Disability: social aspects Books

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Book SynopsisThis volume lays out the practical steps families can take to adjust to a loved one's hearing loss. The book shows how the exchange of information can be altered at fundamental levels, what these alterations entail, and how they can affect one's ability to understand and interpret spoken communication. Along with the hands-on tips provided throughout, this handbook considers the potential of cochlear implants, described both by audiologist Holden and Nickerson, who underwent one in 1985. This should be a useful resource for all families coping with a loved one's hearing loss.

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Book Synopsis"Now available in paperback; ISBN 1-56368-149-8"

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Book SynopsisHomesteader in Iowa, a 49er in the California Gold Rush, and editor of his town-s local paper, Edmund Booth epitomized the classic 19th-century pioneer, except for one difference - he was deaf.

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Book SynopsisAt last, Ruth Sidranksy's groundbreaking book "In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World" is back in print. Her account of growing up as the hearing daughter of deaf Jewish parents in the Bronx and Brooklyn during the 1930s and 1940s reveals the challenges deaf people faced during the Depression and afterward. Inside her family's apartment, Sidransky knew a warm, secure place. She recalls her earliest memories of seeing words fall from her parents' hands. She remembers her father entertaining the family endlessly with his stories, and her mother's story of tying a red ribbon to herself and her infant daughter to know when she needed anything in the night. Outside the apartment, the cacophonous hearing world greeted Sidransky's family with stark stares of curiosity as though they were "freaks." Always upbeat, her proud father still found it hard to earn a living. When Sidransky started school, she was placed in a class for special needs children until the prinicipal realized that she could hear and speak. Sidransky portrays her family with deep affection and honesty, and her frank account provides a living narrative of the Deaf experience in pre- and post-World War II America. "In Silence" has become an invaluable chronicle of a special time and place that will affect all who read it for years to come.

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Book SynopsisConventional wisdom dictates that individuals who learn American Sign Language (ASL) at a young age possess a higher level of proficiency than those who acquire ASL later, but Joseph Christopher Hall shows how diversity in the deaf community belies such generalization. Hall dissects affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to ASL, Signed English, and contact signing across variables of generation, race, and age of language acquisition to identify differing conceptions of a signing standard that, in turn, results in differing perceptions of language proficiency.

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Book SynopsisThe second volume in the Gallaudet Deaf Literature series showcases the work of Deaf writers from 1830 to 1930 during a critical formative period in their history. Excerpted works include autobiographies, travel narratives, romances, nonfiction, short stories, editorials, descriptive pieces, and other forms of prose. The evocative observations offered therein, many explicitly addressing deafness and sign language, reflect an urgency to record Deaf American life during a volatile and changing era in the nation's, and the world's, history. Using sensory details, dialogue, characterization, and narrative movement, the writers anthologized in this collection keenly illustrate the resilience of Deaf people in the face of direct and indirect threats to their way of life.

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Book SynopsisIn this classic bestseller, first published in 2000, Cynthia Peters uses the archetypal concept of the carnival as a framework to interpret the evolution of ASL literature. The Deaf literary canon, much like the carnival itself, represents the "counterculture of the dominated," and Peters shows how Deaf artists and ASL performers have used and continue to use their art as a means to traverse the barriers between disenfranchisement and privilege. Crossing these boundaries is not only a means of self-empowerment for the Deaf community, but a singular vehicle for raising the profile of ASL as its own distinct art form. Deaf American Literature: From Carnival to the Canon was and will continue to be a seminal text in the emerging discipline of ASL literary criticism.Trade Review"Documenting the evolution of ASL literature from 'oral' to 'literary' form, Cynthia Peters has produced a truly seminal work of tremendous value to a variety of readers outside the Deaf community itself: sociologists, linguists, and those in the comparative literature field." (Choice)"

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Book SynopsisMany Ways to Be Deaf circles the globe - from Asia and Russia to Europe and the United Kingdom, from Africa to South America to the United States - profiling the immense diversity of the world's Deaf communities. Special attention is paid not only to the historical and linguistic origins of each community's signed language, but to the ways each language has been influenced by the hearing population and foreign influences. Twenty-four international contributors of different cultural and scholastic backgrounds make this appraisal truly diverse and expansive in scope.Trade Review"In compiling the material for their work, the researchers may have inadvertently set the stage for a more general understanding of world cultures and for valuing diversity. If the Deaf communities of the world can value each other, perhaps we all can." (Choice)"

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Book SynopsisIncludes the cultural perceptions by and of deaf people, the assimilation of deaf children to surrounding communities, the role that society's view of deaf people plays in affecting how deaf people view themselves, the impact of bilingualism in deaf communities, and transliteration.

