Best of
Disability-Studies

2016

Sick Woman Theory


Johanna Hedva - 2016
    The ‘sick’ part of the Sick Woman speaks to an identity that gets defined by ableism: if you are defined by the care you give and take, you are a person who is unproductive, or a drain on resources, or dysfunctional, or disordered, or incurable, or worthless, etc, ad infinitum – in other words, your embodied existence deviates from ableist standards. Hedva's analysis looks at how ableism is perhaps the most pernicious ideology, because it’s the very bedrock of how we decide whether a person is valued or not. White supremacy, racism, misogyny, transphobia, heteronormativity – all of these things need ableism in order to work because they are means of oppressing people based on an invented hierarchy of superiority and normativity.

Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer


Sins Invalid - 2016
    Skin, Tooth, and Bone offers analysis, history and context for the growing Disability Justice Movement. The Second Edition includes the addition of a new section on Audism and Deafhood written and edited by members of the D/deaf community, and a Call to Action from Survivors of Environmental Injury, as well as disability justice timelines, an extensive glossary, and a resource list for learning more.

Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefullness, and Gentle Discipleship


John Swinton - 2016
    Time structures days, provides goals, shapes dreams--and limits lives. Time appears to be tangible, real, and progressive, but, in the end, time proves illusory. Though mercurial, time can be deadly for those with disabilities. To participate fully in human society has come to mean yielding to the criterion of the clock. The absence of thinking rapidly, living punctually, and biographical narration leaves persons with disabilities vulnerable. A worldview driven by the demands the clock makes on the lives of those with dementia or profound neurological and intellectual disabilities seems pointless.And yet, Jesus comes to the world to transform time. Jesus calls us to slow down, take time, and learn to recognize the strangeness of living within God's time. He calls us to be gentle, patient, kind; to walk slowly and timefully with those whom society desires to leave behind.In Becoming Friends of Time, John Swinton crafts a theology of time that draws us toward a perspective wherein time is a gift and a calling. Time is not a commodity nor is time to be mastered. Time is a gift of God to humans, but is also a gift given back to God by humans.Swinton wrestles with critical questions that emerge from theological reflection on time and disability: rethinking doctrine for those who can never grasp Jesus with their intellects; reimagining discipleship and vocation for those who have forgotten who Jesus is; reconsidering salvation for those who, due to neurological damage, can be one person at one time and then be someone else in an instant. In the end, Swinton invites the reader to spend time with the experiences of people with profound neurological disability, people who can change our perceptions of time, enable us to grasp the fruitful rhythms of God's time, and help us learn to live in ways that are unimaginable within the boundaries of the time of the clock.--David F. Ford, Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge "Studies in Christian Ethics"

Ways of Attending: How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World


Iain McGilchrist - 2016
    How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focussed, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does - they are both involved in everything - but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilising the world, the other better at understanding it.Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something - or don't attend to it - matters a very great deal. This book helps you to see what it is you may have been trained by our very unusual culture not to see.

War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence


Anne McGuire - 2016
    Bringing together a variety of interpretive theoretical perspectives including critical disability studies, queer and critical race theory, and cultural studies, the book analyzes the social significance and productive effects of contemporary discourses of autism as these are produced and circulated in the field of autism advocacy. Anne McGuire discusses how in the field of autism advocacy, autism often appears as an abbreviation, its multiple meanings distilled to various “red flag” warnings in awareness campaigns, bulleted biomedical ”facts” in information pamphlets, or worrisome statistics in policy reports. She analyzes the relationships between these fragmentary enactments of autism and traces their continuities to reveal an underlying, powerful, and ubiquitous logic of violence that casts autism as a pathological threat that advocacy must work to eliminate. Such logic, McGuire contends, functions to delimit the role of the “good” autism advocate to one who is positioned “against” autism.

A Very Capitalist Condition: A history and politics of disability


Roddy Slorach - 2016
    In recent years, it has become associated with unemployment and dependence on benefits. But how were people we now call disabled treated in earlier societies?This book examines the origins and development of disability and highlights the hidden history of groups such as disabled war veterans, deaf people and those in mental distress.In a wide-ranging critique, Roddy Slorach describes how capitalist society segregates and marginalises disabled people, turning our minds and bodies into commodities and generating new impairment and disability as it does so.He argues that Marxism not only helps provide a fuller understanding of the politics and nature of disability, but also offers a vision of how disabled people can play a part in building a better world for all.

Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran


Orkideh Behrouzan - 2016
    It exami....

Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War


David Lubin - 2016
    Grand Illusions presents a highly original examination of the era's artworks that range from patriotic idealism to profound disillusionment. In several stylishly written chapters, Lubin assesses the war's impact on two dozen painters, designers, photographers, and film makers from 1914 to 1933. In addition to profiles of famous and forgotten artists from D.W. Griffith and John Singer Sargent to neglected soldier-painter Claggett Wilson and the African American outsider artist Horace Pippin, the book features illustrations from epoch-defining films, sculptures, photographs and paintings. Armed with rich cultural-historical details and an interdisciplinary narrative approach, David Lubin creatively upends traditional understandings of the Great War's effects on the visual arts in America.

