Disability: social aspects Books

Book SynopsisASALH 2023 Book Prize FinalistReveals how disability and disablement have shaped Black social life in AmericaThrough both law and custom, the color line has cast Black people as innately disabled and thus unfit for freedom, incapable of self-governance, and contagious within the national body politic. Disabilities of the Color Line maintains that the Black literary tradition historically has inverted this casting by exposing the disablement of racism without disclaiming disability.In place of a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement alike are shunned, Dennis Tyler argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed what he calls the disabilities of the color line: the historical and ongoing anti-Black systems of division that maim, immobilize, and stigmatize Black people. In doing so, Tyler reveals how Black writers and activists such as David Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen CraTrade ReviewIn this bold and timely study, Dennis Tyler shows that the color line is not just a twentieth century problem, but one that began in the era of slavery and extends to the ongoing racialization of police brutality and the health disparities of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Tyler’s account, the color line is not exclusively about race, but about the entanglement of blackness and disability. Drawing on a wide range of texts, he perceptively shows how disability was enlisted to shape conceptions of blackness in the United States, and a counter-tradition in which black authors confront what Tyler calls ‘disabilities of the color line’ to challenge racial injustice and demand redress. * Rachel Adams, Columbia University *For too long, a conceivable but unfounded myth has been endemic in disability studies: the idea that Black thinkers have distanced themselves from affiliations with disability in contesting the racist construction of Blackness as inherently disabled. Disabilities of the Color Line puts this theory to bed once and for all, establishing a robust record of Black intellectuals’ sustained and complex engagement with disability as both a stigma and a literal condition that white supremacist legal and political systems impose upon Black people. -- Elizabeth Bowen * Public Books, Editors' Choice 2022 *

Read more less

Book SynopsisHow can we learn to notice the signs of disability?We see indications of disability everywhere: yellow diamond-shaped deaf person in area road signs, the telltale shapes of hearing aids, or white-tipped canes sweeping across footpaths. But even though the signs are ubiquitous, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum argues that disability may still not be perceived due to a process she terms dis-attention.To tell better stories of disability, this multidisciplinary work turns to rhetoric, communications, sociology, and phenomenology to understand the processes by which the material world becomes sensory input that then passes through perceptual apparatuses to materialize phenomenaincluding disability. By adding perception to the understanding of disability's materialization, Kerschbaum significantly expands our understanding of disability, accounting for its fluctuations and transformations in the semiotics of everyday life.Drawing on a set of thirty-three research iTrade ReviewThis engaging, accessible book builds on Stephanie Kerschbaum’s already-award- winning scholarship on difference and discourse, constructing new research methods and approaches, but also building community on these pages. Signs of Disability offers an incredibly generative vocabulary for understanding the ways that disability matters: how we mark and signal it, how we ignore and hide it, how we powerfully inhabit and embody it through stories. Signs of Disability is a transformative book. * Jay Dolmage, University of Waterloo *A lovely, powerful read, Signs of Disability makes consequential, engaging, and evocative contributions to scholarship in disability studies and in rhetorical studies. The book’s theoretical and methodological interventions are significant and it offers cogent readings of texts, material culture, bodies, and more. Stephanie Kerschbaum tells powerful stories and draws readers deeply into the material life of disability and its signs. * Christa J. Olson, University of Wisconsin-Madison *

Read more less

Book SynopsisA much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our livesIn an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we aren't even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an emergency. In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of emergency as an opposite of normal. Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Elizabeth Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media. By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archiTrade ReviewIn this moment, in which everything and nothing are simultaneously defined using the language of emergency, Elizabeth Ellcessor’s book is resonant, brilliant, timely, and compassionate, and helps to chart a way forward. Her analysis of emergency media and how they express specific articulations of technology, culture, and power as well as their connection to existing forms of white supremacy, disability justice, and misogyny are rigorous, and explain how our understandings of emergencies and the media with which we communicate that information have life and death stakes. * Shoshana Magnet, author of When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity *Sirens blare. Maps blaze in alarming colors. Phones buzz stridently as pop-up alerts invade the screen. Media technologies index the presence of an emergency, putting us on alert, entreating us to leap into protective action. Yet as Elizabeth Ellcessor argues cogently in her timely, alarming, and ultimately reparative book, emergency media and the workers operating them also have the power to construct emergency—to cultivate panic, to amplify risk, to signal when we’ve tipped over into some unacceptably harmful, destructive, or costly deviation from the norm. Emergency media inform how ‘normality’ is defined, and whose norms become the standard. It thus has the capacity, as Ellcessor shows us, to cultivate a new norm that's more inclusive, just, and compassionate. * Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media *

Read more less

Book SynopsisA much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our livesIn an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we aren't even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an emergency. In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of emergency as an opposite of normal. Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Elizabeth Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media. By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archiTrade Review"In this moment, in which everything and nothing are simultaneously defined using the language of emergency, Elizabeth Ellcessor’s book is resonant, brilliant, timely, and compassionate, and helps to chart a way forward. Her analysis of emergency media and how they express specific articulations of technology, culture, and power as well as their connection to existing forms of white supremacy, disability justice, and misogyny are rigorous, and explain how our understandings of emergencies and the media with which we communicate that information have life and death stakes. " * Shoshana Magnet, author of When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity *"Sirens blare. Maps blaze in alarming colors. Phones buzz stridently as pop-up alerts invade the screen. Media technologies index the presence of an emergency, putting us on alert, entreating us to leap into protective action. Yet as Elizabeth Ellcessor argues cogently in her timely, alarming, and ultimately reparative book, emergency media and the workers operating them also have the power to construct emergency—to cultivate panic, to amplify risk, to signal when we’ve tipped over into some unacceptably harmful, destructive, or costly deviation from the norm. Emergency media inform how ‘normality’ is defined, and whose norms become the standard. It thus has the capacity, as Ellcessor shows us, to cultivate a new norm that's more inclusive, just, and compassionate. " * Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media *

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe role of disability and deafness in artDistressing Language is full of mistakeserrors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. Michael Davidson engages the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics, exploring how physical and intellectual differences challenge our understanding of art and poetry. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of sounding good? Distressing Language grows out of the author's experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Davidson maintains that verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge.Davidson discusses a range of sites, from captioning errors and Bad Lip Reads on YouTube, to the deaf artiTrade ReviewDrawing on his own experience of increasing deafness, Davidson provides an engrossing look into the ways that slips or unusual forms of language can unexpectedly lead to new meanings and beauty. Distressing Language expertly weaves together modern poetry and fiction, popular culture, sign language art, theory, politics, and history, and is often as funny as it is profound. * Christopher Krentz, author of Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature *A highly original account of language, meaning, and sound, all framed through hearing loss. In Davidson’s account, meaning and value come from things not working the way they are supposed to. But rather than fetishizing technical glitch or aesthetic failure, he processes meaning through a disability hermeneutic. Throughout Distressing Language, the lines between poetry, sound art, and music are intentionally blurred and violated, while the meaning of sound is foregrounded as something especially important for those who have limited access to it. * Jonathan Sterne, McGill University *

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat prenatal tests and down syndrome reveal about our reproductive choicesWhen Alison Piepmeierscholar of feminism and disability studies, and mother of Maybelle, an eight-year-old girl with Down syndromedied of cancer in August 2016, she left behind an important unfinished manuscript about motherhood, prenatal testing, and disability. In Unexpected, George Estreich and Rachel Adams pick up where she left off, honoring the important research of their friend and colleague, as well as adding new perspectives to her work. Based on interviews with parents of children with Down syndrome, as well as women who terminated their pregnancies because their fetus was identified as having the condition, Unexpected paints an intimate, nuanced picture of reproductive choice in today's world. Piepmeier takes us inside her own daughter's life, showing how Down syndrome is misunderstood, stigmatized, and condemned, particularly in the context of prenatal testing. At a time when medical technology iTrade ReviewAsks questions such as, what is the line between illness and disability, and how can a parent deal with uncertainties? … Shares rarely heard stories from parents and prospective parents who have confronted challenging decisions about a fetus with Down syndrome … provides insight into a segment of the population rarely explored. * Library Journal *A thought-provoking book at the value of all human life … This book should reassure parents who choose to skip genetic testing or decide not to terminate pregnancies after learning their fetus may not be 'normal.' Like Piepmeier and her coauthors, they may well find unexpected joys in happy, loving kids. * Booklist *Unexpected is a beautiful, thoughtful, and challenging co-authored and deeply reflexive book. It engages the porous lessons of disability, debility, death and an enduring love that is at once familial and friendship-centered. Collectively, Alison Piepmeier recruits George Estreich and Rachel Adams into a profound conversation that narrates their experiences of raising children with Down Syndrome as an optic on injustice, advocacy, and social transformation through this most intimate of parent-child relations. -- Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America

Read more less

Book SynopsisInsists on the importance of embodiment and movement to the creation of Black socialityLinking African diasporic performance, disability studies, and movement studies, Falling, Floating, Flickering approaches disability transnationally by centering Black, African, and diasporic experiences. By eschewing capital's weighted calculus of which bodies hold value, this book centers alternate morphologies and movement practices that have previously been dismissed as abnormal or unrecognizable. To move beyond binaries of ability, Hershini Bhana Young traverses multiple geohistories and cultural forms stretching from the United States and the Mediterranean to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, as well as independent and experimental film, novels, sculptures, images, dance, performances, and anecdotes. In doing so, she argues for the importance of differential embodiment and movement to the creation and survival of Black sociality, and refutes stereotypic notioTrade ReviewA stellar work of scholarship. Young is fearless in her questions and generous in her thinking, providing readers with the tools to imagine, critique, and speculate alongside her. She powerfully demonstrates the necessity of reading disability in context and transforms our understandings of disability and performance. * Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip *Falling, Floating, Flickering demonstrates that Black sociality emerges from and can be reconsidered by foregrounding differential embodiment. Throughout the book, moments of tension, moving through rich theoretical ideas and difficult lived and performed embodiments, are followed by moments of relief, where Hershini Bhana Young offers not simply places to rest, but places to be invigorated. Reading this work is incredibly pleasurable, and I am grateful for its clarity and capaciousness. * Keguro Macharia, author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora *

Read more less

Book SynopsisInsists on the importance of embodiment and movement to the creation of Black socialityLinking African diasporic performance, disability studies, and movement studies, Falling, Floating, Flickering approaches disability transnationally by centering Black, African, and diasporic experiences. By eschewing capital's weighted calculus of which bodies hold value, this book centers alternate morphologies and movement practices that have previously been dismissed as abnormal or unrecognizable. To move beyond binaries of ability, Hershini Bhana Young traverses multiple geohistories and cultural forms stretching from the United States and the Mediterranean to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, as well as independent and experimental film, novels, sculptures, images, dance, performances, and anecdotes. In doing so, she argues for the importance of differential embodiment and movement to the creation and survival of Black sociality, and refutes stereotypic notioTrade ReviewA stellar work of scholarship. Young is fearless in her questions and generous in her thinking, providing readers with the tools to imagine, critique, and speculate alongside her. She powerfully demonstrates the necessity of reading disability in context and transforms our understandings of disability and performance. * Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip *Falling, Floating, Flickering demonstrates that Black sociality emerges from and can be reconsidered by foregrounding differential embodiment. Throughout the book, moments of tension, moving through rich theoretical ideas and difficult lived and performed embodiments, are followed by moments of relief, where Hershini Bhana Young offers not simply places to rest, but places to be invigorated. Reading this work is incredibly pleasurable, and I am grateful for its clarity and capaciousness. * Keguro Macharia, author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora *

Read more less

Book SynopsisIntroduces key ideas and offers a sense of the new frontiers and questions in the emerging field of disability media studies Disability Media Studies articulates the formation of a new field of study, based in the rich traditions of media, cultural, and disability studies. Necessarily interdisciplinary and diverse, this collection weaves together work from scholars from a variety of disciplinary homes, into a broader conversation about exploring media artifacts in relation to disability. The book provides a comprehensive overview for anyone interested in the study of disability and media today. Case studies include familiar contemporary examplessuch as Iron Man 3, Lady Gaga, and Oscar Pistoriusas well as historical media, independent disability media, reality television, and media technologies. The contributors consider disability representation, the role of media in forming cultural assumptions about ability, the construction of disability via media technoTrade ReviewA vital, spot-on collection, assembled with much care and attention,Disability Media Studiesencourages readers to & question ones training and reach toward interdisciplinarity. -- Petra Kuppers,author of Studying Disability Arts and Culture and The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performance anAn important contribution is Ellcessors chapter on conceptualizing access to media not only in relation to consumption but also in relation to production. * Choice *

