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.

Disability impacts everyone in some way. Approximately 10-20% of the world’s population live with disability, and the associated issues affect not just these individuals but also their friends, family, and colleagues. When looking at it this way, it is strange that disability continues to be thought of as an anomaly—either as a medical problem located in a damaged body or something that exists exclusively outside the body, in a society that takes little account of non-normative bodies. Critical disability studies both questions these existing notions of disability and interrogates how they have become a part of the academic attitude towards the field. As the first comprehensive handbook on critical disability studies, this volume provides an authoritative overview of the subject. Including 32 chapters written by established scholars and emerging, next-generation researchers it also includes contributions from activists, writers, and practitioners from the global north and the global south. Divided into three parts: Representation, art, and culture; Media, technology, and communication; and Activism and the life course, it offers discussions on core critical disability studies topics including the social model, technology studies, trauma studies, representation, and queer theory, as well as ground-breaking work on emerging and cutting-edge areas such as neurodiversity and critical approaches in the Middle East, United States, Australia, and Europe. It is required reading for all academics and students working in not just critical disability studies but sociology, digital accessibility and inclusion, health and social care, and social and public policy more broadly.

Focusing on the case of disability, this book examines what happens when previously marginalised individuals obtain the legal recognition of their equal citizenship rights but cannot fully enjoy these rights because of structural inequality. Bringing together disability and citizenship studies, it explores an original conceptualisation of disability as a distinct social division and approaches citizenship as a developing institution. In addition to providing innovative theoretical perspectives on citizenship and disability, this book is grounded in the empirical analysis of the claims of disability activists in Sweden. Drawing on a wide range of blog posts and debate articles, it sheds light upon the inequality and domination faced by disabled people in Sweden and underlines the disability activists’ proactive ideas and solutions for constructing a more equal citizenship. This book will be of interest to scholars, activists and policymakers in the fields of disability, citizenship, social inequality, human rights, politics, activism, social welfare and sociology.

This handbook offers a contemporary and comprehensive review of critical research theory and methodology. Showcasing the work of contemporary critical researchers who are harnessing and building on a variety of methodological tools, this volume extends beyond qualitative methodology to also include critical quantitative and mixed-methods approaches to research. The critical scholars contributing to this volume are influenced by a diverse range of education disciplines, and represent multiple countries and methodological backgrounds, making the handbook an essential resource for anyone doing critical scholarship. The book moves from the theoretical to the specific, examining various paradigms for engaging in critical scholarship, various methodologies for doing critical research, and the political, ethical, and practical issues that arise when working as a critical scholar. In addition to mapping the field, contributions synthesize literature, offer concrete examples, and explore relevant contexts, histories, assumptions, and current practices, ultimately fostering generative thinking that contributes to future methodological and theoretical breakthroughs. New as well as seasoned critical scholars will find within these pages exciting new ideas, challenging questions, and insights that spur the continuous evolution and grow the influence of critical research methods and theories in the education and human disciplines.

The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader’s tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.

To solve the global challenges of the present society, contemporary scholarship requires that all diverse social groups are included in knowledge production through education. Professionalisation is one way in which diverse social groups can engage in knowledge production in higher education. While all kinds of professionalisation produce citizens who can contribute to the social, political and economic development, the teaching profession is foundational as most people have come through the hands of teachers from basic to higher education. Teaching has been referred to as the noblest of professions because it does not only require acquisition of knowledge and skills, but high levels of professionalism, dignity, honour and the ability to lead by example. While inclusion of all diverse social groups is topical after attainment of independence in African countries largely and in South Africa particularly, professionalisation of students with disabilities into the teaching profession and in settings for integrated learning, has received little attention from scholars in the disability field. Professionalisation of Students with Disabilities into the Teaching Profession in South African Higher Education critically reflects on what affordances and challenges face students with disabilities in professionalisation into the teaching professions and on how students are socialised to identify with the profession. It does so from the lived experiences of students with disabilities, the academics who teach them, the support staff and the author’s nuanced understanding of the professionalisation, the teaching profession, and transformation to include all in the South African context of higher education.

Foucault and the Government of Disability is the first book-length investigation of the relevance and importance of the ideas of Michel Foucault to the field of disability studies-and vice versa. Over the last thirty years, politicized conceptions of disability have precipitated significant social change, including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the redesign of urban landscapes, the appearance of closed-captioning on televisions, and the growing recognition that disabled people constitute a marginalized and disenfranchised constituency. The provocative essays in this volume respond to Foucault's call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating, while they challenge established understandings of Foucault's analyses and offer fresh approaches to his work. The book's roster of distinguished international contributors represents a broad range of disciplines and perspectives, making this a timely and necessary addition to the burgeoning field of disability studies.

Disability—as with other marginalized topics in social policy—is at risk for exclusion from social debate. This multivolume reference work provides an overview of challenges and opportunities for people with disabilities and their families at all stages of life. Once primarily thought of as a medical issue, disability is now more widely recognized as a critical issue of identity, personhood, and social justice. By discussing challenges confronting people with disabilities and their families and by collecting numerous accounts of disability experiences, this volume firmly situates disability within broader social movements, policy, and areas of marginalization, providing a critical examination into the lived experiences of people with disabilities and how disability can affect identity. A foundational introduction to disability for a wide audience—from those intimately connected with a person with a disability to those interested in the science behind disability—this collection covers all aspects of disability critical to understanding disability in the United States. Topics covered include characteristics of disability; disability concepts, models, and theories; important historical developments and milestones for people with disabilities; prominent individuals, organizations, and agencies; notable policies and services; and intersections of disability policy with other policy.

What if disability isn′t a problem but a resource? This updated edition of a classic text in the field of disability studies interrogates the commonly held view that disability is something that needs to be ′cured′ or ′eradicated′. It shows us how disability can challenge our thinking and help us to imagine a more socially just society, offering an engaging introduction to a diverse and globally expanding subject. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this text will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers across the social sciences. Making the case that disability is much more than just impairment, this book uncovers the ways in which disabled people are challenging discrimination and marginalisation. Ranging across topics such as health, activism and education, this book asks questions about the ways in which society tends to understand disability and offers alternative explanations that are more exciting, radical and transformative.

Which theoretical and methodological approaches of contemporary cultural criticism resonate within the field of disability studies? What can cultural studies gain by incorporating disability more fully into its toolbox for critical analysis? Culture - Theory - Disability features contributions by leading international cultural disability studies scholars which are complemented with a diverse range of responses from across the humanities spectrum. This essential volume encourages the problematization of disability in connection with critical theories of literary and cultural representation, aesthetics, politics, science and technology, sociology, and philosophy. It includes essays by Lennard J. Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Dan Goodley, Robert McRuer and Margrit Shildrick.