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Book SynopsisFamiliar sounds and shared songs are an integral part of how we build our identities and a sense of place. But for deaf individuals, this missing piece can create a feeling of distance, fueling a desire to seek out community in different ways. In this revolutionary new book, Jan-Kare Breivik profiles ten deaf Norwegians and their search for identity, providing an international perspective on the connectivity of deaf people worldwide.Trade Review"Presents a deep and penetrating exploration of forms of deaf identity in a most readable style. I particularly recommend the book for teachers, counselors, and even for parents of young deaf children." (Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education)"

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Book SynopsisSigns and Wonders traces the intertwining of Protestant religion and the development of the deaf community from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. Tracy Ann Morse draws on nineteenth-century speeches, sermons, and pamphlets; highlights the role of missionary movements in the spread of sign language; and shows how film and stage productions drew on religious themes in their portrayal of the deaf community and its struggles. The first book to take a serious look at the intersection of religion and the deaf community, Signs and Wonders breaks new ground and opens up new avenues for continuing study.

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Book SynopsisShared signing communities consist of a relatively high number of hereditarily deaf people living together with hearing people in relative isolation, one being the Akan village in Ghana called Adamorobe. Annelies Kusters traveled to Adamorobe to conduct an ethnographic study of both the deaf and hearing populations in the village. She reveals how deaf people in Adamorobe did not live in a social paradise but that they created their own "Deaf Space" by seeking each other out to form a society of their own.

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Book SynopsisThe 8th Deaf History International Conference featured 27 presentations from members of Deaf communities hailing from 12 different countries around the world who related their own autobiographies as well as the biographies of historical Deaf individuals. Thus, they created a transnational phenomenon of widespread interest in the collection, documentation, and dissemination of Deaf History by and for members of the deaf community. Telling Deaf Lives brings together the best of these stories.

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Book SynopsisSub-Saharan Africa is one of the most linguistically, culturally, and geographically diverse regions of the world. As in the rest of the world, deaf people live throughout sub-Saharan communities. This is a research on sub-Saharan signed languages and deaf community - organizing has created the opportunity to gather together the perspectives presented herein. Eighteen contributors illuminate the circumstances pertaining to cross-border, cross-regional, and global engagements in sub-Saharan deaf communities.

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Book SynopsisCaring for her disabled husband, Marion Cohen tells her story from the viewpoint of a Well SpouseTrade Review"Marion and her family have done a wonderful job of showing that there is life after innocence... And while each episode is a cry for help--a proof that 'one person, one family cannot do this alone'--it is also a testimony that no matter how late in the game help arrives, it will not be too late. Her message, then, to society is: mark us 'fragile' but don't leave us for dead." --Maggie Strong, Founder, Well Spouse Foundation and author of MainstayTable of ContentsForeword Marty Wyngaarden Krauss Preface 1. The Trike and the 49 Bus 2. Nights, Lifting, and Toilet: The First Conspiracy of Silence 3. Dire Straits 4. Scared 5. Too Many Variables: Relationships within the Household 6. A Separate Species: Relationships with the World and with Ourselves 7. Preparing for His Ghost: About Loss 8. Where Do We Stand? The Second Conspiracy of Silence Resources Photo Gallery