Read more less

Book SynopsisIntroduces key ideas and offers a sense of the new frontiers and questions in the emerging field of disability media studies Disability Media Studies articulates the formation of a new field of study, based in the rich traditions of media, cultural, and disability studies. Necessarily interdisciplinary and diverse, this collection weaves together work from scholars from a variety of disciplinary homes, into a broader conversation about exploring media artifacts in relation to disability. The book provides a comprehensive overview for anyone interested in the study of disability and media today. Case studies include familiar contemporary examplessuch as Iron Man 3, Lady Gaga, and Oscar Pistoriusas well as historical media, independent disability media, reality television, and media technologies. The contributors consider disability representation, the role of media in forming cultural assumptions about ability, the construction of disability via media technoTrade Review"A vital, spot-on collection, assembled with much care and attention,Disability Media Studiesencourages readers to & question ones training and reach toward interdisciplinarity." -- Petra Kuppers,author of Studying Disability Arts and Culture and The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performance an"An important contribution is Ellcessors chapter on conceptualizing access to media not only in relation to consumption but also in relation to production." * Choice *

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat prenatal tests and down syndrome reveal about our reproductive choicesWhen Alison Piepmeierscholar of feminism and disability studies, and mother of Maybelle, an eight-year-old girl with Down syndromedied of cancer in August 2016, she left behind an important unfinished manuscript about motherhood, prenatal testing, and disability. In Unexpected, George Estreich and Rachel Adams pick up where she left off, honoring the important research of their friend and colleague, as well as adding new perspectives to her work. Based on interviews with parents of children with Down syndrome, as well as women who terminated their pregnancies because their fetus was identified as having the condition, Unexpected paints an intimate, nuanced picture of reproductive choice in today's world. Piepmeier takes us inside her own daughter's life, showing how Down syndrome is misunderstood, stigmatized, and condemned, particularly in the context of prenatal testing. At a time when medical technology iTrade Review"Asks questions such as, what is the line between illness and disability, and how can a parent deal with uncertainties? … Shares rarely heard stories from parents and prospective parents who have confronted challenging decisions about a fetus with Down syndrome … provides insight into a segment of the population rarely explored." * Library Journal *"A thought-provoking book at the value of all human life … This book should reassure parents who choose to skip genetic testing or decide not to terminate pregnancies after learning their fetus may not be 'normal.' Like Piepmeier and her coauthors, they may well find unexpected joys in happy, loving kids." * Booklist *"Unexpected is a beautiful, thoughtful, and challenging co-authored and deeply reflexive book. It engages the porous lessons of disability, debility, death and an enduring love that is at once familial and friendship-centered. Collectively, Alison Piepmeier recruits George Estreich and Rachel Adams into a profound conversation that narrates their experiences of raising children with Down Syndrome as an optic on injustice, advocacy, and social transformation through this most intimate of parent-child relations." -- Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America

Read more less

Book SynopsisDuring the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf appeared in the US for the first time. This book places the growth of the Deaf community at the heart of the story of deaf education and explains how the unexpected emergence of Deafness provoked the pedagogical battles that dominated the field of deaf education in the nineteenth century.Trade Review[A] useful addition to the still-developing history of the nation's evolving deaf community. * The Journal of American History *R.A.R. Edwards' Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture is a brilliant study of the emergence of a deaf community in nineteenth-century America . . . . Beyond a more nuanced account of the emergence of the American Deaf community, this monograph is ultimately a revisionist history of the ongoing conflict over pedagogical methods in deaf education. Building on the established historiography produced by a small cadre of deaf historians, Edwards represents a new generation of scholarship in the field, offering a revisionist thesis of the ideas originally presented by Van Cleve and Crouch over twenty years ago. Words Made Flesh is a fine addition to New York University press's history of disability series. * Common-Place *[This book is] provocative, detailed, and a welcome examination of the emergence of a signing deaf culture. * American Historical Review *In this gracefully written book, Edwards offers both a fascinating narrative and a provocative, revisionist thesis.Scholars and general readers interested in the Deaf community and American cultural history will find it a rewarding read. -- Douglas Baynton,University of IowaWords Made Fleshis a stimulating, beautifully written, and thoroughly engaging book. -- James W. Trent * American Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1 Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc: A Yale Man and a Deaf Man Open a School and Create a World 2 Manual Education: An American Beginning 3 Learning to Be Deaf: Lessons from the Residential School 4 The Deaf Way: Living a Deaf Life 5 Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe: The First American Oralists 6 Languages of Signs: Methodical versus Natural 7 The Fight over the Clarke School: Manualists and Oralists Confront Deafness Conclusion Notes Index About the Author

Read more less

Book SynopsisA history of design that is often overlookeduntil we need itHave you ever hit the big blue button to activate automatic doors? Have you ever used an ergonomic kitchen tool? Have you ever used curb cuts to roll a stroller across an intersection? If you have, then you've benefited from accessible designdesign for people with physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities. These ubiquitous touchstones of modern life were once anything but. Disability advocates fought tirelessly to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities became a standard part of public design thinking. That fight took many forms worldwide, but in the United States it became a civil rights issue; activists used design to make an argument about the place of people with disabilities in public life.In the aftermath of World War II, with injured veterans returning home and the polio epidemic reaching the Oval Office, the needs of people with disabilities came forcibly into the public eye as they Trade ReviewAccessible America offers an important history of how and why design for disability has evolved and needs to evolve. * Curbed.com *This illuminating and thoughtful overview of the evolution of accessible design in the U.S. between the end of WWII and the late 1990s is a strong introduction to the topic...Williamson skillfully connects design concepts to changing social narratives; this work should reward readers interested in either topic. * Publishers Weekly *Williamson keenly emphasizes that the United States has led the world globally toward physical access and accessibility as acceptable and admirable natural and civil rights rather than annoying physical encumbrances that stand in the way...reading [this]can change lives. * Library Journal *Accessible America is handsomely produced and will appeal to readers interested in design, disability studies, and social history. -- CHOICEAmerica was once even less accessible than it is now, as historicized by Bess Williamson in her book Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design. Williamson uses her background in art and design to critique the ways that nationalism and idealism have driven material environments to reflect societal norms in the United States post World War II. She integrates analysis with historical images that exhibit how truly inaccessible this country has been throughout history, which she artfully points out as being in "response to a lack" for much of modern history. * Disability Studies Quarterly *Beautifully and engagingly written, Williamson's approach to the history of accessibility as a history of design is brilliant. Accessible America shows how disability advocates harnessed technological design in their quest for access and equality, paying particular attention to the connection between prosthetic devices and the 'universal' design that followed, illuminating both histories. Highly recommended. -- Douglas C. Baynton,author of Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of EugenicsBess Williamson's engaging history of accessible design points the way to design as a tool for empowerment, critique, and self-expression that celebrates the diversity of human bodies. Disability is a culture, not a lack. -- Ellen Lupton,Curator of Contemporary Design at The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design MuseumBy unearthing, situating, and interpreting artifacts of accessible designfrom World War II to the rise of the Independent Living Movement to the post-ADA eraWilliamson's book offers a much-needed contribution to disability history as we know it while also reshaping it for the next generation of disability historians, designers, and activists. -- David Serlin,author of Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar AmericaWilliamson reveals the hidden history of how the Disability Rights Movement's struggle for inclusion rebuilt the world. Reaching back to activist veterans returning from World War II, through the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, to ergonomics, universal design, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, Williamson shows us the transformed America that gives us the tools and pathways we all use every day to make our lives work better, and that the emergence of inclusive design and the world it makes is a tool for justice. -- Rosemarie Garland-Thomson,author of Extraordinary BodiesThe contents of this book are a win for historians of disability as well as for historians of technology, architecture, and design. * H-Net Reviews *Accessible America is a must-read for scholars of disability history and material culture ... Williamson’s design-centered approach charts an effective and compelling road map for future disability studies projects, and she suggests interesting possibilities for further research on the built environment and US disability history. * Winterthur Portfolio *A special strength of Williamson’s work is the emphasis on the role of people with disabilities as active agents of change in design [...] Accessible America manages to include the hidden stories of the history of disability-related design and places them in a wider context of technological, political, and social change, including the growing impact of the disability movement. * Technology and Culture *

Read more less

Book SynopsisMadness is a sin. Those with emotional disabilities are shunned. Mental illness is not the church’s problem. All three claims are wrong. Heather H. Vacek traces the history of Protestant reactions to mental illness in America, revealing how two distinct forces combined to thwart Christian care for the whole person.Trade ReviewVacek has written a scholarly jeremiad in which she has weighed her co-religionists' responses to mental illness in the moral balance and found them wanting. The organization of the book highlights what she persuasively argues is a perennial gap between belief and practice in her faith community...The prose is clear, the documentation thorough, and her stance heartfelt." - Lawrence B. Goodheart, Bulletin of the History of Medicine "This timely and deeply moving study has garnered wide media attention. It shows how American Protestants have addressed and, more often, failed to address mental illness in their congregations." - The Christian Century "I recommend this book, and especially its final chapter, to pastors and church leaders who are seeking to reflect on and develop a congregation's ministry among people with mental illnesses, whether they be church members or strangers. It will also appeal to readers with an interest in the history of American mental health attitudes and practices, or, more generally, the history of Christian influences on American society." - Christine Guth, Anabaptist Disabilities Network "Vacek's book serves as an important reminder of how conceptions of mental illness and the structure of care for the mentally ill has a long and complicated history, shaped by everything from religious reformers, the emerging field of professionalized medicine, and the evolution of often grossly underfunded state institutions." - David Eagle, Sociology of Religion "In sum, Vacek combines top-notch historical inquiry with a concern for effective theological responses to mental suffering. She carefully contextualizes the lives of her subjects in relation to broad religious and medical trends, and her in-depth biographical studies facilitate insightful, comparative analysis. The book is accessible to a broad audience and represents an excellent addition to the growing scholarly literature addressing the intersection of religion, medicine, and healing." - Joseph Williams, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences "Madness is a fine accomplishment, weaving together a theological point with historical analysis." - Sean Cosgrove, Journal of Religious History "A text that will be read profitably both within the academic community and outside it." - Jeremy Bonner, Journal of Ecclesiastical History "Vacek has written an important text for professors of pastoral counseling/clinical pastoral education and students in divinity and theological schools to disentangle church history and understand what it is they believe about the role of churches and clergy in the accompaniment of people with mental disabilities." - Corrine C. Bertram, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Social Sciences "… Madness is a fascinating read and of particular interest to historians, mental healthcare practitioners, and those researching the intersection between medicine and religion." - E. Janet Warren, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith "We live in an era of ever more interest in religion and medicine, yet religious studies has produced remarkably few monographs on the relationship between religion and mental health. The historical breadth of Vacek's book offers a wide-angle lens on this relationship, tracing major shifts as well as detailing turns both disturbing and promising. Aware both of the importance of history and the variety of communities such studies might reach, Vacek offers a thoughtful starting point for future scholarship and engagement." - Philippa Koch, The Journal of ReligionTable of Contents Introduction: Christianity and Mental Illness 1. Making Theological Sense out of Suffering, Sin, and Sickness: Cotton Mather 2. Christian Vocation and the Shape of the Secular Profession: Benjamin Rush 3. Advocating for the Helpless, Forgotten, and Insane: Dorothea Dix 4. Reclaiming Religious Authority in Medicine: Anton Boisen 5. A Passionate Plea to Engage Finds Lukewarm Reaction: Karl Menninger Conclusion: Suffering, Stigma, and Hospitality

Read more less

Book SynopsisCrafts a theology of time that draws us toward a perspective wherein time is a gift and a calling. Time is not a commodity nor is time to be mastered. Time is a gift of God to humans, but is also a gift given back to God by humans.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Time, Disability, and the Fragile Brain Part I. Time and Disability Chapter 1. Thinking about Time: The Tyranny of the Clock Chapter 2. Time and Progress: Disability and the Wrong Kind of Time Part II. Learning to Live in God's Time Chapter 3. Time and Christ: A Brief Theology of Time Chapter 4. Becoming Friends of Time: Love Has a Speed Part III. From Inclusion to Discipleship Chapter 5. Time and Discipleship: Inclusion, Discipleship, and Profound Intellectual Disability Chapter 6. Time and Vocation: Slow and Gentle Disciples Part IV. Reclaiming the Heart Chapter 7. Time and Memory: Dementia and the Advancement of Time Chapter 8. Time and the Heart: Affective Remembering Part V. The Horror of Time Chapter 9. The Horror of Time: Acquired Brain Injury and Personality Change Chapter 10. The Time Before and the Time After: Brain Injury, Human Identity, and the Hiddenness of Our Lives in Christ Chapter 11. Time and Ritual: Funerals for Friends Conclusion: Being in Christ, Being in Time: Every Body Has a Place Appendix: Redeeming Time: A Lived Funeral Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisOpens our eyes to the prophetic corpus’ ongoing theological relevance in the first book-length treatment of disability in the Bible’s prophetic literature. Sarah Melcher takes a deep exegetical dive into Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, analysing passages that mention disability explicitly and those that offer complementary relevance.Table of Contents Introduction: Disability and Divine Sovereignty in the Hebrew Prophets 1 "The Hands of All Will Go Limp": The Book of Isaiah 2 "Their Ears Are Closed": The Book of Jeremiah 3 "I Will Cleanse You from All Your Uncleanness": The Book of Ezekiel 4 "Assemble the Lame and Outcast": The Book of the Twelve Conclusion: Prophetic Disability and Theological Ethics

