will be of value to anyone interested in learning about important disability-related issues and exploring the perspectives of disabled people. Disability has become a human rights and social justice issue that should concern all Americans. Access to safe, affordable, and effective health care, access to safe and affordable housing, access to reliable and efficient public transportation, and the ability to work and participate freely in the community are central to disability justice movements. Unlike encyclopedias or biographical dictionaries that only offer brief accounts of key topics, people, events, and organizations, Disability: A Reference Handbook provides important interpretive and analytical frameworks and meaningful primary evidence. The book opens with a chapter dedicated to the history of disability in the United States, placing 21st-century issues and concerns within their contexts. The next chapter explores important controversies and questions related to disability. The third chapter brings diverse voices to the topic, and the fourth chapter offers valuable profiles of key people and organizations. The remaining chapters provide valuable reference tools that will help readers to explore topics in more depth and to engage in independent research.

Disability history exists outside of the institutions, healers, and treatments it often brings to mind. It is a history where the disabled live not just as patients or cure-seekers, but rather as people living differently in the world-and it is also a history that helps define the fundamental concepts of identity, community, citizenship, and normality. The Oxford Handbook of Disability History is the first volume of its kind to represent this history and its global scale, from ancient Greece to British West Africa. The twenty-seven articles, written by thirty experts from across the field, capture the diversity and liveliness of this emerging scholarship. Whether discussing disability in modern Chinese cinema or on the American antebellum stage, this collection provides new and valuable insights into the rich and varied lives of the disabled across time and place.