Critical Readings In Interdisciplinary Disability Studies

This edited volume includes chapters on disability studies organized around three themes: Theory, Philosophy and Critique. Informed by a range of scholars who may or may not fashion their work beneath the banner of disability studies in explicit terms, it draws connections across a range of identities, knowledges, histories, and struggles that may, on the face of the text seem unrelated. The chapters are cross-categorical and interdisciplinary for purposes of complicating disability studies across international contexts and multiple locations that consider practice-oriented and intersectional approaches for analysis and advocacy. This integrative approach heralds more powerful ways to imagine disability and the conversation on disability.

This collection identifies the key tensions and conflicts being debated within the field of critical disability studies and provides both an outline of the field in its current form and offers manifestos for its future direction. Traversing a number of disciplines from science and technology studies to maternal studies, the collection offers a transdisciplinary vision for the future of critical disability studies. Some common thematic concerns emerge across the book such as digital futures, the usefulness of anger, creativity, family as disability allies, intersectionality, ethics, eugenics, accessibility and interdisciplinarity. However, the contributors who write as either disabled people or allies do not proceed from a singular approach to disability, often reflecting different or even opposing positions on these issues. Containing contributions from established and new voices in disability studies outlining their own manifesto for the future of the field, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students working within the fields of disability studies, cultural studies, sociology, law, history and education. The concerns introduced here are further explored in its sister volume Interdisciplinary approaches to disability: looking towards the future.

Passionate, engaging and challenging, this second edition of the ground-breaking Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction is a contemporary introduction to this diverse and complex field. Taking an interdisciplinary and critical approach, the book: examines a diverse range of theories and perspectives and engages with current debates in the field explores key areas of analysis, with chapters devoted to the individual, society, community and education applies a global perspective encompassing examples from the UK, Australia, Scandinavia, the US, and Canada. Encouraging and stimulating readers using thought-provoking questions, exercises and activities, Disability Studies is a rich and rewarding read for students and researchers engaging with disability across the social sciences.

How can a deep engagement with disability studies change our understanding of sociology, literary studies, gender studies, aesthetics, bioethics, social work, law, education, or history? Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability (the companion volume to Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies) identifies both the practical and theoretical implications of such an interdisciplinary dialogue and challenges people in disability studies as well as other disciplinary fields to critically reflect on their professional praxis in terms of theory, practice, and methods. Topics covered include interdisciplinary outlooks ranging from media studies, games studies, education, performance, history and curation through to theology and immunology. Perspectives are drawn from different regions from the European Union to the Global South with chapters that draw on a range of different national backgrounds. Our contributors who write as either disabled people or allies do not proceed from a singular approach to disability, often reflecting different or even opposing positions. The collection features contributions from both established and new voices in international disability studies outlining their own visions for the future of the field. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability will be of interest to all scholars and students working within the fields of disability studies, cultural studies, sociology, law history and education. The concerns raised here are further in Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies.

As a field of inquiry, disability studies in education stands at the broad intersection of disability studies and educational studies. This book introduces graduate students, educational researchers, and teacher educators to the range of scholarly inquiry emerging from this exciting new field. Susan L. Gabel pulls together a sampling of the vast array of available scholarship that includes readings that intersect curriculum theory, critical policy analysis, personal narrative, and much more. Although disability studies in education has only recently been recognized as a field of inquiry with an identifiable body of literature, the chapters in this book present the work of some of the major scholars of disability studies in education.

This book examines the relationship between contemporary cultural representations of disabled children on the one hand, and disability as a personal experience of internalised oppression on the other. In focalising this debate through an exploration of the politically and emotionally charged figure of the disabled child, Harriet Cooper raises questions both about what it means to ‘speak for’ the other and about what resistance means when one is unknowingly invested in one’s own abjection. Drawing on both the author’s personal experience of growing up with a physical impairment and on a range of critical theories and cultural objects – from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden to Judith Butler’s work on injurious speech – the book theorises the making of disabled and ‘rehabilitated’ subjectivities. With a conceptual framework informed by both psychoanalysis and critical disability studies, it investigates the ways in which cultural anxieties about disability come to be embodied and lived by the disabled child. Posing new questions for disability studies and for identity politics about the relationships between lived experiences, cultural representations and dominant discourses – and demonstrating a new approach to the concept of ‘internalised oppression’ – this book will be of interest to scholars and students of disability studies, medical humanities, sociology and psychosocial studies, as well as to those with an interest in identity politics more generally.

Despite the widespread belief that Canada is a country of liberty, equality, and inclusiveness, many persons with disabilities experience social exclusion and marginalization. In this book, twenty-four scholars from a variety of disciplines contend that achieving equality for the disabled is not fundamentally a question of medicine or health, nor is it an issue of sensitivity or compassion. Rather, it is a question of politics, and of power and powerlessness. This book argues that we need a new understanding of participatory citizenship that encompasses the disabled, new policies to respond to their needs, and a new vision of their entitlements.

Over the last few decades disability studies has emerged not only as a discipline in itself but also as a catalyst for cultural disability studies and Disability Studies in Education. In this book the three areas become united in a new field that recognises education as a discourse between tutors and students who explore representations of disability on the levels of everything from academic disciplines and knowledge to language and theory; from received understandings and social attitudes to narrative and characterisation. Moving from late nineteenth to early twenty-first-century representations, this book combines disability studies with aesthetics, film studies, Holocaust studies, gender studies, happiness studies, popular music studies, humour studies, and media studies. In so doing it encourages discussion around representations of disability in drama, novels, films, autobiography, short stories, music videos, sitcoms, and advertising campaigns. Discussions are underpinned by the tripartite model of disability and so disrupt one-dimensional representations. Cultural Disability Studies in Education encourages educators and students to engage with disability as an isolating, hurtful, and joyful experience that merits multiple levels of representation and offers true potential for a non-normative social aesthetic. It will be required reading for all scholars and students of disability studies, cultural disability studies, Disability Studies in Education, sociology, and cultural studies.