Read more less

Book SynopsisArgues that what our churches need is not more programs for disabled people but rather the pastoral tools to repent of able-bodied theologies and practices, listen to people with disabilities, lament ableism and injustice, and be transformed by God’s ministry through disabled leadership.Table of Contents Introduction 1 The Problem of Inclusion 2 The "End" of Inclusion 3 Listening beyond Inclusion 4 Listening beyond Rebuke 5 Following Jesus toward Justice 6 Ministers Each and Every One 7 A Disabled Critique of Christian Leadership 8 New Modes of Disabled Leadership 9 Mirrors and Accomplices in the Kingdom of God Conclusion

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhereas the public-facing proponents of bioenhancements tend to come from privileged positions in society, Bioenhancement Technologies and the Vulnerable Body seeks to analyse the nuances of bioenhancement from the perspective of those who are often marginalized in bioethical discussions.Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Fleshly Transhumanism: A Positive Account of Body Modification and Body Enhancement - Adam Pryor 2. The Groaning of Creation: Technological Interventions in Creaturely Suffering - J. Jeanine Thweatt 3. The Tree of Life: Aquinas, Disability, and Transhumanism - Miguel J. Romero and Jason T. Eberl 4. Ontology--Where It Comes in and How It Matters: A Conversation Between Friends - Jonathan Tran and Jeffrey P. Bishop 5. Transfiguring the Vulnerability of Suffering - Kimbell Kornu 6. This is My Body: Faith Communities as Sites of Transfiguring Vulnerability - Wylin D. Wilson 7. The Lame to Walk and the Deaf Hear: Why It Pays for Surveillance Capitalism to Exploit the Disabled - Brian Brock 8. Christian Transhumanism in Context: The Relevance of Race Terri Laws - 9. Disability Justice, Bioenhancement and the Eschatological Imagination - Devan Stahl Epilogue Enhancing Bodies: From What to What?

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this collection of primary sources, Eugene Smelyansky highlights instances of persecution and violence, as well as those relatively rare but significant episodes of toleration, that impacted a broad spectrum of people who existed at the margins of medieval society: heretics, Jews and Muslims, the poor, the displaced and disabled, women, and those deemed sexually deviant. The volume also presents a more geographically diverse Middle Ages by including sources from Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Mediterranean. Each document is preceded by a brief introduction and followed by questions for discussion, making The Intolerant Middle Ages an excellent entrance into the lives and struggles of medieval minorities. Trade Review"The book contains a large number of interesting documents and should prove convenient for teaching undergraduate courses on its particular thematic sections. It will be particularly useful for courses on gender and sexuality." -- Lola Sharon Davidson, University of Technology Sydney * Parergon *“Smelyansky has chosen an excellent set of texts, including some that are unexpected and therefore especially interesting … The care with which Smelyansky treats his subjects, the persecutors and the persecuted, is admirable.” -- Deeana Copeland Klepper, Boston University * Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1: Precursors and Origins 1. Christians Accused of Participating in Scandalous Rituals 2. The Martyrdom of Saint Perpetua 3. Emperor Constantine Condemns Arianism 4. Saint Augustine on the Grounds for Religious Persecution 5. Christianity Triumphant: The Theodosian Code on Christianity and Paganism Chapter 2: Anti-Judaism and Persecution of the Jews 6. “Slay Them Not”: Saint Augustine on the Jews 7. Anti-Jewish Legislation from the Visigothic Code 8. The Massacre in Mainz at the Beginning of the First Crusade 9. Blood Libel: The Murder of William of Norwich 10. A Papal Response: Gregory X against the Blood Libel 11. Jewish Woman in a Christian Miracle Story 12. King Otakar II Promises Royal Protection to the Jews in Bohemia and Austria 13. Well-Poisoning Accusations against the Jews 14. Massacre of the Jews in Strasbourg Chapter 3: Heresy and Inquisition 15. Heresy in the Carolingian Word: Gottschalk of Orbais 16. Guibert of Nogent and the Heretics of Soissons 17. Hildegard of Bingen Preaches against Heresy 18. A Cathar Origin Story in the Testimony of Arnaud Sicre 19. Origins of the Waldensians 20. Canon of the Fourth Lateran Council Concerning Heresy 21. Inquisitor Bernard Gui at Work 22. Heretical Tricks: Inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich on the Art of Interrogation 23. Individual Resistance: Bernard Clergue 24. Cooperation and Resistance: Arnaud Sicre Infiltrates a Heretical Group 25. Papal Prohibitions against Beguines and Beghards at the Council of Vienne 26. The Fruits of Clerical Imagination: A Heretical Orgy 27. Persecutions of Waldensians in Late Medieval German Cities Chapter 4: External Others: Contacts, Intolerance, and the Making of Medieval Europe 28. Carolingian Conquest of Saxony: Two Perspectives 29. Gerald of Wales on the Irish 30. Papal Blessing for Henry II’s Conquest of Ireland 31. Keeping the Peace after the Conquest: Statutes of the Parliament of Dublin 32. Medieval Europe Old and New: Otto of Freising Describes Northern Italy and Hungary 33. Duke of Lithuania on the Teutonic Order Chapter 5: Interreligious Violence in the Mediterranean 34. The Martyrs of Cordoba 35. Depictions of Muslims in The Song of Roland 36. Ibn Jubayr on Sicily under the Christian Rule 37. Interfaith Coexistence in Crusader Jerusalem 38. Coexistence and Exclusion in the Siete Partidas 39. Pope Innocent III Forbids the Venetian Merchants to Trade with the Muslims 40. Frederick II’s Trade Agreement with Tunisia 41. Accusations against the Genoese Merchants in Service of the Mamluk Sultan Chapter 6: People on the Margins of Medieval Society 42. Agobard of Lyon: On the Baptism of Jewish Slaves 43. Poverty as Piety: The Rule of Saint Francis 44. Critique of the Mendicant Friars: William of St-Amour’s On the Dangers of the Final Days 45. Medieval Serfdom and Manumission 46. Punishments for Impregnating a Female Slave in Genoa 47. Discrimination against the Poor in Siena during the Famine of 1329 48. Living in Poverty in Florence 49. The World Turned Upside Down: Social Anxiety during and after the Plague 50. Wage Control after the Plague: Ordinance of the Laborers, 1349 51. Ordinances against the “Jews, Lepers, and Swine” and the Poor in Late Medieval London 52. Christine de Pizan on the Virtues of Toleration Chapter 7: Disease and Disability in Medieval Europe 53. Disability and Charity in Piers Plowman 54. False Disability on the Streets of London 55. Rules of the Maison-Dieu in Pontoise 56. Physician Gilbert the Englishman on the Symptoms of Leprosy 57. Humbert of Romans Preaches to the Lepers 58. Ritual of Exclusion for a Leper 59. The Leper Plot against Christendom, 1321 Chapter 8: From the Holy to the Sinful: Attitudes towards Women 60. A Prostitute Saint: Saint Mary of Egypt 61. The Trial of Thiota, A False Prophetess 62. The Life of Christina of Markyate 63. Women in the Sicilian Laws of Frederick II 64. Women and the Ideals of Courtly Love 65. Religious Life of Margery Kempe 66. Marital Problems: An Innkeeper’s Wife Leaves Him 67. Bernardino of Siena Preaches on Marriage Chapter 9: The Control of Sexuality 68. Laws of Justinian Concerning Same-Sex Acts and Blasphemy 69. A Cross-Dressing Saint: Marina/Marinus 70. Punishments for Illicit Sexuality from a Medieval Penitential 71. Prostitution and Religious Reform in Prague 72. Illegal Prostitution in London 73. Confession of a Muslim Prostitute in Valencia 74. Confession of Arnaud of Verniolle 75. The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer 76. Testimony of Rolandina Roncaglia 77. Testimony of Eleanor/John Rykener

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines different ways authors use and portray disability in literature. Abbye Meyer demonstrates how narratives about and for young adults differ from the norm. With a distinctive young adult voice based in disability, these narratives allow for readings that conflate and complicate both adolescence and disability.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines different ways authors use and portray disability in literature. Abbye Meyer demonstrates how narratives about and for young adults differ from the norm. With a distinctive young adult voice based in disability, these narratives allow for readings that conflate and complicate both adolescence and disability.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines how creative works have depicted what it means to be a deaf or hard of hearing child in the modern world. Scholars discuss wide-ranging subjects and themes, including growing up deaf in a hearing world, stigmas associated with deafness, rival modes of communication, and friendship and discrimination.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA groundbreaking work at the intersection of Faulkner studies and disability studies. Originally published in 2009 by Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle as L’Idiotie dans l’ouvre de Faulkner, this translation brings the book to English-language readers for the first time.Trade ReviewWith great authority and lucidity, Inventing Benjy shows brilliantly how Faulkner adopted the conceit of ‘idiocy’ for his innovative, contrarian, and revolutionary modernist project." - John T. Matthews, editor of William Faulkner in Context

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book is about the employment of people with disabilities in the United States and the important role of employer practices. Nearly one in five people report some form of disability, and they are only half as likely to be employed as those without disabilities. With the aging workforce and returning military veterans both contributing to increasing number of disabilities in the workplace, there is an urgent need for better ways to address continuing employment disparities for people with disabilities. Examining employer behaviors is critical to changing this trend. It is essential to understand the factors that motivate employers to engage this workforce and which specific practices are most effective. Disability and Employer Practices features research-based documentation of workplace policies and practices that result in the successful recruitment, retention, advancement, and inclusion of individuals with disabilities. The Cornell team whose work is featured in tTrade Review[T]his book provides valuable information to academic researchers, industrial employers, and policy makers. Researchers can use this book as a guide-line of seeking collaboration with employers who can provide data for academic studies. Employers can use this book to gain benchmark information and practical recommendations for recruiting and accommodating employees with disabilities.And policy makers can use this book to think through multiple elements when formulating a new policy regarding disability in the workplace. -- Xin Xuan Che & Weiwei Liu * Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy *Table of Contents1. Disability and Employment: Framing the Problem, and Our Approach Susanne M. Bruyère, Sara VanLooy, Sarah von Schrader, and Linda Barrington 2. Engaging Employers as Stakeholders Linda Barrington 3. Exploring National Survey Data William A. Erickson, Arun Karpur, and Kevin F. Hallock 4. Using Administrative Data Hassan Enayati and Sarah von Schrader 5. Surveying Employers and Individuals with Disabilities William A. Erickson, Sarah von Schrader, and Sara VanLooy 6. Conducting Case Studies Lisa H. Nishii and Susanne M. Bruyère 7. Translating Knowledge to Practice, and the Way Forward Susanne M. Bruyère, Ellice Switzer, Sara VanLooy, Sarah von Schrader, and Linda Barrington