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Book SynopsisWhen Rod Michalko's sight finally became so limited that he no longer felt safe on busy city streets or traveling alone, he began a search for a guide. The Two-in-One is his account of how his search ended with Smokie, a guide dog, and a dramatically different sense of blindness. Few people who regularly encountered Michalko in his neighborhood shops and cafes realized that he was technically blind; like many people with physical disabilities, he had found ways of compensating for his impairment. Those who knew about his condition thought of him as a fully realized person who just happened to be blind. He thought so himself. Until Smokie changed all that. In this often moving, always compelling meditations on his relationship with Smokie, Michalko probes into what it means to be at home with blindness. Smokie makes no judgment about Michalko's lack of sight; it simply is the condition within which they work together. Their partnership thus allows Michalko to step outside of the conventional -- and even \u0022enlightened\u0022 -- understanding of blindness; he becomes not simply resigned to it but able to embrace it as an essential part of his being in the world. Drawing on his training as a sociologist and his experience as a disabled person, Michalko joins a still small circle of scholars who examine disability from the inside. More rare still -- and what will resonate with most readers -- is Michalko's remarkable portrayal of Smokie; avoiding sentimentality and pathos, it is a deeply affectionate yet restrained and nuanced appreciation of his behavior and personality. From their first meeting at the dog guide training school, Smokie springs to life in these pages as a highly competent, sure-footed, take-charge, full-speed-ahead, indispensable partner. \u0022Sighties\u0022 are always in awe watching them work; Michalko has even persuaded some of them that the Smokester can locate street addresses -- but has a little difficulty with the odd numbers! Readers of The Two-in-One can easily imagine Rod and Smokie sharing the joke as they continue on their way.Trade Review"The Two in One offers a fresh look at disability in western culture by reconsidering our traditional views about the human-animal bond. Along the way, Rod Michalko shows us how both he and guide dog Smokie learn to scan the far horizon." -Stephen Kuusisto, author of Planet of the Blind "This is a moving phenomenology of blindness, a provocative deconstruction of the culture/nature dichotomy, a telling analysis of the everyday construction of identity, and a compelling argument for the special 'insight' of marginality of various kinds." -Spencer E. Cahill, University of South Florida "Michalko, a sociologist, has written an insightful memoir of how, with the aid of his guide dog, Smokie, he came to fully inhabit his blindness. ...Michalko presents himself on many levels: the scientist considering the meanings of social behavior toward disability; the attentive pet-caretaker describing guide dog training and funny incidents that occur during his walks with Smokie; and finally, a down-to-earth intellectual who begins to forget-after decades of near-sightlessness-that he has a disability. He writes movingly about how, through his relationship with Smokie, he came to view blindness not just as a lack of sight but as something in itself, a condition with its own properties. In so doing, he invites us to rethink the very nature of disability." -Publishers Weekly "I would highly recommend this book, together with it's predecessor The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness (1998, University of Toronto Press), as exemplars of both politically engaged narrative writing and phenomenological accounts of disability." -Canadian Journal of Sociology OnlineTable of ContentsCONTENTS Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Search for a Guide Chapter 3 Is That One of Those Blind Dogs? Chapter 4 The Grace of Teaching Chapter 5 The Power of Reputation Chapter 6 Feel Free to Ask Chapter 7 The Two-In-One Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExploring issues of disability culture, activism, and policy across the African continent, this volume argues for the recognition of African disability studies as an important and emerging interdisciplinary field. While the disability rights movement of recent decades has a rich and well-documented history, it is a history mostly focused on the Global North. Disability in Africa presents an interdisciplinary approach to cultural, health, and policy challenges that disability issues have