Sara Rodrigues – författare

Embracing Neurodiversity: A Social Work Approach to Building Inclusive Schools and Communities offers a transformative framework for reimagining how educators, clinicians, and social workers support neurodivergent students. Grounded in social work values and the human rights model of disability, this book bridges research and practice to challenge compliance-based systems and cultivate environments where every learner can thrive. Drawing from lived experience, clinical insight, and current scholarship, Dr. Sara Rodrigues invites readers to move beyond awareness toward action by integrating strengths-based, affirming, and trauma-informed approaches into everyday school practice. The book explores the intersection of theory and application, guiding readers through key areas such as identity and language, sensory and emotional regulation, peer connection, dedicated interests, and the systemic inequities that shape neurodivergent students' experiences. Designed for social workers, educators, and allied professionals, Embracing Neurodiversity emphasizes collaboration, advocacy, and community engagement as tools for sustainable change. It offers practical strategies for classroom inclusion, policy reform, and family partnership, while centering neurodivergent voices and honoring their expertise. More than a professional guide, this book is a call to action, urging schools to move from accommodation to belonging, from deficit to dignity, and from "managing behaviors" to understanding human diversity in all its complexity and brilliance.

Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.

Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.