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Other Welfare offers the first comprehensive history of Supplemental Security Income (SSI), from its origins as part of President Nixon's daring social reform efforts to its pivotal role in the politics of the Clinton administration. Enacted into law in 1972, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) marked the culmination of liberal social and economic policies that began during the New Deal. The new program provided cash benefits to needy elderly, blind, and disabled individuals. Because of the complex character of SSImarking both the high tide of the Great Society and the beginning of the retrenchment of the welfare stateit provides the perfect subject for assessing the development of the American state in the late twentieth century. SSI was launched with the hope of freeing welfare programs from social and political stigma; it instead became a source of controversy almost from its very start. Intended as a program that paid uniform benefits across the nation, it ended up repTrade ReviewThe Other Welfare is an excellent and insightful contribution to the study of federal and state interactions in social-welfare policy making and execution. In a few years its readers will want to return to it to trace the parallels between SSI and Obamacare. -- John E. Murray * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *Berkowitz and DeWitt offer an exceptionally fine history of SSI. Along with their descriptive project, Berkowitz and DeWitt offer a handful of historically informed lessons for SSI, including how the perceived 'deservedness' of program beneficiaries can profoundly affect how policies are understood and how they are 'reformed.'. -- Stephen Pimpare * The Journal of American History, *Berkowitz and DeWitt's story of SSI illuminates not ony the program's participants but also the largely uncharted territory of social poicymaking after 'the high tide of the expansive welfare state of the postwar and Great Society eras.' Drawing on recent multidisciplinary scholarship on the state and American political development, they point to new structures and actors shaping social policy in an age of political conservatism, market ascendancy, congressional restructuring, and media saturation. -- Jennifer Mittelstadt * The American Historical Review *For those familiar with the SSI program, the details in the book will shed some needed light on the legislative wrangling that produced the program's cumbersome and often confusing structure. For those unfamiliar with SSI, the book is a well-documented reminder of the difficulties of efficiently and effectively managing federal income support programs across changing political and social environments. -- Mary C. Daly * Journal of Economic Literature *In their masterful historical account of Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Edward D. Berkowitz and Larry DeWitt argue convincingly that disability benefits policy, though little studied by historians and political scientists, is at the heart of contemporary debate over the proper scope of government and its capacity to do good.. Drawing from archival material not previously available, Berkowitz and DeWitt's The Other Welfare is a marvelous book and their inquiry a timely one. Reformers of the left and right, academics, and policy analysts would do well to heed its lessons as our nation, amid great public doubt, partisan rancor, and budgetary pressures, rolls out the Affordable Care Act, one of the most ambitious pieces of social legislation since SSI. -- Jennifer L. Erkul * Journal of Children and Poverty *This unusual book provides an in-depth history of the administration of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program from its inception through 1996 and the Clinton administration. Berkowitz and DeWitt examine the pressures and compromises they witnessed from their respective professional positions.... The authors' proximity to the program enables them to report the details of political maneuvers and policy proposals few others could achieve. * Choice *This well-researched and insightfully argued history of the SSI program tells us how and why SSI failed to reinvent welfare and illuminates our understanding of U.S. social policy in several fundamental ways along the way. It shows that welfare policy—particularly in the U.S. political-cultural context of deserving and underserving poor—is inherently fraught with controversy.... In this sense, it takes its place in the venerable tradition of American Political Development. -- Benjamin W. Veghte * Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare *Table of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction1. Creating a New Welfare Program: The Politics of Welfare and Social Security Reform in the Nixon Administration2. A Year in Transition: Why Planning for the New Program Became Difficult3. Launching the Program: Why the Program Began Badly4. The Emergence of a Disability Program: How the Program's Fundamental Identity Changed5. The Continuing Disability Reviews: How the Politics of Controversy Hindered the Program6. The Courts and Other Sources of Program Growth: How the Program Expanded in a Conservative Age7. The Welfare Reform of 1996: How the Program Became Swept Up in the Narrative of Welfare Fraud and Abuse8. Post-1996 Developments: A Brief PostscriptConclusionNotes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Deaf in the USSR, Claire L. Shaw asks what it meant to be deaf in a culture that was founded on a radically utopian, socialist view of human perfectibility. Shaw reveals how fundamental contradictions inherent in the Soviet revolutionary project were negotiatedboth individually and collectively by a vibrant and independent community of deaf people who engaged in complex ways with Soviet ideology.Deaf in the USSR engages with a wide range of sources from both deaf and hearing perspectivesarchival sources, films and literature, personal memoirs, and journalismto build a multilayered history of deafness. This book will appeal to scholars of Soviet history and disability studies as well as those in the international deaf community who are interested in their collective heritage. Deaf in the USSR will also enjoy a broad readership among those who are interested in deafness and disability as a key to more inclusive understandings of being human and of languaTrade ReviewA compelling study of the Soviet deaf community.... Deaf in the USSR deserves to be widely read and suggests ways for the experiences of other minority and marginalized Soviet communities to be re-examined. * Times Literary Supplement *A landmark in the history of disability and the Soviet welfare state. A stunning first book, it covers the entire Soviet experience from a thought-provoking perspective. * AUSTRIAN TIMES *Shaw traces how deaf individuals challenged prevailing notions about their abilities and legal competence while also participating in the underlying goal of the Soviet project to transform "backward" masses into productive and literate citizens.... An important scholarly contribution to the field of deaf history. * Choice *Shaw's approach is, first and foremost, historically rigorous. With this, the first definitive account of deaf political advocacy throughout the Soviet twentieth century, Shaw has proffered a fertile platform for further scholarship. * Slavic Review *An outstanding work. [Deaf in the USSR] will be of considerable interest to a number of different kinds of readers. For historians of the Soviet Union, it addresses a little-known but potentially quite important aspect of Soviet history. For those interested in the history of deafness and the deaf, it offers fascinating insights into the unique case of deafness in post-revolutionary Russia.... The volume is well-written, cogent, and thoroughly grounded in both historical and archival sources. It is a significant contribution to the literature on the history of deafness and Deaf identity, and we have much for which to be grateful to Shaw. * Sign Language Studies *This is an important book for not just historians of Russia and the Soviet Union, nor only scholars of deafness and disability, but for researchers in all of these fields and beyond. * Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences *One of the strengths of Deaf in the USSR is its identification of—indeed, emphasis on—tensions that remained unresolved throughout the Soviet era. It is a testimony to Shaw's analytical rigor that she can keep all these dialectical balls in the air without succumbing to incoherence. * American Historical Review *Deaf in the USSR succeeds best in offering a deaf-centered, unique overview of the development of political identity of deaf people in urban Russia under the Soviet system, and is a significant contribution to the fields of Deaf Studies and Soviet History. * The Russian Review *Claire Shaw's excellent monograph traces a history of deafness—attitudes toward deafness, experiences of deafness—across the Soviet century. It is, above all, a history of shifting discourses about the senses... This is a valuable corrective to oversimplified narratives of Soviet ideology. -- Emma Widdis * KRITIKA *

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Twenty-Two Cents an Hour, Doug Crandell uncovers the harsh reality of people with disabilities in the United States who are forced to work in unethical conditions for subminimum wages with little or no opportunity to advocate for themselves, while wealthy CEOs grow even wealthier as a direct result. As recently as 2016, the United States Congress enacted bipartisan legislation which continued to allow workers with disabilities to legally be paid far lower than the federal minimum wage. Drawing on ongoing federal Department of Justice lawsuits, the horrifying story of Henry''s Turkey Farm in Iowa, and more, Crandell shows the history of the policies that have led to these unjust outcomes, examines who benefits from this legislation, and asks important questions about the rise of a disability industrial complex. Exposing this complexwhich is rooted in profit, lobbying, and playing on the emotions of workers'' parents and families, as well as the pTable of ContentsPart I 1. The Stage is Set for Broken Promises 2. From Evil Intentions to Unintended Consequences 3. Subminimum Wages and Disability Rights 4. The Floor is Gone and Modern Lobbying Arrives Part II 5. The Olmstead Supreme Court Decision and Freedom Fighters 6. Early Adopters and Tearing Down Assumptions 7. Federal Policy as Catalyst, Barrier, and Duality 8. The Nightmare in Atalissa Part III 9. Boycotting Goodwill 10. Oregon, Rhode Island, and the Promise of a Way Forward 11. A Legislative Fix Was In 12. Ohio and the Future of Subminimum Wages

