Know Me For My Ability Not My Disability

One summer, best friends, Jack and George, decided to go to summer camp together. Little did they know that their parents would send them to a camp built on the idea of having an inclusive environment for all people. Their plans of spending time together take a turn when they are placed in separate groups. On their adventure, however, they encounter new friends with a wide range of different abilities. Through the eyes of the children in the camp with special needs such as spina bifida, Down syndrome, and autism, Jack and George get to see how our differences are not what define us. Rather, the boys learn a valuable lesson. They realize that it's important to know each other’s abilities and not focus on our disabilities. Jack and George learn through their new friends that our differences truly are what make each and every one of us beautifully unique.

One summer, best friends, Jack and George, decided to go to summer camp together. Little did they know that their parents would send them to a camp built on the idea of having an inclusive environment for all people. Their plans of spending time together take a turn when they are placed in separate groups. On their adventure, however, they encounter new friends with a wide range of different abilities. Through the eyes of the children in the camp with special needs such as spina bifida, Down syndrome, and autism, Jack and George get to see how our differences are not what define us. Rather, the boys learn a valuable lesson. They realize that it's important to know each other's abilities and not focus on our disabilities. Jack and George learn through their new friends that our differences truly are what make each and every one of us beautifully unique.

This "intense reading experience"* is a Printz Honor Book. Shawn McDaniel's life is not what it may seem to anyone looking at him. He is glued to his wheelchair, unable to voluntarily move a muscle—he can't even move his eyes. For all Shawn's father knows, his son may be suffering. Shawn may want a release. And as long as he is unable to communicate his true feelings to his father, Shawn's life is in danger. To the world, Shawn's senses seem dead. Within these pages, however, we meet a side of him that no one else has seen—a spirit that is rich beyond imagining, breathing life. *Booklist starred review

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year for Nonfiction "...an essential and engaging look at recent disability history."— Buzzfeed One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human. A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn’t built for all of us and of one woman’s activism—from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington—Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann’s lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society. Paralyzed from polio at eighteen months, Judy’s struggle for equality began early in life. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a “fire hazard” to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license because of her paralysis, Judy’s actions set a precedent that fundamentally improved rights for disabled people. As a young woman, Judy rolled her wheelchair through the doors of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco as a leader of the Section 504 Sit-In, the longest takeover of a governmental building in US history. Working with a community of over 150 disabled activists and allies, Judy successfully pressured the Carter administration to implement protections for disabled peoples’ rights, sparking a national movement and leading to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Candid, intimate, and irreverent, Judy Heumann’s memoir about resistance to exclusion invites readers to imagine and make real a world in which we all belong.

Die in diesem Buch versammelten Texte sind die Ergebnisse des dialogisch angelegten und vom Deutschen Akademischen Austauschdienst (DAAD) von 2017-2019 geförderten Projekts „Dialogues on Disability and Inclusion between Isfahan and Hamburg“. Gleichzeitig sind die Texte aber auch das Ergebnis eines Schreibexperiments: über alle universitären Hierarchien, fachlichen und sprachlichen Hindernisse hinweg haben Projektmitglieder aus den verschiedenen Fakultäten der Isfahan University of Medical Sciences und Projektmitglieder aus dem Institut für Behindertenpädagogik der Universität Hamburg Autor*innentandems gebildet und gemeinsam Texte in Deutsch, Englisch und Farsi zur Arbeit von NGOs von und für Menschen mit Behinderungen, Gesundheits- und Rehabilitationszentren, Schulen und Universitäten, aber auch zur Umsetzung der UN-BRK in Isfahan, Hamburg und den ländlichen Regionen der beiden Städte sowie zur Reflexion allgemein gebräuchlicher Begriffe für „Behinderung“ im Deutschen und Farsi geschrieben. So geben die Beiträge nicht nur Einblicke in die Umsetzung, Kämpfe und Debatten um Inklusion und Behinderung in den beiden Städten, sondern auch in die Bandbreite der unterschiedlichen individuellen wie fachlichen Wahrnehmungen und Perspektiven auf Inklusion und Behinderung der Autor*innen.

Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.

Anything is possible when you believe and do not give up on yourself. Everyone faces challenges in life while pursuing their own goals. It is how a person faces those challenges that gives a person character. Not letting negativity get in the way and having a positive attitude was the recipe of Dave Copeland’s success.