The Fourth Edition of the Disability Studies Reader breaks new ground by emphasizing the global, transgender, homonational, and posthuman conceptions of disability. Including physical disabilities, but exploring issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities, this edition explores more varieties of bodily and mental experience. New histories of the legal, social, and cultural give a broader picture of disability than ever before. Now available for the first time in eBook format 978-0-203-07788-7.

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.

This path-breaking international handbook of disability studies signals the emergence of a vital new area of scholarship, social policy and activism. Drawing on the insights of disability scholars around the world and the creative advice of an international editorial board, the book engages the reader in the critical issues and debates framing disability studies and places them in an historical and cultural context. Five years in the making, this one volume summarizes the ongoing discourse ranging across continents and traditional academic disciplines. To provide insight and perspective, the volume is divided into three sections: The shaping of disability studies as a field; experiencing disability; and, disability in context. Each section, written by world class figures, consists of original chapters designed to map the field and explore the key conceptual, theoretical, methodological, practice and policy issues that constitute the field. Each chapter provides a critical review of an area, positions and literature and an agenda for future research and practice. The handbook answers the need expressed by the disability community for a thought provoking, interdisciplinary, international examination of the vibrant field of disability studies. The book will be of interest to disabled people, scholars, policy makers and activists alike. The book aims to define the existing field, stimulate future debate, encourage respectful discourse between different interest groups and move the field a step forward.

This collection brings together scholarship and creative writing that brings together two of the most innovative fields to emerge from critical and cultural studies in the past few decades: Disability studies and performance studies. It draws on writings about such media as live performance art, photography, silent film, dance, personal narrative and theatre, using such diverse perspectives and methods as queer theory, gender, feminist, and masculinity studies, dance studies, as well as providing first publication of creative writings by award-winning poets and playwrights. This book was based on a special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly.

A collection of eight essays by scholars who have published extensively within the disability studies literature, and who have helped build the field to its current state. Includes contributions from Robert Bogdan, Doug Biklen, Susan Schweik, and more.

This unique interdisciplinary book uses a fresh approach to explore issues of disability in the Hebrew Bible. It examines how disability functions in the David Story (1 Samuel 16; 1 Kings 2) by paying special attention to Mephibosheth, the only biblical character with a disability as a sustained character trait. The David Story contains some of the Bible's most striking images of disability. Nonetheless, interpreters tend to focus on legal material rather than narratives when studying disability in the Hebrew Bible. Often, they neglect the David Story's complex use of disability. They overlook its use of disability imagery as open to critical interpretation because its stereotypical meanings may seem so commonplace and transparent. Yet recent work in the burgeoning field of disability studies presents disability as a complicated motif that demands more critical engagement than it typically receives. Informed by exciting developments in the field, it argues that the David Story employs disability imagery as a subtle mode of narrating and organizing various ideological positions regarding national identity.

Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom is a core textbook that integrates knowledge and practice from the fields of disability studies and special education. The second edition has been fully revised and updated throughout to include stronger connections between race, class, sexual orientation, gender, and disability to emphasize intersecting identities and experiences; stronger emphasis on curriculum and teaching rather than on attitudes toward disability; and updates to current events, cultural references, resources, research literature, laws, and policies.

In the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of political theory, The Capacity Contract shows how the exclusion of disabled people has shaped democratic politics. Stacy Clifford Simplican demonstrates how disability buttresses systems of domination based on race, sex, and gender. She exposes how democratic theory and politics have long blocked from political citizenship anyone whose cognitive capacity falls below a threshold level⎯marginalization with real-world repercussions on the implementation of disability rights today. Simplican’s compelling ethnographic analysis of the self-advocacy movement describes the obstacles it faces. From the outside, the movement must confront stiff budget cuts and dwindling memberships; internally, self-advocates must find ways to demand political standing without reinforcing entrenched stigma against people with profound cognitive disabilities. And yet Simplican’s investigation also offers democratic theorists and disability activists a more emancipatory vision of democracy as it relates to disability⎯one that focuses on enabling people to engage in public and spontaneous action to disrupt exclusion and stigma. Taking seriously democratic promises of equality and inclusion, The Capacity Contract rejects conceptions of political citizenship that privilege cognitive capacity and, instead, centers such citizenship on action that is accessible to all people.

This volume in The SAGE Reference Series on Disability explores the arts and humanities within the lives of people with disabilities. It is one of eight volumes in the cross-disciplinary and issues-based series, which incorporates links from varied fields making up Disability Studies as volumes examine topics central to the lives of individuals with disabilities and their families. With a balance of history, theory, research, and application, specialists set out the findings and implications of research and practice for others whose current or future work involves the care and/or study of those with disabilities, as well as for the disabled themselves. The presentational style (concise and engaging) emphasizes accessibility. Taken individually, each volume sets out the fundamentals of the topic it addresses, accompanied by compiled data and statistics, recommended further readings, a guide to organizations and associations, and other annotated resources, thus providing the ideal introductory platform and gateway for further study. Taken together, the series represents both a survey of major disability issues and a guide to new directions and trends and contemporary resources in the field as a whole.