Book Selections

Visible protests reflect both continuity and change. This Element illustrates how protest around longstanding issues and grievances is punctuated by movement dynamics as well as broader cultural and institutional environments. The disability movement is an example of how activist networks and groups strategically adapt to opportunity and threat, linking protest waves to the development of issue politics. The Element examines sixty years of protest across numerous issue areas that matter for disability including social welfare, discrimination, transportation, healthcare, and media portrayals. Situating visible protest in this way provides a more nuanced picture of cycles of contention as they relate to political and organizational processes, strategies and tactics, and short-and-long-term outcomes. It also provides clues about why protest ebbs and flows, when and how protest matters, who it matters for, and for what.

This book examines how those with disabilities, and in particular, the Deaf and hard-of-hearing, are impacted by the influence language and culture in policing, criminal law, and corrections. Frequently left out of policy making and research, almost no resources exist that can inform and aid law enforcement, legal, and correctional officials on culturally competent interactions with the Deaf and hard-of-hearing. As a result, this group is at a distinct disadvantage when dealing with law enforcement or the courts as well as being vastly underserved, which often lead to negative outcomes for the Deaf suspect/defendant/inmate as they attempt to interact with law enforcement and navigate the legal system. In a step-by-step presentation from arrest to incarceration each chapter will discuss a specific part of the legal system. As well as providing information on the topic, this book can serve as an important resource to the myriad of issues and difficulties that may be experiences by the Deaf suspect, defendant, or inmate, as well as by law enforcement officers, attorneys, and correctional officers. To illustrate these issues, previous cases of Deaf suspects, defendants, and inmates will be presented and discussed to clarify key issues and to provide a perspective of the problem. Each chapter dealing with these issues will also provide suggestions for more culturally competent interactions between the Deaf community and the legal system.

The much-anticipated follow up to the groundbreaking anthology Disability Visibility: another revolutionary collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience, and intimacy in all its myriad forms. What is intimacy? More than sex, more than romantic love, the pieces in this stunning and illuminating new anthology offer broader and more inclusive definitions of what it can mean to be intimate with another person. Explorations of caregiving, community, access, and friendship offer us alternative ways of thinking about the connections we form with others--a vital reimagining in an era when forced physical distance is at times a necessary norm. But don't worry: there's still sex to consider--and the numerous ways sexual liberation intersects with disability justice. Plunge between these pages and you'll also find disabled sexual discovery, disabled love stories, and disabled joy. These twenty-five stunning original pieces--plus other modern classics on the subject, all carefully curated by acclaimed activist Alice Wong--include essays, photo essays, poetry, drama, and erotica: a full spectrum of the dreams, fantasies, and deeply personal realities of a wide range of beautiful bodies and minds. Disability Intimacy will free your thinking, invigorate your spirit, and delight your desires

"A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice explains the history and theories behind abolition and disability justice in a way that is easy to understand for those new to these concepts yet also gives insights that will be useful to seasoned activists. The book uses extensive research and professional and lived experience to illuminate the way the State uses disability and its power to disable to incarcerate multiply marginalized disabled people, especially those who are queer, trans, Black, or Indigenous. Because disabled people are much more likely than nondisabled people to be locked up in prisons, jails, and other sites of incarceration, abolitionists, and others critical of carceral systems must incorporate a disability justice perspective into our work. A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice gives personal and policy examples of how and why disabled people are disproportionately caught up in the carceral net, and how we can use this information to work toward prison and police abolition more effectively. This book includes practical tools and strategies that will be useful for anyone who cares about disability justice or abolition and explains why we can't have one without the other"--Amazon.com.

"In Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference, Chloe Deambrogio explores how developments in the field of forensic psychiatry shaped American courts' assessments of defendants' mental health and criminal responsibility over the course of the 20th century. During this period, new psychiatric notions of the mind and its readability, legal doctrines of insanity and diminished culpability, and cultural stereotypes about race and gender shaped the ways in which legal professionals, mental health experts, and lay witnesses approached mental disability evidence, especially in cases carrying the death penalty. Using Texas as a case-study, Deambrogio examines how these medical, legal, and cultural trends shaped psycho-legal debates in state criminal courts, while shedding light on the ways in which experts and lay actors' interpretations of 'pathological' mental states influenced trial verdicts in capital cases. She shows that despite mounting pressures from advocates of the 'rehabilitative penology', Texas courts maintained a punitive approach towards defendants allegedly affected by severe mental disabilities, while allowing for moralized views about personalities, habits, and lifestyle to influence psycho-legal assessments, in potentially prejudicial ways"--

"Struggle and Solidarity presents seven key pieces of federal legislation and demonstrates how public policies--even when not explicitly mental health related--can shape social determinants and improve mental health"--

Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity , J. Logan Smilges shows us what's gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism-beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

"In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Building on the work of their game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future." --

"This book explores how being "disabled" originates in the physical world, social representations and rules, and historical power relations-the interplay of which render bodies "normal" or not. Scholars and researchers will find that this book provides new avenues for thinking about dis/ability. A wider audience will find it accessible and informative"--