Searching for a Rose Garden: challenging psychiatry, fostering mad studies


Jasna Russo - 2016
    Crucially, these are not alternatives developed by professionals; they are innovative, survivor-led and survivor-run grassroots approaches based on people who have direct experience of mental health issues and who have been through the mental health process themselves.

Disability in Higher Education: A Social Justice Approach


Nancy J. Evans - 2016
    Drawing on multiple theoretical frameworks, research, and experience creating inclusive campuses, this text offers a new framework for understanding disability using a social justice lens. Many institutions focus solely on legal access and accommodation, enabling a system of exclusion and oppression. However, using principles of universal design, social justice, and other inclusive practices, campus environments can be transformed into more inclusive and equitable settings for all constituents.The authors consider the experiences of students, faculty, and staff with disabilities and offer strategies for addressing ableism within a variety of settings, including classrooms, residence halls, admissions and orientation, student organizations, career development, and counseling. They also expand traditional student affairs understandings of disability issues by including chapters on technology, law, theory, and disability services. Using social justice principles, the discussion spans the entire college experience of individuals with disabilities, and avoids any single-issue focus such as physical accessibility or classroom accommodations.The book will help readers:Consider issues in addition to access and accommodation Use principles of universal design to benefit students and employees in academic, cocurricular, and employment settings Understand how disability interacts with multiple aspects of identity and experience. Despite their best intentions, college personnel frequently approach disability from the singular perspective of access to the exclusion of other important issues. This book provides strategies for addressing ableism in the assumptions, policies and practices, organizational structures, attitudes, and physical structures of higher education.

The Minor Gesture


Erin Manning - 2016
    The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward.

The Spoon Knife Anthology: Thoughts on Defiance, Compliance, and Resistance


Michael Scott Monje Jr. - 2016
    Together, these writers deliver a series of meditations on compliance and consent that are simultaneously intimate and alienating.

Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics


Douglas C. Baynton - 2016
    Baynton’s groundbreaking new look at immigration and disability, aims to change this. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baynton explains, immigration restriction in the United States was primarily intended to keep people with disabilities—known as “defectives”—out of the country. The list of those included is long: the deaf, blind, epileptic, and mobility impaired; people with curved spines, hernias, flat or club feet, missing limbs, and short limbs; those unusually short or tall; people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities; intersexuals; men of “poor physique” and men diagnosed with “feminism.” Not only were disabled individuals excluded, but particular races and nationalities were also identified as undesirable based on their supposed susceptibility to mental, moral, and physical defects. In this transformative book, Baynton argues that early immigration laws were a cohesive whole—a decades-long effort to find an effective method of excluding people considered to be defective. This effort was one aspect of a national culture that was increasingly fixated on competition and efficiency, anxious about physical appearance and difference, and haunted by a fear of hereditary defect and the degeneration of the American race.

Disabling Romanticism


Michael Bradshaw - 2016
    It is the first collection of its kind, breaking new ground in re-interpreting key texts and providing a challenging overview of this emerging field. The collection offers both a critique of academic Romantic studies and an affirmation of the responsiveness of the Romantic canon to new stimuli. Authors discussed include William Blake, Lord Byron, Ann Batten Cristall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Darley, Richard Payne Knight, William Gilpin, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth."--Back cover.

Obesity in Canada: Critical Perspectives


Jenny Ellison - 2016
    Conceptualizing obesity as a biological condition, these experts insist that it needs to be "prevented" and "managed."Obesity in Canada takes a broader, critical perspective of our supposed epidemic. Examining obesity in its cultural and historical context, the book's contributors ask how we measure health and wellness, where our attitudes to obesity develop from, and what the consequences are of naming and targeting as "obese" those whose body weights do not match our expectations. A broad survey of the issues surrounding the obesity panic in Canada, it is the first collection of fat studies and critical obesity studies from a distinctly Canadian perspective.

PearlStitch


Petra Kuppers - 2016
    Here we find the “goddess,” or “the nervous system,” but also an “inflammatory process,” the “assymmetrical lean.” The delicacy and courage to do that, to shift the time of the body, or its space—spaces—is what I learned from at every stage of PearlStitch, which I want to recommend to any reader interested in hybridity, or poetry, or performance, as something that begins as a seam, not composed, but unraveling, undoing itself at every turn. This surrender or loosening is the work, too, of the “beloved” and of “breath.” In this way, Petra Kuppers’ book turns to love. And it’s love, at last, that illuminates everything that she writes and that eventually, transmitted, felt, we read. Bhanu Kapil