Read more less

Book SynopsisAmbassadors of Social Progress examines the ways in which blind activists from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe entered the postwar international disability movement and shaped its content and its course. Maria Cristina Galmarini shows that the international work of socialist blind activists was defined by the larger politics of the Cold War and, in many respects, represented a field of competition with the West in which the East could shine. Yet, her study also reveals that socialist blind politics went beyond propaganda. When socialist activists joined the international blind movement, they initiated an exchange of experiences that profoundly impacted everyone involved. Not only did the international blind movement turn global disability welfare from philanthropy to self-advocacy, but it also gave East European and Soviet activists a new set of ideas and technologies to improve their own national movements. By analyzing the intersection of disability and politics, Ambassadors of Social Progress enables a deeper, bottom-up understanding of cultural relations during the Cold War. Galmarini significantly contributes to the little-studied history of disability in socialist Europe, and ultimately shows that disability activism did not start as an import from the West in the post-1989 period, but rather had a long and meaningful tradition that was rooted in the socialist system of welfare and needed to be reinvented when this system fell apart.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDespite the progress of decades-old disability rights policy, including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, threats continue to undermine the wellbeing of this population. The U.S. is, thus, a policy innovator and laggard in this regard. In Politics of Empowerment, David Pettinicchio offers a historically grounded analysis of the singular case of U.S. disability policy, countering long-held views of progress that privilege public demand as its primary driver. By the 1970s, a group of legislators and bureaucrats came to act as "political entrepreneurs." Motivated by personal and professional commitments, they were seen as experts leading a movement within the government. But as they increasingly faced obstacles to their legislative intentions, nascent disability advocacy and protest groups took the cause to the American people forming the basis of the contemporary disability rights movement. Drawing on extensive archival material, Pettinicchio redefines the relationship between grassroots advocacy and institutional politics, revealing a cycle of progress and backlash embedded in the American political system.Trade Review"David Pettinicchio has written a broad and ambitious study of the evolution of American disability policy and disability rights, incorporating changing policy approaches, governmental institutions, and social movement activities into his account. Drawing on legislative documents, policy debates, and sociological concepts, the book situates disability within broader social policy frameworks and political trends. It will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the interplay of disability policies, politics, and rights within the context of American policy-making." -- Richard K. Scotch, Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Political Economy * University of Texas at Dallas *"This excellent addition to the policy feedbacks literature shows how federal policy helped disabled activists become fully mobilized citizens. But progress is not always linear. Recurrent retrenchment efforts mean that the push for civil rights for the disabled is incomplete, and their economic citizenship not yet fully realized. A must-read for those interested in social movements and citizen participation." -- Andrea Louise Campbell, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science * MIT *"David Pettinicchio explains the odd but important development of disability politics and policy in the context of changing political alliances and definitions of civil rights. It's a compelling story, with lessons for advocates, policy makers, and anyone who wants to understand either group." -- David S. Meyer * University of California, Irvine *"Empirically, [this book] is a rigorous treatment of the successes and setbacks of the disability rights movement....A number of folks in our field...have discussed the importance of considering institutional actors, and what movement mobilization looks like from their point of view, rather than analyzing movements only from the perspective of movement actors. Pettinicchio does this admirably." -- Joshua A. Basseches * Mobilizing Ideas *"Politics of Empowerment is an important work that will both broaden the view of those interested specifically in the American disability rights movement and those more generally interested in social movements of all kinds." -- Stephen J. Meyers * Mobilization *"[A] meticulous historical and political account of the development of disability policy in the United States....I recommend this book to readers who are interested in understanding how people, politics, and governmental and organizational goals align to increase access and opportunity for marginalized groups." -- Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides * Contemporary Sociology *"Politics of Empowerment is a really, really good book. David Pettinicchio tells the story of disability policy in the United States with great care and close attention to detail....This book is both a specific history of disability policy as well as a broad story of the politics of social change....Politics of Empowerment is in many ways the best kind of scholarship: it generates new thinking and ideas, and it gives the rest of us a strong foundation to build upon." -- Jeremy R. Levine * American Journal of Sociology *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1The Political Evolution of Disability chapter abstractChapter 1 outlines the key tenets of the book's thesis: that disability rights entered into an already-defined agenda space revolving around social services and vocational rehabilitation. It did so by way of political entrepreneurs incrementally carving a path for rights to develop. These policies empowered a group of Americans once thought of exclusively as clients deserving of social services to be citizens entitled to civil rights. But, while it began as an elite-driven movement, disability rights would soon be threatened by policy rollbacks and retrenchment that ultimately mobilized a constituency to defend against these attacks. The political evolution of disability rights therefore provides an opportunity for contextualizing—in terms of time and space—the relationship between social movements, political entrepreneurship, policy shifts, and organizational transformations in the broader struggle for civil rights. 2It's Ability, Not Disability, That Counts chapter abstractChapter 2 further contextualizes the evolution of disability rights by examining the service-provision-dominated policy agenda in the first half of the twentieth century. Until the 1960s, a disability policy monopoly promoted a policy image emphasizing ability over disability—the idea that rehabilitation was necessary to overcome disability and create "good citizens." The chapter investigates the kinds of institutional constraints that prevented any significant policy reforms, requiring elites to pursue incremental policy changes. Political entrepreneurs championed the removal of architectural barriers, promoting equal access by using existing rhetoric about economic self-sufficiency through rehabilitation—and consequently laying the groundwork for rights to flourish. Ultimately, their efforts also helped frame the plight of a heterogeneous group as the common struggle of a community. 3Reshaping the Policy Agenda chapter abstractChapter 3 provides a systematic analysis of the kinds of institutional changes that helped political entrepreneurs extend the political discourse around disability to include civil rights. Beginning with the Great Society, the 1960s and 1970s saw an increasing number of congressional committees and administrative agencies involved in disability issues. While this helped gain disability a place on the agenda, it also generated conflict as different policy frameworks clashed. The chapter draws on the equal rights to transit debate as an example. Chapter 3 also points to the consequences of legislative change: that the way actors went about promoting a new logic around "the problem" of disability shaped policy outcomes, backlash, and most certainly the tools and motivations available to a political constituency to push for their rights. And, in mobilizing against political, economic, and social institutions, the disability rights movement necessarily challenged cultural understandings and meanings of disability. 4How Disability Advocacy Made Citizens out of Clients chapter abstractChapter 4 explains how disability organizations and policy coevolved. In the 1970s, the disability organizational sector underwent an advocacy explosion, as it adapted to a new rights-focused policy environment. Existing service-provision groups adopted political advocacy, alongside a proliferation of new advocacy organizations. The chapter illustrates the interdependent relationship between disability organizations and political entrepreneurs in protecting and advancing disability rights, especially when faced with growing backlash and political threats. Chapter 4 uses the transit debate, as well as educational mainstreaming, to situate the growing demand for advocacy as sympathetic elites confronted attempts to roll back rights. Changes in the disability voluntary sector encouraged the expansion of new mobilizing structures that would bring activists together. 5Politics Is Pressure chapter abstractChapter 5 looks at the rise of disability protest in the context of political threats to existing disability rights legislation. The disability rights movement in the government reflected critical structural and organizational transformations that politicized a constituency. Political entrepreneurs supplied the policy instruments around which disability groups helped mobilize everyday citizens with disabilities to champion their rights. The use of extra-institutional, disruptive tactics was not only necessary when institutional means became less available; it also drew public attention to the kinds of inequality disabled people faced. Educational mainstreaming, equal access to transit and Medicaid, and in-home care serve as salient examples of the decades-old unsettled issues that generated uncertainty and back-stepping, which fueled contentious politics and mobilized a movement. Chapter 5 points to this critical transformation in disability rights from an elite-driven movement in the government to a broader grassroots movement in the streets. 6Empowering the Government chapter abstractChapter 6 returns to the reasons why the disability rights struggle is, to this day, a story of unresolved policy entrenchment. The chapter highlights ongoing debates about integrating students with disabilities into regular classrooms and the continued fight over community-based care—key movement issues that are in deadlock. The same institutional configurations that allowed for policy innovation and political entrepreneurship also led to conflict, obstruction, retrenchment, and undesirable policy consequences. Indeed, the case of disability rights reveals the ways in which the duality in America's political institutions creates both the resources and the motivations for citizen action. The chapter speaks to current efforts to undermine policies like the ADA that are rooted in their political development, negotiation, compromise, and lack of enforcement. It also sheds light on the status of the disability rights movement today and the importance of citizen engagement in this civil rights struggle.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDespite the progress of decades-old disability rights policy, including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, threats continue to undermine the wellbeing of this population. The U.S. is, thus, a policy innovator and laggard in this regard. In Politics of Empowerment, David Pettinicchio offers a historically grounded analysis of the singular case of U.S. disability policy, countering long-held views of progress that privilege public demand as its primary driver. By the 1970s, a group of legislators and bureaucrats came to act as "political entrepreneurs." Motivated by personal and professional commitments, they were seen as experts leading a movement within the government. But as they increasingly faced obstacles to their legislative intentions, nascent disability advocacy and protest groups took the cause to the American people forming the basis of the contemporary disability rights movement. Drawing on extensive archival material, Pettinicchio redefines the relationship between grassroots advocacy and institutional politics, revealing a cycle of progress and backlash embedded in the American political system.Trade Review"David Pettinicchio has written a broad and ambitious study of the evolution of American disability policy and disability rights, incorporating changing policy approaches, governmental institutions, and social movement activities into his account. Drawing on legislative documents, policy debates, and sociological concepts, the book situates disability within broader social policy frameworks and political trends. It will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the interplay of disability policies, politics, and rights within the context of American policy-making." -- Richard K. Scotch, Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Political Economy * University of Texas at Dallas *"This excellent addition to the policy feedbacks literature shows how federal policy helped disabled activists become fully mobilized citizens. But progress is not always linear. Recurrent retrenchment efforts mean that the push for civil rights for the disabled is incomplete, and their economic citizenship not yet fully realized. A must-read for those interested in social movements and citizen participation." -- Andrea Louise Campbell, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science * MIT *"David Pettinicchio explains the odd but important development of disability politics and policy in the context of changing political alliances and definitions of civil rights. It's a compelling story, with lessons for advocates, policy makers, and anyone who wants to understand either group." -- David S. Meyer * University of California, Irvine *"Empirically, [this book] is a rigorous treatment of the successes and setbacks of the disability rights movement....A number of folks in our field...have discussed the importance of considering institutional actors, and what movement mobilization looks like from their point of view, rather than analyzing movements only from the perspective of movement actors. Pettinicchio does this admirably." -- Joshua A. Basseches * Mobilizing Ideas *"Politics of Empowerment is an important work that will both broaden the view of those interested specifically in the American disability rights movement and those more generally interested in social movements of all kinds." -- Stephen J. Meyers * Mobilization *"[A] meticulous historical and political account of the development of disability policy in the United States....I recommend this book to readers who are interested in understanding how people, politics, and governmental and organizational goals align to increase access and opportunity for marginalized groups." -- Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides * Contemporary Sociology *"Politics of Empowerment is a really, really good book. David Pettinicchio tells the story of disability policy in the United States with great care and close attention to detail....This book is both a specific history of disability policy as well as a broad story of the politics of social change....Politics of Empowerment is in many ways the best kind of scholarship: it generates new thinking and ideas, and it gives the rest of us a strong foundation to build upon." -- Jeremy R. Levine * American Journal of Sociology *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1The Political Evolution of Disability chapter abstractChapter 1 outlines the key tenets of the book's thesis: that disability rights entered into an already-defined agenda space revolving around social services and vocational rehabilitation. It did so by way of political entrepreneurs incrementally carving a path for rights to develop. These policies empowered a group of Americans once thought of exclusively as clients deserving of social services to be citizens entitled to civil rights. But, while it began as an elite-driven movement, disability rights would soon be threatened by policy rollbacks and retrenchment that ultimately mobilized a constituency to defend against these attacks. The political evolution of disability rights therefore provides an opportunity for contextualizing—in terms of time and space—the relationship between social movements, political entrepreneurship, policy shifts, and organizational transformations in the broader struggle for civil rights. 2It's Ability, Not Disability, That Counts chapter abstractChapter 2 further contextualizes the evolution of disability rights by examining the service-provision-dominated policy agenda in the first half of the twentieth century. Until the 1960s, a disability policy monopoly promoted a policy image emphasizing ability over disability—the idea that rehabilitation was necessary to overcome disability and create "good citizens." The chapter investigates the kinds of institutional constraints that prevented any significant policy reforms, requiring elites to pursue incremental policy changes. Political entrepreneurs championed the removal of architectural barriers, promoting equal access by using existing rhetoric about economic self-sufficiency through rehabilitation—and consequently laying the groundwork for rights to flourish. Ultimately, their efforts also helped frame the plight of a heterogeneous group as the common struggle of a community. 3Reshaping the Policy Agenda chapter abstractChapter 3 provides a systematic analysis of the kinds of institutional changes that helped political entrepreneurs extend the political discourse around disability to include civil rights. Beginning with the Great Society, the 1960s and 1970s saw an increasing number of congressional committees and administrative agencies involved in disability issues. While this helped gain disability a place on the agenda, it also generated conflict as different policy frameworks clashed. The chapter draws on the equal rights to transit debate as an example. Chapter 3 also points to the consequences of legislative change: that the way actors went about promoting a new logic around "the problem" of disability shaped policy outcomes, backlash, and most certainly the tools and motivations available to a political constituency to push for their rights. And, in mobilizing against political, economic, and social institutions, the disability rights movement necessarily challenged cultural understandings and meanings of disability. 4How Disability Advocacy Made Citizens out of Clients chapter abstractChapter 4 explains how disability organizations and policy coevolved. In the 1970s, the disability organizational sector underwent an advocacy explosion, as it adapted to a new rights-focused policy environment. Existing service-provision groups adopted political advocacy, alongside a proliferation of new advocacy organizations. The chapter illustrates the interdependent relationship between disability organizations and political entrepreneurs in protecting and advancing disability rights, especially when faced with growing backlash and political threats. Chapter 4 uses the transit debate, as well as educational mainstreaming, to situate the growing demand for advocacy as sympathetic elites confronted attempts to roll back rights. Changes in the disability voluntary sector encouraged the expansion of new mobilizing structures that would bring activists together. 