Michael Rembis – författare

Disability history exists outside of the institutions, healers, and treatments it often brings to mind. It is a history where the disabled live not just as patients or cure-seekers, but rather as people living differently in the world--and it is also a history that helps define the fundamental concepts of identity, community, citizenship, and normality. The Oxford Handbook of Disability History is the first volume of its kind to represent this history and its global scale, from ancient Greece to British West Africa. The twenty-seven articles, written by thirty experts from across the field, capture the diversity and liveliness of this emerging scholarship. Whether discussing disability in modern Chinese cinema or on the American antebellum stage, this collection provides new and valuable insights into the rich and varied lives of the disabled across time and place.

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws." Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers."

Defining Deviance analyzes how reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perceived delinquent girls and their often troubled lives. Drawing on exclusive access to thousands of case files and other documents at the State Training School in Geneva, Illinois, Michael A. Rembis uses Illinois as a case study to show how implementation of involuntary commitment laws in the United States reflected eugenic thinking about juvenile delinquency.  Much more than an institutional history, Defining Deviance examines the cases of vulnerable young women to reveal the centrality of sex, class, gender, and disability in the formation of scientific and social reform. Rembis recounts the contestations between largely working-class teenage girls and the mostly female reformers and professionals who attempted to diagnose and treat them based on changing ideas of eugenics, gender, and impairment. He shows how generational roles and prevailing notions of gender and sexuality influenced reformers to restrict, control, and institutionalize undesirable "defectives" within society, and he details the girls' attempts to influence methods of diagnosis, discipline, and reform. In tracing the historical evolution of ideologies of impairment and gender to show the central importance of gender to the construction of disability, Rembis reveals the larger national implications of the cases at the State Training School. His study provides new insights into the treatment of young women whom the dominant society perceived as threats to the sexual and eugenic purity of modern America.

Defining Deviance analyzes how reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perceived delinquent girls and their often troubled lives. Drawing on exclusive access to thousands of case files and other documents at the State Training School in Geneva, Illinois, Michael A. Rembis uses Illinois as a case study to show how implementation of involuntary commitment laws in the United States reflected eugenic thinking about juvenile delinquency.  Much more than an institutional history, Defining Deviance examines the cases of vulnerable young women to reveal the centrality of sex, class, gender, and disability in the formation of scientific and social reform. Rembis recounts the contestations between largely working-class teenage girls and the mostly female reformers and professionals who attempted to diagnose and treat them based on changing ideas of eugenics, gender, and impairment. He shows how generational roles and prevailing notions of gender and sexuality influenced reformers to restrict, control, and institutionalize undesirable "defectives" within society, and he details the girls' attempts to influence methods of diagnosis, discipline, and reform. In tracing the historical evolution of ideologies of impairment and gender to show the central importance of gender to the construction of disability, Rembis reveals the larger national implications of the cases at the State Training School. His study provides new insights into the treatment of young women whom the dominant society perceived as threats to the sexual and eugenic purity of modern America.

The field of disability history continues to evolve rapidly. In this collection, Susan Burch and Michael Rembis present essays that integrate critical analysis of gender, race, historical context, and other factors to enrich and challenge the traditional modes of interpretation still dominating the field. Contributors delve into four critical areas of study within disability history: family, community, and daily life; cultural histories; the relationship between disabled people and the medical field; and issues of citizenship, belonging, and normalcy. As the first collection of its kind in over a decade, Disability Histories not only brings readers up to date on scholarship within the field but fosters the process of moving it beyond the U.S. and Western Europe by offering work on Africa, South America, and Asia. The result is a broad range of readings that open new vistas for investigation and study while encouraging scholars at all levels to redraw the boundaries that delineate who and what is considered of historical value.Informed and accessible, Disability Histories is essential for classrooms engaged in all facets of disability studies within and across disciplines.

This book examines the role of disability in the right to political and social participation, an act of citizenship that many disabled people do not enjoy.The disability rights movement does not accept the use of disability to create limits on citizenship, which poses challenges for contemporary societies that will become ever greater as the science and technology of enhancing human abilities evolves. Comprised of eight chapters, three interludes, and a postscript written by leading scholars and disability rights activists, the book explores citizenship for people with disabilities from an interdisciplinary perspective using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as a point of departure and the concept of universal design as a strategy for actualizing full citizenship for all. Situating disability in its historical and cultural contexts, the authors offer directions for rethinking citizenship, including implications for access to the built environment, information and communication systems, education, work, community life and politics.This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies, planning, architecture, public health, rehabilitation, social work, and education.

This book examines the role of disability in the right to political and social participation, an act of citizenship that many disabled people do not enjoy.The disability rights movement does not accept the use of disability to create limits on citizenship, which poses challenges for contemporary societies that will become ever greater as the science and technology of enhancing human abilities evolves. Comprised of eight chapters, three interludes, and a postscript written by leading scholars and disability rights activists, the book explores citizenship for people with disabilities from an interdisciplinary perspective using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as a point of departure and the concept of universal design as a strategy for actualizing full citizenship for all. Situating disability in its historical and cultural contexts, the authors offer directions for rethinking citizenship, including implications for access to the built environment, information and communication systems, education, work, community life and politics.This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies, planning, architecture, public health, rehabilitation, social work, and education.

Bringing together a range of authors from the multidisciplinary field of disability studies, this book uses disability and the experiences of disabled people living in the United States and Canada to explore and analyze dynamic sites of human interaction in both historical and contemporary contexts to provide readers with new ways of envisioning home, care, and family. Contributors to Disabling Domesticity focus on the varied domestic sites where intimate – and interdependent – human relations are formed and maintained.  Analyzing domesticity through the lens of disability forces readers to think in new ways about family and household forms, care work, an ethic of care, reproductive labor, gendered and generational conflicts and cooperation, ageing, dependence, and local and global economies and political systems, in part by bringing the notion of interdependence, which undergirds all of the chapters in this book, into the foreground.