Description
Book SynopsisDisabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists demonstrate that disabled people can change their social status by transforming the political and legal discourse surrounding disablement.
Employing tools from the fields of law and history, this original contribution explores how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a variety of contexts, including within the labour market, the workers' compensation system, the immigration process, and the legal system (both as litigants and as lawyers). It deepens our knowledge of the role of people with disabilities within social movements in disability history. The contributors encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to effect positive societal change.
Trade ReviewDisabled Barriers is an intricate and thorough analysis of the interaction between labour histories and disability rights. The collection introduces a focus that has been largely ignored in the literature but would be quite valuable to researchers of labour and disability studies.
-- Sara Klein, Research and Learning Services Librarian, University of Calgary * Canadian Law Library Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 *
Table of ContentsForeword / Bryan D. Palmer
Introduction: Bringing History and Law to Disability Studies / Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt
Part 1: Historical Debates on Work and Disability
1 Bearing the Marks of Capital: Solidarities and Fractures in E.T. Kingsley’s British Columbia / Mark Leier
2 Employers, Disabled Workers, and the War on Attitudes in Late Twentieth-Century Canada / Dustin Galer
3 Gender and the Value of Work in Canadian Disability History / Geoffrey Reaume
Part 2: Debates in Disability Studies
4 Dancing with a Cane: The Public Perception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Disability / Anne Finger
5 Disability in Motion: Aesthetics, Embodiment, Sensation, and the Emergence of Modern Vestibular Science in the Nineteenth Century / Mark Walters
6 “Of Dark Type and Poor Physique”: Law, Immigration Restriction, and Disability in Canada, 1900–30 / Jen Rinaldi and Jay Dolmage
Part 3: Legal Debates
7 Battling the Warrior-Litigator: An Exploration of Chronic Illness and Employment Discrimination Paradigms / Odelia R. Bay
8 Towards Full Inclusion: Addressing the Issue of Income Inequality for People with Disabilities in Canada / Megan A. Rusciano
9 Compensating Work-Related Disability: The Theory, Politics, and History of the Commodification-Decommodification Dialectic / Eric Tucker
Index