5Politics Is Pressure chapter abstractChapter 5 looks at the rise of disability protest in the context of political threats to existing disability rights legislation. The disability rights movement in the government reflected critical structural and organizational transformations that politicized a constituency. Political entrepreneurs supplied the policy instruments around which disability groups helped mobilize everyday citizens with disabilities to champion their rights. The use of extra-institutional, disruptive tactics was not only necessary when institutional means became less available; it also drew public attention to the kinds of inequality disabled people faced. Educational mainstreaming, equal access to transit and Medicaid, and in-home care serve as salient examples of the decades-old unsettled issues that generated uncertainty and back-stepping, which fueled contentious politics and mobilized a movement. Chapter 5 points to this critical transformation in disability rights from an elite-driven movement in the government to a broader grassroots movement in the streets. 6Empowering the Government chapter abstractChapter 6 returns to the reasons why the disability rights struggle is, to this day, a story of unresolved policy entrenchment. The chapter highlights ongoing debates about integrating students with disabilities into regular classrooms and the continued fight over community-based care—key movement issues that are in deadlock. The same institutional configurations that allowed for policy innovation and political entrepreneurship also led to conflict, obstruction, retrenchment, and undesirable policy consequences. Indeed, the case of disability rights reveals the ways in which the duality in America's political institutions creates both the resources and the motivations for citizen action. The chapter speaks to current efforts to undermine policies like the ADA that are rooted in their political development, negotiation, compromise, and lack of enforcement. It also sheds light on the status of the disability rights movement today and the importance of citizen engagement in this civil rights struggle.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA philosophical challenge to the ableist conflation of disability and pain More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said: “let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.” This idea is alive and well today. During the past century, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the United States can forcibly sterilize intellectually disabled women and philosopher Peter Singer argued for the right of parents to euthanize certain cognitively disabled infants. The Life Worth Living explores how and why such arguments persist by investigating the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy.Joel Michael Reynolds argues that this history demonstrates a fundamental mischaracterization of the meaning of disability, thanks to the conflation of lived experiences of disability with those of pain and suffering. Building on decades of activism and scholarship in the field, Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires.The Life Worth Living is the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of the history of moral philosophy and phenomenology, and it demonstrates how lived experiences of disability demand a far richer account of human flourishing, embodiment, community, and politics in philosophical inquiry and beyond.Trade Review"In this philosophically ambitious and deeply personal book, Joel Michael Reynolds exposes the ableist mistake that has afflicted philosophy at least since Socrates asked what makes a life worth living. To repair the damage done by that mistake, Reynolds exhorts us to stop looking for the worth of human lives in individual ‘normate’ bodies and to start building systems of access and care that make it possible for people with all sorts of bodies to flourish. Anyone committed to understanding what disability justice requires should read this book."—Erik Parens, director, The Hastings Center Initiative in Bioethics and the Humanities"Joel Michael Reynolds’s The Life Worth Living is the most insightful analysis of pain since Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. His phenomenology of foreboding, beholdenness, bioreckoning, and disruption is brilliant. And his critical engagement with ableist assumptions that run throughout the history of thought and continue into contemporary medical discourses powerfully demonstrates that these discourses continue to conflate disability, pain, and harm in ways that devalue ‘disabled’ lives."—Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Ableist ConflationPart I. Pain1. Theories of Pain2. A Phenomenology of Chronic PainPart II. Disability3. Theories of Disability4. A Phenomenology of Multiple SclerosisPart III. Ability5. Theories of Ability6. A Phenomenology of AbilityConclusion: An Anti-Ableist FutureAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.Liat Ben-Moshe provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom. Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.Trade Review"Decarcerating Disability is a groundbreaking feminist study of the affinities, interrelations, and contradictions between prison abolition and psychiatric deinstitutionalization. Emphasizing the need for a more expansive field of critical carceral studies, Liat Ben-Moshe compellingly demonstrates the important lessons we can discover through serious engagements with radical disability movements. Scholars and activists alike should read this book without delay!"—Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz"In Decarcerating Disability, Liat Ben-Moshe carefully and incisively models an intersectional approach to abolition grounded in feminist, queer, and crip of color critique. Moving beyond demands for inclusion and critiques of overrepresentation, Ben-Moshe makes a powerful and persuasive case for a disability studies that recognizes state violence as central to its work and the carceral industrial complex as a site for queer coalitions for racial and disability justice. In so doing, she paves the way for thinking not only disability and disability studies differently, but also liberation itself."—Alison Kafer, University of Texas at Austin"Decarcerating Disability is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and dismantling the interlocking systems of incarceration that shape the contemporary political landscape and shorten so many lives. Liat Ben-Moshe shows how the effectiveness of abolitionist work has been limited by the marginalization of disability and anti-sanism analysis and advocacy. She not only exposes how much contemporary abolitionists have to learn from historical struggles for deinstitutionalization, she also demonstrates a more truly intersectional method of abolitionist scholar-activism that we urgently need. This book is both a corrective intervention and a path-breaking tool for developing better strategy toward the world that those who seek liberation are fighting to build."—Dean Spade, Seattle University School of Law"Ben-Moshe outlines how people fought for a new paradigm in mental health treatment before. Beginning in the 1960s, widespread deinstitutionalization sparked by disability activists shut down asylums across the country. Many see this movement now as a failure because it led to more people with mental illness being herded into jails and prisons. But Ben-Moshe argues that this was a pivotal step in abolition by grassroots organizing."—Teen Vogue"Examining decarceration and deinstitutionalisation within the same frame is vitally important...the book challenges us to think about the range of carceral facilities that exist."—Race & Class"A groundbreaking connection between disability justice and prison abolition."—Public Books "Decarcerating Disability should be read not only by students and scholars of African-American studies, criminology, critical theory, gender studies, law, or sociology, nor only by policy makers, but by all who are concerned about disability, gender, or racial justice."—American Journal of Sociology "Each chapter of Decarcerating Disability serves as a fantastic example of the knowledges, perspectives, and genealogies that are made possible when disability and madness are the lenses through which a queer of color critique is engaged."—Disability Studies Quarterly"Decarcerating Disability is an impressive text that powerfully argues for robust coalitional politics to challenge the logic of incarceration. Entire syllabi and reading groups can be structured around this text as Ben-Moshe opens up much to consider, especially how to effectively demand carceral-free futures, while also valuing disability. "—Ethnic Studies Review"Decarcerating disability: Deinstitutionalization and prison abolition is abold and challenging critical intervention, which puts critical disability studies, deinstitutionalisation, decarceration, and abolition theory and scholarship into closer conversation with each other. In so doing, the book has pushed these fields forward in new and, interesting ways. The book’s strongest contribution is its attempt to transform, redefine, and reframe what disability studies is and can be about, its appeal to frame and address issues of incarceration and decarceration as disability and carceral abolition issues, and the generative groundwork laid for fostering coalitional, liberatory politics and ideas."—Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology"[A]n important book that offers both a sweeping genealogy of disability and itsentangled history with race and incarceration, and rallying cry for abolitionism."—Journal of Constructivist Psychology"Ben-Moshe offers a detailed history of institutionalization and incarceration primarily in the United States. In putting institutionalization and incarceration in conversation, Ben-Moshe offers a larger consideration around the systems that keep certain individuals enclosed and the implications of deinstitutionalization as a movement versus louder for total prison abolition. A major intervention of Ben-Moshe’s book is the different approaches to and opinions of institutions as opposed to prison systems across the United States."—Work in Critical and Cultural TheoryTable of ContentsContentsList of Abbreviations Introduction: The Case for Intersecting Disability, Imprisonment, and Deinstitutionalization1. The Perfect Storm: Origin Stories of Deinstitutionalization2. Abolition in Deinstitutionalization: Normalization and the Myth of Mental Illness 3. Abolition as Knowledge and Ways of Unknowing4. Why Prisons Are Not “the New Asylums”5. Resistance to Inclusion and Community Living: NIMBY, Desegregation, and Race-Ability6. Political and Affective Economies of Closing Carceral Enclosures7. Institutional and Prison Reform Litigation: From Politicization to the Governable Iron CageEpilogue: Abolition NowAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisDeveloping a cybernetic model of subjectivity and personhood that honors disability experiences to reconceptualize the category of the human Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood. Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rather than being walled off inside the body, moving beyond neuroscientific, symbolic, and materialist approaches to the self to focus instead on such concepts as animation, modularity, and facilitation. It does so through close readings of memoirs by individuals who lost their hearing or developed trauma-induced aphasia, as well as family members of people diagnosed as autistic—texts that rethink modes of subjectivity through experiences with communication, caregiving, and the demands of everyday life. Arguing for a radical antinormative bioethics, Unraveling shifts the discourse on neurological disorders from such value-laden concepts as “quality of life” to develop an inclusive model of personhood that honors disability experiences and reconceptualizes the category of the human in all of its social, technological, and environmental contexts.Trade Review"Unraveling is a work of cultural reimagination. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer knits together neurological, psychiatric, and neuroscientific theories about ‘the brain’ in this broad-based inquiry into ‘communicative disorders.’ He insists that the many possibilities and blocked channels of communication depend on the interdependency of subject, personhood, family, community, and polity. He joins leading scholars in disability studies and feminist theory, illuminating the thoroughly social nature of all embodied communication and thus its ethical and political reliance on making a world where differences are welcome."—Rayna Rapp, New York University"This is a book for our times—a deep dive into the problematics of personhood in relationship to the neurological. This book, alluringly readable, vigorously challenges our conceptions of what makes a human being human and advocates for an anti-neoliberal vision of complex selfhood that is not dependent on predictable norms. While this subject could lend itself to predictable advocacy, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer stays ahead of the reader's assumptions and provides a new and thoughtful way of conceiving big questions concerning the very definitions of life, thought, value, and ethics. A must read for anyone interested in neurodivergence and disability in general."—Lennard J. Davis, author of Obsession: A HistoryTable of ContentsContentsPreface: Blind-Man-and-WorldIntroduction: Let’s Build a New Nervous System1. Neurological Subjectivity: How Neuroscience Makes and Unmakes People through Neurological Disorder2. Symbolic Subjectivity: How Psychoanalysis and the Communication of Meaning Disable Individuals3. Materialist Subjectivity: How Technology and Material Environments Make Personhood Possible4. Cybernetic Subjectivity: The Fusion of Body, Symbol, and Environment in the Facilitated Person5. Facilitated Subjectivity, Affective Bioethics, and the Nervous SystemEpilogue: Living and Dying in the Nervous System AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisYoung adults with intellectual disability tell the story of their own experience of higher education How do students with intellectual disability experience higher education? Creating Our Own Lives addresses this question through the eyes of participants themselves. In relating their experiences and aspirations, these student perspectives mount a powerful challenge to assumptions that intellectual disability is best met with protection or segregation. Taken together, the essays expose and contradict the inherently ableist claim that individuals with intellectual disability cannot be reliable storytellers. Instead, their deeply informative stories serve as a corrective narrative. The first of the four sections, “Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in College,” focuses on belonging and inclusion; the second, “Opening Up Possibilities: Overcoming Doubt and Uncertainty,” conveys the optimism of this generation of advocates through stories of personal hardship, hopeful perseverance, and triumph over adversity; the third, “Inclusion as Action: Diversifying Student Experiences,” supports the understanding of diverse student experiences in inclusive higher education; and the fourth, “Supporting Growth: Peer Mentoring and Advice,” offers guidance to those reimagining and creating educational spaces. Students with disabilities belong in higher education. Not only does this book serve as an important record of students enrolled in inclusive higher education programs, it is also an unprecedented resource, packed with information and inspiration both for parents seeking opportunities for their children and for individuals with intellectual disability who aspire to attend college. Contributors: Makayla Adkins, Olivia Baist, Brandon Baldwin, George Barham, Marquavious Barnes, Katie Bartlett, Steven Brief, De'Onte Brown, Meghan Brozaitis, Mary Bryant, Gracie Carrol, Taylor Cathey, Maia Chamberlain, Antonio E. Contreras, Kim Dean, Elizabeth Droessler, Katie Ducett, Keiron Dyck, Rachel Gomez, Deriq Graves, Micah Gray, Maggie Guillaume, Cleo Hamilton, Nathan Heald, Joshua R. Hourigan, Hannah Lenae Humes, Courtney Jorgensen, Eilish Kelderman, Kailin Kelderman, Kenneth Kelty, Kaelan Knowles, Karlee Lambert, Kate Lisotta, Rachel Mast, Elise McDaniel, Emma Miller, Jake Miller, Lydia Newnum, Brenna Mantz Nielsen, Carly O’Connell, Nadia Osbey, Stirling Peebles, Breyan Pettaway, Amanda Pilkenton, True Rafferty, Taylor Ruppe, Lawrence Sapp, Tyler Shore, Brianna Silva, Alex Smith, Elliott Smith, Phillandra Smith, Payton Storms, Allen Thomas, Kylie Walter, Stephen Wanser, Sayid Webb, Breana Whittlesey, Luke Wilcox, Adam Wolfond. Trade Review "I like Creating Our Own Lives because people with disabilities talked about being in college and shared their stories in their own words. And they really shared their experiences, not just about how everything is great, but about how it is to be in college and what Syracuse is like for people with disabilities. Beth Myers and Michael Gill also shared, and that made the book great to read."—Tia Nelis, Director of Policy and Advocacy, TASH Table of Contents Contents Introduction: Recognizing Student Voice in Inclusive Higher Education Michael Gill and Beth Myers Part I. Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in College 1. I Want to Go to College Antonio E. Contreras 2. I Got In Taylor Ruppe 3. Adventures in Postsecondary Education Stirling Peebles 4. A Language to Open Adam Wolfond 5. “The Wanderer” and “This Is What I Sing” Steven Brief 6. My History of the Excel Program Alex Smith 7. Taking the Llama for a Walk and Other Things That Helped Us Olivia Baist and Kylie Walter Part II. Opening Up Possibilities: Overcoming Doubt and Uncertainty 8. Being Independent Has Risks: How to Recover When Something Terrible Happens Kailin Kelderman, Eilish Kelderman, and Mary Bryant 9. Spartan Kid: Journeys Brandon Baldwin 10. Best Experiences at IDEAL De’Onte Brown, Deriq Graves, Nadia Osbey, Breyan Pettaway, and Sayid Webb 11. Two Poems Carly O’Connell 12. Goal(s) in Common Hannah Lenae Humes 13. I Did What They Said I Couldn’t Allen Thomas 14. Climbing Higher and “From Mission Impossible to Mission Possible” Courtney Jorgensen 15. Inclusive College on Zoom? My Inclusive Higher Education 2020 Experience Stephen Wanser, Kate Lisotta, and Kim Dean 16. Inclusive College for All and How My Perception of My History Prof Changed Keiron Dyck 17. Qua’s GT Excel Life and “Never Give Up” Marquavious Barnes 18. Photo Essays and Selections from Student Leadership Conference 2019 Breana Whittlesey, Kaelan Knowles, Elise McDaniel, Kenneth Kelty, Katie Bartlett, and Rachel Mast Part III. Inclusion as Action: Diversifying Student Experiences 19. Hi, I’m Jake Miller Jake Miller and Katie Ducett 20. “BGWYN” and “Confidence with Curves” Taylor Cathey 21. Inclusive College Education Micah Gray, with Karlee Lambert and Lydia Newnum 22. My UC Perspective Joshua R. Hourigan 23. Phoenix Nation as in Spirit Cleo Hamilton 24. My Excel Story George Barham 25. #CreatingMyOwnLife Payton Storms 26. Inclusive College Education Makayla Adkins 27. My Story about Aggies Elevated at Utah State University Brenna Mantz Nielsen 28. Questions and Answers Lawrence Sapp 29. College Memories but Ready for What’s Next Amanda Pilkenton 30. Full Year of College Luke Wilcox 31. My Favorite Memories in College Elizabeth Droessler Part IV. Supporting Growth: Peer Mentoring and Support 32. Communicating Successfully in College Maia Chamberlain 33. True Rafferty Interviewed True Rafferty, with Nathan Heald 34. College Program Experience Gracie Carroll 35. Teaching, Assisting, Reflecting: Our Experience Working Together Phillandra Smith and Meghan Brozaitis 36. My Georgia Tech Excel Story Maggie Guillaume 37. Emma’s Journey Emma Miller 38. Come Read about My Awesome Journeys through Life Brianna Silva 39. My Social Experience throughout Georgia Tech Rachel Gomez 40. The Importance of Goals Tyler Shore 41. Support and Encouragement for the Ones Who Seek It Elliott Smith Coda: Why This Collection? Beth Myers and Michael Gill Acknowledgments Contributors