raised throughout the African continent. The volume draws on the achievements of disability studies while acknowledging the demands and challenges of particular African contexts. The authors bring diverse methodological approaches and expertise to bear on these issues, ranging from anthropology and bioethics to special education and community rehabilitation. Essays consider indigenously African definitions of disability as well as exploring disability at the intersection of poverty, geography, and globalized biopolitics. Contributors analyze the difficulties of implementing disability policy across the continent while also being mindful of successful approaches taken at local, national, and international levels. Disability in Africa thus charts new avenues for disability studies research in and about Africa.Trade ReviewI encourage the readers to take in multiple texts within this book. Listen to the multiplicities of voices and perspectives; prepare yourself to challenge mainstream notions of "the handicapped" as well as popular notions in the West about inclusion and disability. You'll learn about African cultural contexts and find perspectives here that you can use to support disabled people wherever you live. -- Against the CurrentThis book provides much-needed insight into African perspectives on disability and contributes toward calls for the transformation and decolonization of research and practice. -- H-Net ReviewsTable of ContentsPART ONE: INTRODUCING THE FIELD Africanizing Disability: Toward an Articulation of African Disability Studies -Toyin Falola and Nic Hamel Disability Studies: A Disciplinary Overview - Toyin Falola, Anna Lee Carothers, and Nic Hamel PART TWO: THEORIZING DISABILITY IN AFRICA An African Ethics of Social Well-Being: Understanding Disability and Public Health - Maria Berghs Rethinking African Disability Studies: From the Cultural-Deficit Model to a Socio-Economic Perspective - Fikru Negash Gebrekidan Disability in Africa: A Cultural/Religious Perspective - Mary Nyangweso Disability and Cultural Meaning Making in Africa Kathryn - Linn Guerts PART THREE: REPRESENTATION AND CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS Disfiguration, Trauma, and Disability: Reclaiming the Body and the Case against Prosthetics - Ernest Cole Paradoxical Dramaturgies: Disability, Ritual, and Resistance in the Plays of Wole Soyinka - Nic Hamel Demonizing Madness: Mental Disorders as Deus Ex Machina in Nollywood Movies - Kolawole Olaiya Masculinity, Disability, and Empire in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians - Saloua Ben Zahra PART FOUR: EDUCATION, COMMUNITY, AND CAREGIVING Addressing Poverty and Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Fostering Inclusive Education of Children with Disabilities - Serges Djoyou Kamga Inclusive Education and Cultural Relevance in East Africa - Angi Stone-MacDonald and Ozden H. Pinar-Irmak Youth, Women, and Disability in Africa: Economic Empowerment and Community Strategies to Leave No One Behind - Ntombekhaya Tshabalala, Elizabeth Ladner Babi Agbettor, and Theresa Lorenzo Caregiving and Support in African Context: A Personal Perspective Frances Emily Owusu-Ansah PART FIVE: ACTIVISM AND BARRIERS TO INCLUSION So that the Stew Reaches Everybody: Women's Negotiations of Leadership and Power in Ghana's DPO's - Denise M. Nepveux Disability Policy, Movement Activism, and the Non-Enforcement of a Disability Act: The Case of Ghana - Emmanuel Sackey Students with Disabilities' Lack of Opportunity for Sport and Recreational Activities: The Case of South African Universities - Desire Chiwandire Rehabilitation and the Realization of Disability Rights - Serges Djoyou Kamga Conclusion: A Research Agenda for African Disability Studies Anna Lee Carothers and Toyin Falola Notes on Contributors Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe true story of a Chicago gang member who was shot and paralyzed and became a world-class wheelchair athleteTrade Review"A compelling and richly sociological memoir. The incisive introduction and conclusion highlight how and why Melvin’s successes are not simply of his own making. Wheelchair Warrior provides the reader with an enlightening analysis of how history and society intersect with biography in Melvin’s life."—Kent Sandstrom, University of Northern IowaTable of ContentsIntroduction / Ronald J. BergerPart I Beginnings 1 Roots; 2 In the Company of Peers; 3 Gangs; 4 The ShootingPart II Transitions 5 Road to Recovery; 6 Breaking Away; 7 A Motley CrewPart III Resolutions 8 Fundamentally Sound; 9 Lost and Found; 10 The Best of All VictoriesConclusion / Ronald J. Berger