"In 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act authorized the use of subminimum wages for workers with disabilities. While some states have banned their use, it remains legal federally. The program known as 14(c) has a long history of poor oversight and abuse. While disability rights have grown in the United States, this issue lags decades behind"--

Safety: every law enforcement officer and every politician tells us that they're for it. And yet for many, police are a problem in their communities, and today's policies are only making things worse. If what we're doing isn't the answer. What is? We explore this issue, and what we all need to learn from the disability justice movement, with this week's guest. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled writer, performer, poet, healer and teacher, inspired by poets and authors June Jordan, Suheir Hammad and Audre Lorde. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Consensual Genocide and the Lambda-award winning Love Cake. She has a new book of poetry called Bodymap, and a memoir, Dirty River. out this year. She also co-founded the performance group Mangos With Chili and is an editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, a book that grapples with the difficult idea of addressing violence without police. All this, and Laura discusses the roads less traveled.

"Violence in the lives of women with disabilities is not a new problem, but it is a problem about which little has been written. This gap in our knowledge needs to be addressed, as women with disabilities are valuable members of our society whose experiences need to be made known. Without such knowledge, political action for social justice and for the prevention of violence is impossible. Contributors to Not a New Problem examine the experiences of Canadian women with disabilities, the need for improved access to services and the ways this violence is exacerbated by and intersects with gender, sexuality, indigeneity, race, ethnicity and class"--

Forbidden Signs explores American culture from the mid-nineteenth century to 1920 through the lens of one striking episode: the campaign led by Alexander Graham Bell and other prominent Americans to suppress the use of sign language among deaf people. The ensuing debate over sign language invoked such fundamental questions as what distinguished Americans from non-Americans, civilized people from "savages," humans from animals, men from women, the natural from the unnatural, and the normal from the abnormal. An advocate of the return to sign language, Baynton found that although the grounds of the debate have shifted, educators still base decisions on many of the same metaphors and images that led to the misguided efforts to eradicate sign language.

"A groundbreaking collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience: Disability Visibility brings together the voices of activists, authors, lawyers, politicians, artists, and everyday people whose daily lives are, in the words of playwright Neil Marcus, "an art ... an ingenious way to live." According to the last census, one in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some are visible, some are hidden--but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together an urgent, galvanizing collection of personal essays by contemporary disabled writers. There is Harriet McBryde Johnson's "Unspeakable Conversations," which describes her famous debate with Princeton philosopher Peter Singer over her own personhood. There is columnist s. e. smith's celebratory review of a work of theater by disabled performers. There are original pieces by up-and-coming authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma. There are blog posts, manifestos, eulogies, and testimonies to Congress. Taken together, this anthology gives a glimpse of the vast richness and complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own assumptions and understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and past with hope and love."--

"Politics of (En)closure: Deinstitutionalization, Disability, and Prison Abolition argues that a complex understanding of disability is fundamental to an understanding of decarceration. Many argue that the rise of deinstitutionalization led directly to the rise of imprisonment. Liat Ben-Moshe complicates this narrative by looking closely at how people of color and disabled people are pathologized as well as how profit plays a roll in caring for "disposable" populations in nursing homes, rehab facilities, prisons, etc. Ben-Moshe puts forth a theory of carceral abolition as a way to understand the failed utopian dream of deinstitutionalization and how to move forward"--

Broadly attentive to the political and economic shifts of the last several decades, Robert McRuer asks how disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or "crip times." Throughout "Crip Times", McRuer considers how transnational queer disability theory and culture-activism, blogs, art, photography, literature, and performance-provide important and generative sites for both contesting austerity politics and imagining alternatives. The book engages various cultural flashpoints, including the spectacle surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; the murder trial of South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius; the photography of Brazilian artist Livia Radwanski which documents the gentrification of Colonia Roma in Mexico City; the defiance of Chilean students demanding a free and accessible education for all; the sculpture and performance of UK artist Liz Crow; and the problematic rhetoric of "aspiration" dependent upon both able-bodied and disabled figurations that emerged in Thatcher's England. "Crip Times" asserts that disabled people themselves are demanding that disability be central to our understanding of political economy and uneven development and suggests that, in some locations, their demand for disability justice is starting to register. Ultimately, McRuer argues that a politics of austerity will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined "us" in need of protection from "them."

Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.

"In this long awaited new edition Oliver draws on his own experiences to paint a vivid picture of both the practical challenges of disablement and the theoretical understandings of disability. This approachable text is core reading for social work, nursing, health and social care and social science students taking modules in disability"--Provided by publisher.