Read more less

Book SynopsisYoung adults with intellectual disability tell the story of their own experience of higher education How do students with intellectual disability experience higher education? Creating Our Own Lives addresses this question through the eyes of participants themselves. In relating their experiences and aspirations, these student perspectives mount a powerful challenge to assumptions that intellectual disability is best met with protection or segregation. Taken together, the essays expose and contradict the inherently ableist claim that individuals with intellectual disability cannot be reliable storytellers. Instead, their deeply informative stories serve as a corrective narrative. The first of the four sections, “Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in College,” focuses on belonging and inclusion; the second, “Opening Up Possibilities: Overcoming Doubt and Uncertainty,” conveys the optimism of this generation of advocates through stories of personal hardship, hopeful perseverance, and triumph over adversity; the third, “Inclusion as Action: Diversifying Student Experiences,” supports the understanding of diverse student experiences in inclusive higher education; and the fourth, “Supporting Growth: Peer Mentoring and Advice,” offers guidance to those reimagining and creating educational spaces. Students with disabilities belong in higher education. Not only does this book serve as an important record of students enrolled in inclusive higher education programs, it is also an unprecedented resource, packed with information and inspiration both for parents seeking opportunities for their children and for individuals with intellectual disability who aspire to attend college. Contributors: Makayla Adkins, Olivia Baist, Brandon Baldwin, George Barham, Marquavious Barnes, Katie Bartlett, Steven Brief, De'Onte Brown, Meghan Brozaitis, Mary Bryant, Gracie Carrol, Taylor Cathey, Maia Chamberlain, Antonio E. Contreras, Kim Dean, Elizabeth Droessler, Katie Ducett, Keiron Dyck, Rachel Gomez, Deriq Graves, Micah Gray, Maggie Guillaume, Cleo Hamilton, Nathan Heald, Joshua R. Hourigan, Hannah Lenae Humes, Courtney Jorgensen, Eilish Kelderman, Kailin Kelderman, Kenneth Kelty, Kaelan Knowles, Karlee Lambert, Kate Lisotta, Rachel Mast, Elise McDaniel, Emma Miller, Jake Miller, Lydia Newnum, Brenna Mantz Nielsen, Carly O’Connell, Nadia Osbey, Stirling Peebles, Breyan Pettaway, Amanda Pilkenton, True Rafferty, Taylor Ruppe, Lawrence Sapp, Tyler Shore, Brianna Silva, Alex Smith, Elliott Smith, Phillandra Smith, Payton Storms, Allen Thomas, Kylie Walter, Stephen Wanser, Sayid Webb, Breana Whittlesey, Luke Wilcox, Adam Wolfond. Trade Review "I like Creating Our Own Lives because people with disabilities talked about being in college and shared their stories in their own words. And they really shared their experiences, not just about how everything is great, but about how it is to be in college and what Syracuse is like for people with disabilities. Beth Myers and Michael Gill also shared, and that made the book great to read."—Tia Nelis, Director of Policy and Advocacy, TASH Table of Contents Contents Introduction: Recognizing Student Voice in Inclusive Higher Education Michael Gill and Beth Myers Part I. Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in College 1. I Want to Go to College Antonio E. Contreras 2. I Got In Taylor Ruppe 3. Adventures in Postsecondary Education Stirling Peebles 4. A Language to Open Adam Wolfond 5. “The Wanderer” and “This Is What I Sing” Steven Brief 6. My History of the Excel Program Alex Smith 7. Taking the Llama for a Walk and Other Things That Helped Us Olivia Baist and Kylie Walter Part II. Opening Up Possibilities: Overcoming Doubt and Uncertainty 8. Being Independent Has Risks: How to Recover When Something Terrible Happens Kailin Kelderman, Eilish Kelderman, and Mary Bryant 9. Spartan Kid: Journeys Brandon Baldwin 10. Best Experiences at IDEAL De’Onte Brown, Deriq Graves, Nadia Osbey, Breyan Pettaway, and Sayid Webb 11. Two Poems Carly O’Connell 12. Goal(s) in Common Hannah Lenae Humes 13. I Did What They Said I Couldn’t Allen Thomas 14. Climbing Higher and “From Mission Impossible to Mission Possible” Courtney Jorgensen 15. Inclusive College on Zoom? My Inclusive Higher Education 2020 Experience Stephen Wanser, Kate Lisotta, and Kim Dean 16. Inclusive College for All and How My Perception of My History Prof Changed Keiron Dyck 17. Qua’s GT Excel Life and “Never Give Up” Marquavious Barnes 18. Photo Essays and Selections from Student Leadership Conference 2019 Breana Whittlesey, Kaelan Knowles, Elise McDaniel, Kenneth Kelty, Katie Bartlett, and Rachel Mast Part III. Inclusion as Action: Diversifying Student Experiences 19. Hi, I’m Jake Miller Jake Miller and Katie Ducett 20. “BGWYN” and “Confidence with Curves” Taylor Cathey 21. Inclusive College Education Micah Gray, with Karlee Lambert and Lydia Newnum 22. My UC Perspective Joshua R. Hourigan 23. Phoenix Nation as in Spirit Cleo Hamilton 24. My Excel Story George Barham 25. #CreatingMyOwnLife Payton Storms 26. Inclusive College Education Makayla Adkins 27. My Story about Aggies Elevated at Utah State University Brenna Mantz Nielsen 28. Questions and Answers Lawrence Sapp 29. College Memories but Ready for What’s Next Amanda Pilkenton 30. Full Year of College Luke Wilcox 31. My Favorite Memories in College Elizabeth Droessler Part IV. Supporting Growth: Peer Mentoring and Support 32. Communicating Successfully in College Maia Chamberlain 33. True Rafferty Interviewed True Rafferty, with Nathan Heald 34. College Program Experience Gracie Carroll 35. Teaching, Assisting, Reflecting: Our Experience Working Together Phillandra Smith and Meghan Brozaitis 36. My Georgia Tech Excel Story Maggie Guillaume 37. Emma’s Journey Emma Miller 38. Come Read about My Awesome Journeys through Life Brianna Silva 39. My Social Experience throughout Georgia Tech Rachel Gomez 40. The Importance of Goals Tyler Shore 41. Support and Encouragement for the Ones Who Seek It Elliott Smith Coda: Why This Collection? Beth Myers and Michael Gill Acknowledgments Contributors

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn examination of the presumed opposition between the natural human body and artificial inanimate objectsProsthesis is a landmark work in posthuman thought that analyzes and explores the human body as a technology, seamlessly integrated (both physically and psychologically) with prosthetics. Here David Wills lays the groundwork for ideas he develops in two of his other books, Dorsality, exploring how technology functions behind or before the human, and Inanimation, giving perspective on what it means to be “alive.” In Prosthesis, Wills promotes the idea that the human body is open to supplementation by artificial addenda that operate both internally or externally and engage it in an unceasing arbitration with the environment. Questioning the opposition between animate and inanimate along with the logic of the automatic prioritization of living flesh, Prosthesis undertakes these assumptions by studying thematics of artificiality through the writings of Freud, Derrida, William Gibson, Peter Greenaway, and others. In the twenty-five years since its first publication, Prosthesis has been a point of reference in the field of disability studies. It has also been recognized for its “prosthetic” writing, consisting of academic and autobiographical voices and styles that are artificially attached to one another. Trade Review"Many of you, many of us know [David Wills's] work and, like me, have admired it for a long time. It is work that I not only admire, but to which I owe a great deal. . . . [Prosthesis] is in my estimation a great book, a magnificent book."—Jacques DerridaTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsOn David Wills and ProsthesisJacques DerridaPreface to 25th Anniversary Edition of Prosthesis1. Hamilton, 19702. Mentone, 18883. Africa, 21st Century4. Berchtesgaden, 19295. Paris, 19766. Rome, 19857. Cambridge, 15538. Menton, 19219. Geneva, 1978NotesBibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisModeling a disability culture perspective on performance practice toward socially just futures In Eco Soma, Petra Kuppers asks readers to be alert to their own embodied responses to art practice and to pay attention to themselves as active participants in a shared sociocultural world. Reading contemporary performance encounters and artful engagements, this book models a disability culture sensitivity to living in a shared world, oriented toward more socially just futures.Eco soma methods mix and merge realities on the edges of lived experience and site-specific performance. Kuppers invites us to become moths, sprout gills, listen to our heart’s drum, and take starships into crip time. And fantasy is central to these engagements: feeling/sensing monsters, catastrophes, golden lines, heartbeats, injured sharks, dotted salamanders, kissing mammoths, and more. Kuppers illuminates ecopoetic disability culture perspectives, contending that disabled people and their co-conspirators make art to live in a changing world, in contact with feminist, queer, trans, racialized, and Indigenous art projects. By offering new ways to think, frame, and feel “environments,” Kuppers focuses on art-based methods of envisioning change and argues that disability can offer imaginative ways toward living well and with agency in change, unrest, and challenge.Traditional somatics teach us how to fine-tune our introspective senses and to open up the world of our own bodies, while eco soma methods extend that attention toward the creative possibilities of the reach between self, others, and the land. Eco Soma proposes an art/life method of sensory tuning to the inside and the outside simultaneously, a method that allows for a wider opening toward ethical cohabitation with human and more-than-human others.Trade Review "Petra Kuppers breathes us through connections between embodiment and the earth, weaving queer studies and disability studies into self-guided explorations. Her imagistic text evokes dancing—the pull of gravity and the shifting perspectives of bodies in flow. She moves, she writes, we respond to her autobiographical narratives of environmental spaces and social places."—Anita Gonzalez, Georgetown University (cofounder of Georgetown University’s Racial Justice Institute) "There is absolutely nothing like Eco Soma in any field. Petra Kuppers provides a much-needed model for what interdisciplinary arts-based research can be, and her work is always put into the context of the lived reality of minoritized communities. She shows us how to write about bodies as she does—unflinchingly, while maintaining respect and dignity."—Carrie Sandahl, director, Program on Disability Art, Culture, and Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago "Petra Kuppers’s grounded and reflective investigation encourages generative dialogue within and beyond disability performance studies. Sharing many vivid examples drawn from diverse community scales and sites, her eco soma method both illuminates and prompts creative reimaginings of relations between self, land, other humans, and more-than-humans. Answering the urgent call for multidisciplinary work to address climate catastrophe, she reveals the profound power of art-based methods to engage the body, forge connection, and enact change."—Kirsty Johnston, University of British Columbia (located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people) "Kuppers's spectral disability approach makes this book an ideal companion for revising older canons and theories, through embodied encounters with activist community performance... The labour of reading this layered and performative text generates new research trajectories through realms of sense, affect, and relation."—Research in Drama Education "Kuppers animates the concepts of disability culture with unexplored ways of witnessing performances through uncertain being and identifying. The fundamental questions Kuppers gently invites the readers to explore about their own encounters and identifications with the human, nonhuman and fantastic worlds are especially important for a world grappling with the continued realities of a global pandemic, of reassessing one’s place and purpose, privileges and uncertainties."—Synapsis "Engaging with the intersection of the self and the environment in the wide array of well-chosen performances it analyses, Petra Kuppers’s Eco Soma substantially invites a rethinking of material enmeshments embodied in the self that is marked by various agencies—be they geographical, historical, or cultural."—Ecocene "Relevant and grounding."—Wordgathering "The text models a form of inquiry, inviting the reader to take a journey through the author’s collection of embodied performance witnessing and become aware of how one encounters the world through the discovery of involved witnessing."—Synapsis Journal "Eco Soma reads like a historical recipe for imagined futures, one that invites you to add a pinch of your favorite spice to make it smell of home and taste like possibility."—Research in Arts and Education "Kuppers’s book puts forward appropriate ways for diverse bodyminds to access the spaciousness as well as the peacefulness of being with nature, subsequently offering revolutionary ways of thinking about complex embodiment and issues of belonging and accessibility in cultural work."—Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies "Petra Kuppers moves in a refreshing worldscape of academic writing. In the introduction to Eco Soma, I am invited into her private space, her own study, her nest on the ground. From here, she takes me by the hand and guides me through stories and reflections from her personal and artistic life and practice as an academic, mover, facilitator and performance witness."—Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices Table of ContentsContentsPreface: From Ecosomatics to Eco Soma1. Social Somatics: Tentacular Methods on the Horizon2. Edges of Water and Land: Indigenous/Settler Eco Soma Collaborations3. Un/Bounding: Writing Water Worlds4. Crip Time, Rhythms, and Slow Rays: Speculative EmbodimentCoda: OraclesAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisRevealing inequalities and sensory hierarchies embedded in the latest medical technologies and global biotechnical marketsWhat happens when cochlear implants, heralded as the first successful bionic technologies, make their way around the globe and are provided by both states and growing private markets? As Sensory Futures follows these implants from development to domestication and their unequal distribution in India, Michele Ilana Friedner explores biotechnical intervention in the realm of disability and its implications for state politics in the Global South. A signing and speaking deaf bilateral cochlear implant user, Friedner weaves personal reflections into this fine-grained ethnography of everyday negotiations, activist aspirations, and the space of the family. She places sensory anthropology in conversation with disability studies to analyze how normative sensoria are cultivated and the pursuit of listening and speaking capability is enacted. She argues that the conditions of potentiality that have emerged through cochlear implantation have, in fact, resulted in ever narrower understandings of future life possibilities. Rejecting sensory hierarchies that privilege audition, Friedner calls for multisensory, multimodal, and multipersonal ways of relating to the world. Sensory Futures explores deaf people’s desires to create habitable worlds and grapple with what their futures might look like, in India and beyond, amid a surge in both biotechnical interventions and disability rights activism. With implications for a broad range of disability experiences, this sensitive, in-depth research focuses on the specific experiences of deaf people, both children and adults, and the structural, political, and social possibilities offered by both biotechnological and social “cures.”Trade Review"Michele Friedner’s book is a gem—I can’t think of anything else like it. Scaling from the pronunciation of 's' by a deaf American child who will someday become an ethnographer to Indian state partnerships with biotech corporations, we encounter many ways to be hearing and deaf. And we see this communicative abundance whittled away by repressive transnational infrastructures as well as local rules, tests, and disability bureaucracies. To my mind, Sensory Futures is the union of medical anthropology, STS, and disability studies at its finest."—Mara Mills, cofounder and codirector, NYU Center for Disability Studies"Sensory Futures compels us to question what it means to live with disability as an ongoing process of becoming. Michele Friedner excels at describing the everyday demands of disability and normality in India. Engaging, insightful, and careful, this extraordinary book spotlights the reshaping of state power and technological promise through the everyday intimacies of multisensory life."—Harris Solomon, author of Lifelines: The Traffic of TraumaTable of ContentsNote on Transliteration and AnonymizationIntroduction: Sensory, Modal, and Relational Narrowing through Cochlear Implants1. Disability Camps and Surgical Celebrations: Indian Disability Interventions and the Creation of Complex Dependencies2. Becoming Unisensory: Creating a Child’s Social Sense through Auditory Verbal Therapy and Total Communication3. Mothers’ Work: Intersensing and Learning to Talk like a Cricket Commentator4. (Non-)Use: Maintaining Devices, Relationships, and Senses5. Becoming Normal: Potentiality Beyond PassingConclusion: Beyond the Bad S: Making Space for Sensory UnrulinessAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Five Indian Cochlear Implant TrajectoriesNotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA radical critique of architecture that places disability at the heart of the built environment Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but The Architecture of Disability calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for “the construction of disability,” this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world. Stressing the connection between architectural form and the capacities of the human body, David Gissen demonstrates how disability haunts the history and practice of architecture. Examining various historic sites, landscape designs, and urban spaces, he deconstructs the prevailing functionalist approach to accommodating disabled people in architecture and instead asserts that physical capacity is essential to the conception of all designed space. By recontextualizing the history of architecture through the discourse of disability, The Architecture of Disability presents a unique challenge to current modes of architectural practice, theory, and education. Envisioning an architectural design that fully integrates disabled persons into its production, it advocates for looking beyond traditional notions of accessibility and shows how certain incapacities can offer us the means to positively reimagine the roots of architecture.Trade Review "This book is an urgent and exhilarating manifesto that calls for nothing less than a complete rethinking of architecture. Rather than insisting that architectural forms need to be adjusted to accommodate a greater diversity of impairments, it uses diversities of physical, mental, social, and collective capacities to unlock new ways to conceive of architecture, model it, design it, describe it, represent it, theorize it, and write histories about it. The fictional singular, athletic, male, young, healthy, undamaged, untraumatized, white body at the center of normative architectural discourse finally gives way to a permanently complex philosophical and political agency reshaping the way buildings are thought."—Beatriz Colomina, author of X-Ray Architecture "The Architecture of Disability takes a historically rich, theoretically informed route beyond disability access as a functional problem in architecture (and one often poorly resolved). Reading familiar sites such as the Parthenon alongside lesser-known landscapes of walking, rolling, and embodied presence, David Gissen centers disabled perspectives—including his own—to reveal new theoretical avenues to and poetic journeys through the built world."—Bess Williamson, author of Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design "By placing disability at the heart of the built environment, Gissen provides a radical critique of architecture while conceiving of a new way of experiencing disability."—Metropolis "This book builds on Gissen’s transformative contributions to the discipline with a combination of erudition and accessibility."—Constructs, Yale Architecture "Part manifesto and part memoir, Gissen’s book upends centuries’ worth of dogmatic thinking in architecture by inserting ‘impaired’ and ‘disabled’ bodies into focus, an overdue act, as they have been excluded by the Western canon with very few exceptions to date."—The Architect’s Newspaper "Gissen brings a nuanced critique of the design professions."—The Globe and Mail "It is rare to read a book that relates as deeply to the way you have both lived and thought for the length of your life as this one does for me—and even rarer that it helps you imagine the future of your own thought, too. . . In The Architecture of Disability, author, designer, and educator David Gissen manages to dismantle and reconstruct the world through the combined strength of his own experience and a critical perspective on the material world and its many under acknowledged histories."—Jordan Whitewood-Neal, Winterthur Portfolio "The Architecture of Disability is a poignant call to arms to address the omnipresence of ableism across a broad spectrum of environments."—Architectural Record "The Architecture of Disability uses the lens of disability to reevaluate received architectural histories and speculate on a more inclusive architectural environment, one divested from the inherited biases around function and form."—The New York Review of Architecture "Designers at all scales can take in this slim volume as a set of concepts for reinvigorating their work by productive defamiliarization. For practitioners, Gissen offers ways to see differently, to think differently, and therefore to practice differently."—Landscape Architecture Magazine "Gissen’s thoughtful engagement with theory and history alike clearly demonstrates deficits in the field, outlining how ableism bleeds into just about every practice and principle."—H-Net Reviews