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Book SynopsisThis collection reflects on the development of disability studies in German-speaking Europe and brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on disability in German, Austrian, and Swiss history and culture. Ableism remains the most socially acceptable form of intolerance, with pejoratives referencing disability - and intellectual disability in particular - remaining largely unquestioned among many. Yet the understanding, depiction, and representation of disability is also clearly in a process of transformation. This volume analyzes that transformation, taking a close look at attitudes toward disability in historical and contemporary German-speaking contexts. The volume begins with an overview of the emergence and growth of disability studies in German-speaking Europe against the background of the field's emergence a decade or so earlier in the US and UK. The differences in timing, methodology, and research concentrations bring into focus how each cultural context has shaped the field of disability studies in its multiple and diverse approaches. Building on recent scholarship that uses a cultural studies approach, the volume's three sections analyze constructs of disability and ability in history, memory, and culture. The essays in the history section examine how the emotions, morality, and power have played into - and still do play into - the individual's experience of disability. Those in the memory section grapple with the origins of the Nazi persecution of people with disabilities, the fight for recognition of this genocide, and the politics of its commemoration. Finally, the culture section offers close readings of disability in literary and filmic texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Disability Studies in German-Speaking Europe, an Introduction Linda Leskau, Tanja Nusser, and Katherine Sorrels Part 1: Negotiating Interpersonal Relationships: Historical Perspectives 1: Inclusion, Emotion, and Disability Markus Dederich and Katherine Sorrels 2: "Moral Madness": Representations of Prodigality, Disability, and Competence in German Legal History Ashley L. Elrod 3: Deafness and "Disfigurement" as Relational Disorders: Aron Ronald Bodenheimer's Psychotherapy at the Zurich School for the Deaf during the 1960s Marion Schmidt Part 2: Reckoning with the Past: Reconstruction of Memory 4: The Romance of the Institution: Educational Optimism and the Confinement of the "Feeble-Minded" in Modern Germany Warren Rosenblum 5: From the Disability Murders Archive: Ernst Klee's Confrontation of the Public with Nazism's First Genocide Dagmar Herzog 6: Disability in Nazi Germany: Memory of "Euthanasia" Crimes and Commemoration of Their Victims Lutz Kaelber Part 3: Intersections and Diversity: The Lens of Culture 7: A Crip Chronotope: Time, Disability, and Heimat in Else Lasker-Schüler's Die Wupper Caroline Weist 8: Disability in the Narrative and Dramatic Work of Thomas Bernhard Linda Leskau 9: Freaks, Capriccios, Monstrosities: Ulrike Ottinger's Freak Orlando: Kleines Welttheater in fünf Episoden Tanja Nusser 10: Disability as Opportunity in Alissa Walser's Novel about the Blind Maria Theresia Paradis Waltraud Maierhofer Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisIn this groundbreaking book, Jill Harshaw explores the spiritual experiences of people with profound intellectual disabilities with regard to their capacity to enjoy life-giving spiritual experiences in their own right. The author expertly argues that our thinking of spiritual life needs to start not with our assumptions about people who are unable to speak for themselves, but with what we can know about God. Stimulating a much-needed discussion, this book explains why we need to respect individuals with profound intellectual disabilities as spiritual persons, and stop seeing them simply as care-receivers or uncomfortable reminders of human vulnerability. Calling for a more critical approach in practical theology, this book invites a deeper, genuinely inter-disciplinary dialogue between new and traditional theological fields, and asks why, after more than 30 years of intellectual disability theology, the impact on church life remains minimal so that debates around the right to basic inclusion continue to dominate. The questions raised in this book not only move the discussion forward, but will spark a change on how the Church approaches inclusiveness.Trade ReviewGod Without Words probes deeply into the methodological and theological obstacles to understanding the spiritual experience of people with profound intellectual disability to discover we have to ask even more primordial questions about how God reveals Godself at all. The result is a wide-ranging scriptural, philosophical, and theological inquiry into the God who would be perceived by human flesh despite the limitations of cognition. What was intended as an intervention in the arena of intellectual disability has ripple effects in Christian theology as a whole. -- Amos Yong, professor of theology & mission, Fuller Theological Seminary, and author of Theology & Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (2007)God Beyond Words has significance for and beyond studies in theology and various experiences of disability. Jill Harshaw provides new insights into the spiritual lives of people with intellectual disabilities and she challenges us more broadly to rethink how diverse spiritualities can be researched. This is a very important book that should be read as widely as possible. -- Dr Wayne Morris, Associate Dean, Faculty of Humanities, Head of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Chester, author, Theology without Words, co-author, Making a World of DifferenceJill Harshaw offers a stimulating book which will interest all people who accompany others in their experience of faith as growth in trust, as well as emergent belief. It will appeal beyond those already familiar with disability theology among Christians and others. -- Anthony Kramers * Health and Social Care Chaplaincy *This challenging and potentially life-changing book is both a tribute to what Harshaw's daughter has taught her, and testimony to the power of theology to illumine the lives and lighten the load for those whose duty of care can also be, by God's grace, a positive joy. -- The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee, former Bishop of Lincoln * Church Times *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements. Introduction. 1. A Brief Contextual Survey of Disability in Society and Theology. 2. The Role of Qualitative Research in Intellectual Disability Theology. 3. Issues of Theological Language. 4. Theological Objections and Possibilities. 5. Arguments from Scripture. 6. The Mystical Experience of God. 7. Conclusion. Bibliography.

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