This well-written and informative book has become the standard on the uses and laws regarding therapy and service dogs. With the expansion of new service dog types, a greater complexity with regard to service animal laws and regulations and the interpretation of these by the courts has developed. This book carefully examines these complexities at both the state and federal levels. In addition, the expanded use of therapy dogs in facilities and institutions has brought with it a paradigm shift in society's acceptance and acknowledgment of the canine capacity to contribute in meaningful ways to the lives of ill and institutionalized persons. This resource discusses the benefits of dogs as a therapeutic modality that reflects the importance of enrichment and healing to seizure patients, autistic children, and others with disabilities, including mental illness. Part I covers canines and canine caregiving, physical disabilities, mental disabilities, cancer sniffers, and the therapy dog movement. Part II explores traveling and living with canine caregivers, taking service and support dogs to schools, workplace scenarios, access rights of trainers and handlers, and proving service animal status and false assertions of such status. Part III discusses registration, licensing, tags, special gear for skilled dogs, traffic precautions, including cruelty and criminal interference laws protecting service animals. Part IV researches canine caregivers and social benefits, keeping animals with handlers in emergencies and disasters, tax benefits, and social service reimbursement for service animals. The author has provided a list of legal sources and service and therapy dog organizations by state. The information contained in this book is well-researched, factual, and appropriately cited. By reading this book, readers will acquire a clearer understanding of the many federal and state laws that apply to service and therapy dogs.

"A comprehensive study of the history of the Pennhurst State School and Hospital (1908-87), a state-operated institution in Pennsylvania for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Explores Pennhurst's enduring impact on the disability civil rights movement in America"--

This Handbook brings together twenty-nine authors from around the world, each expert in a different area within the history of disability. This collection of new and original essays forms a benchmark in a field of historical inquiry that has been growing and maturing over the last thirty years. It is the first book to gather critical essays that incorporate studies from South and East Asia, eastern and western Europe, Australia, North America, and the Arab world. This Handbook is unique among other disability history texts in that it engages simultaneously in methodological and historiographic debates and in a further articulation and analysis of the lived experiences of disabled people.

A sociological history of the fight for civil rights for people with intellectual disabilities. Allison Carey develops a relational practice approach to the issues of intellectual disability & civil rights, looking at how advocacy has progressed over the course of the past century.

"A study of the global oppression of people with disabilities and the international movement that has recently emerged to resist it ... A theoretical overview of disability oppression that shows its similarities to, and differences from, racism, sexism, and colonialism."--Jacket.

Many children have learning disabilities and it's up to parents and schools to work together to ensure that each child's unique educational needs are met. But what if the school disagrees with your goals for your child? You are at a disadvantage if you don't know the law. This book teaches you to: identify a learning disability; understand your child's rights to education; untangle eligibility rules and evaluations; prepare and make your best case to school administrators; develop IEP goals and advocate for their adoption, and explore and choose the best programs and services.

The memoir of a paraplegic journalist, describing his experiences as a reporter for National Public Radio in exotic locations, and the challenges of living in a wheelchair.

Theories of social justice are necessarily abstract, reaching beyond theparticular and the immediate to the general and the timeless. Yet such theories, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to thereal and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practicalphilosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice neglected by current theorie sand thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday life, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to aricher, more responsive approach to social co-operation.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Books for a Better Life Award, and one of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2012, this masterpiece by the National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon features stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children, but also find profound meaning in doing so--"a brave, beautiful book that will expand your humanity" (People). Solomon's startling proposition in Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition--that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter. All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges. Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far from the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other--a theme in every family's life.

"At thirty-two, Ady Barkan had everything he wanted: a fulfilling career in the progressive movement, a brilliant wife, and a beautiful newborn son. Then his luck ran out. What he thought might be carpal tunnel was in fact ALS, a neurological disease that would probably paralyze and kill him quickly. But then, with his life slipping away and American democracy under grave threat, he turned a devastating diagnosis into his most potent tool. [This book] is a rousing memoir featuring intertwining narratives about determination, perseverance, and now to live a life of purpose. The first traces Ady's battle with ALS. The second shows his journey from a goofy political nerd to a prominent figure in the progressive movement, becoming one of today's most vocal advocates for social justice. [This book] is an evocative and unforgettable memoir about activism, dedication, love and hope."--Book jacket flap

Sensitive and practical, this book openly discusses the ways in which personal thoughts, feelings, and questions about disabilities can influence effective communication between people with and without disabilities. It offers simple and effective ways to become more comfortable with the concept of disability, and it opens the door to better social and professional relationships. Featuring activities and exercises that encourage self-examination, this guide helps us all create more enriching personal relationships and work toward a fully inclusive society. It will help you overcome fears and dispel stereotypes while enhancing personal growth, professional development, and community outreach.

For psychotherapist, painter, feminist, filmmaker, writer, and disability activist Harilyn Rousso, hearing well-intentioned people tell her, "You're so inspirational!" is patronizing, not complimentary. In her empowering and at times confrontational memoir, Don't Call Me Inspirational, Rousso, who has cerebral palsy, describes overcoming the prejudice against disability--not overcoming disability. She addresses the often absurd and ignorant attitudes of strangers, friends, and family. Rousso also examines her own prejudice toward her disabled body, and portrays the healing effects of intimacy and creativity, as well as her involvement with the disability rights community. She intimately reveals herself with honesty and humor and measures her personal growth as she goes from "passing" to embracing and claiming her disability as a source of pride, positive identity, and rebellion. A collage of images about her life, rather than a formal portrait, Don't Call Me Inspirational celebrates Rousso's wise, witty, productive, outrageous life, disability and all.