Read more less

Book SynopsisA radical critique of architecture that places disability at the heart of the built environment Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but The Architecture of Disability calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for “the construction of disability,” this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world. Stressing the connection between architectural form and the capacities of the human body, David Gissen demonstrates how disability haunts the history and practice of architecture. Examining various historic sites, landscape designs, and urban spaces, he deconstructs the prevailing functionalist approach to accommodating disabled people in architecture and instead asserts that physical capacity is essential to the conception of all designed space. By recontextualizing the history of architecture through the discourse of disability, The Architecture of Disability presents a unique challenge to current modes of architectural practice, theory, and education. Envisioning an architectural design that fully integrates disabled persons into its production, it advocates for looking beyond traditional notions of accessibility and shows how certain incapacities can offer us the means to positively reimagine the roots of architecture.Trade Review "This book is an urgent and exhilarating manifesto that calls for nothing less than a complete rethinking of architecture. Rather than insisting that architectural forms need to be adjusted to accommodate a greater diversity of impairments, it uses diversities of physical, mental, social, and collective capacities to unlock new ways to conceive of architecture, model it, design it, describe it, represent it, theorize it, and write histories about it. The fictional singular, athletic, male, young, healthy, undamaged, untraumatized, white body at the center of normative architectural discourse finally gives way to a permanently complex philosophical and political agency reshaping the way buildings are thought."—Beatriz Colomina, author of X-Ray Architecture "The Architecture of Disability takes a historically rich, theoretically informed route beyond disability access as a functional problem in architecture (and one often poorly resolved). Reading familiar sites such as the Parthenon alongside lesser-known landscapes of walking, rolling, and embodied presence, David Gissen centers disabled perspectives—including his own—to reveal new theoretical avenues to and poetic journeys through the built world."—Bess Williamson, author of Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design "By placing disability at the heart of the built environment, Gissen provides a radical critique of architecture while conceiving of a new way of experiencing disability."—Metropolis "This book builds on Gissen’s transformative contributions to the discipline with a combination of erudition and accessibility."—Constructs, Yale Architecture "Part manifesto and part memoir, Gissen’s book upends centuries’ worth of dogmatic thinking in architecture by inserting ‘impaired’ and ‘disabled’ bodies into focus, an overdue act, as they have been excluded by the Western canon with very few exceptions to date."—The Architect’s Newspaper "Gissen brings a nuanced critique of the design professions."—The Globe and Mail "It is rare to read a book that relates as deeply to the way you have both lived and thought for the length of your life as this one does for me—and even rarer that it helps you imagine the future of your own thought, too. . . In The Architecture of Disability, author, designer, and educator David Gissen manages to dismantle and reconstruct the world through the combined strength of his own experience and a critical perspective on the material world and its many under acknowledged histories."—Jordan Whitewood-Neal, Winterthur Portfolio "The Architecture of Disability is a poignant call to arms to address the omnipresence of ableism across a broad spectrum of environments."—Architectural Record "The Architecture of Disability uses the lens of disability to reevaluate received architectural histories and speculate on a more inclusive architectural environment, one divested from the inherited biases around function and form."—The New York Review of Architecture "Designers at all scales can take in this slim volume as a set of concepts for reinvigorating their work by productive defamiliarization. For practitioners, Gissen offers ways to see differently, to think differently, and therefore to practice differently."—Landscape Architecture Magazine "Gissen’s thoughtful engagement with theory and history alike clearly demonstrates deficits in the field, outlining how ableism bleeds into just about every practice and principle."—H-Net Reviews

Read more less

Book SynopsisChampioning the liberatory potential of silence to address the fraught disability politics of queernessIn queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words.Queer Silence begins by historicizing silence’s negative reputation, beginning with the ways homophile activists rejected medical models pathologizing homosexuality as a disability, resulting in the silencing of disability itself. This silencing was redoubled by HIV/AIDS activism’s demand for “out, loud, and proud” rhetorical activities that saw silence as capitulation.Reading a range of cultural artifacts whose relative silence has failed to attract queer attachment, from anonymous profiles on Grindr to ex-gays to belated gender transitions to disability performance art, Smilges argues for silence’s critical role in serving the needs of queers who are never named as such. Queer Silence urges queer activists and queer studies scholars to reconcile with their own ableism by acknowledging the liberatory potential of silence, a mode of engagement that disattached queers use every day for resistance, sociality, and survival.Cover alt text: Background detail of a painting on canvas shows a partial view of the upper body and face of a figure, bearded and naked; title in painted script.Trade Review "J. Logan Smilges’s Queer Silence attends to that which remains unspoken or silenced in queer history. Through a series of brilliant rhetorical readings, Smilges critiques the silencing of disability that has been structural to queer theory. Simultaneously, this indispensable book points toward new ways of conceptualizing those who cannot or will not speak."—Robert McRuer, author of Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance "Queer Silence is a groundbreaking book that makes concerted interventions in the fields of queer studies, trans studies, disability studies, and contemporary rhetoric. Profound in its insights, incisive in its analysis, and gorgeous in its style, this book takes up cases of queer silences for analysis, attentively engaging the ruptures and omissions through which queerness, race, and disability co-emerge."—M. Remi Yergeau, author of Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness "This important study probes the nature and the ramifications of silence on differing aspects of queer culture."—Bay Area Reporter "Smilges takes the topic of Queer Silence and applies it broadly, describing not just the ways that queers are silenced, but what we do in that space, and how silencing does or doesn’t work, what it produces and what other ways we speak—and it ranges widely."—Xtra Magazine "Smilges first explores the history of many negative attitudes towards silence, then invites one to explore what people “whose bodyminds signify more than their words” convey through silence."—Lavender Magazine Table of ContentsIntroduction: Unspeakably Queer1. To Speak of Silence2. White Squares to Black Boxes3. Queer(crip) Masquerading4. Disidentifying Silence5. Neuroqueer IntimaciesEpilogue: Shameful Disattachments and Queer IllegibilityAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe 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.Table of ContentsPreface | ix Introduction: Why Food Allergies? | 1 1 Relational Food Allergy, Immunity, and Environments | 25 2 Nut-Free Squirrels and Princesses with Peanut Allergies: Food Allergies, Identity, and Children’s Books | 43 3 Allergic Reactions through Fluid Exchanges | 56 4 You Ate What? Intentionality, Accidents, and Death | 77 Conclusion: Pandemics and the Need for Coalitions | 97 Acknowledgments | 101 Notes | 103 Index | 123

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe 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.Table of ContentsPreface | ix Introduction: Why Food Allergies? | 1 1 Relational Food Allergy, Immunity, and Environments | 25 2 Nut-Free Squirrels and Princesses with Peanut Allergies: Food Allergies, Identity, and Children’s Books | 43 3 Allergic Reactions through Fluid Exchanges | 56 4 You Ate What? Intentionality, Accidents, and Death | 77 Conclusion: Pandemics and the Need for Coalitions | 97 Acknowledgments | 101 Notes | 103 Index | 123

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn introduction to the volume addresses the background and evolution of day services, national trends, and guiding principles for meaningful daytimes. Chapters discuss: transition from school to meaningful lives, how individuals have used their own initiative to create work and work alternatives, lifelong learning/adult education, promoting community relationships and connections, self-advocacy, promoting meaningful daytimes for older people, organizational issues (innovative organizational structures and practices, organizational conversion from facility-based to community-based services), and policy and practice in promoting quality daytime supports. Focus will be placed on examples, case studies, and practical strategies, themes of self-determination, cultural diversity, and collaboration.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book presents practical discussions of best practice techniques for job development along with reproducible forms for use in the field. The purpose of the book is to systematize the job development process by sharing replicable processes for transition-aged youth and adults with significant support needs and illustrating several urban and rural approaches to creative employment (including self-employment as an alternate strategy) that blend funding streams, utilize SSA Work Incentives, and capitalize on the hidden jobs in small neighborhood companies that are often overlooked in favor of large companies.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAccessible, engaging, and filled with contributions by the country's most celebrated disability experts, this fascinating volume skillfully captures how intellectual disability has been understood from prehistoric times to present. Readers will discover how different societies have responded to people with disability throughout history, how life has changed for people with intellectual disability and their families over the centuries, and how key historical figures and events sparked social change and shaped our modern understanding of intellectual disability. Enhanced with remarkable images and illustrations, including exclusive photos from the editor's private collection of cultural artifacts, this informal history is a must-read for anyone devoted to improving the lives of people with intellectual disability.Top Disability Experts Explore: Early ideas about the causes of intellectual disability Evolution of the concept of intellectual disability The role of religion in the ancient world's understanding of disability Changing approaches to education and intervention The rise and fall of the institution system Depictions of intellectual disability in film, literature, and art State-sanctioned sterilization programs in the twentieth century The self-advocacy movement The emergence and impact of parent associations, support groups, and training programs How and why terminology changed throughout the years and more

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less