Disability Culture and Politics – serie

Mobilizing Metaphor illustrates how radical and unconventional forms of activism, including art, are reshaping the rich and vibrant tradition of disability mobilization in Canada – and in the process, challenging perceptions of disability and the politics that surround it.Until now, research on Canadian disability activism has focused on legal and policy spheres and overlooked how disability activism is as varied as the population it represents. Mobilizing Metaphor combines contributions by artists, activists, and academics (including an insightful concluding chapter by renowned disability scholar Tanya Titchkoksy) with rich illustrations and photographs to reveal how disability art is distinctive as both art and social action.As the contributors sketch the shifting contours of disability politics in Canada and show how disability oppression is not isolated from other prejudices, they challenge us to re-examine how we enact social and political change.

Mobilizing Metaphor illustrates how radical and unconventional forms of activism, including art, are reshaping the rich and vibrant tradition of disability mobilization in Canada – and in the process, challenging perceptions of disability and the politics that surround it.Until now, research on Canadian disability activism has focused on legal and policy spheres and overlooked how disability activism is as varied as the population it represents. Mobilizing Metaphor combines contributions by artists, activists, and academics (including an insightful concluding chapter by renowned disability scholar Tanya Titchkoksy) with rich illustrations and photographs to reveal how disability art is distinctive as both art and social action.As the contributors sketch the shifting contours of disability politics in Canada and show how disability oppression is not isolated from other prejudices, they challenge us to re-examine how we enact social and political change.

Disabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists demonstrate that disabled people can change their social status by transforming the political and legal discourse surrounding disablement.Employing tools from the fields of law and history, this original contribution explores how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a variety of contexts, including within the labour market, the workers' compensation system, the immigration process, and the legal system (both as litigants and as lawyers). It deepens our knowledge of the role of people with disabilities within social movements in disability history. The contributors encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to effect positive societal change.

Disabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists demonstrate that disabled people can change their social status by transforming the political and legal discourse surrounding disablement.Employing tools from the fields of law and history, this original contribution explores how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a variety of contexts, including within the labour market, the workers' compensation system, the immigration process, and the legal system (both as litigants and as lawyers). It deepens our knowledge of the role of people with disabilities within social movements in disability history. The contributors encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to effect positive societal change.

As the global population ages, disability demographics are shifting. Societal transformation and global health inequities have changed who is likely to reach old age, who is likely to live with disability, and the relationship between aging and disability in various socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts.The Aging–Disability Nexus breaks new ground by bringing gerontology and disability studies into dialogue with each other through a variety of empirical, conceptual, and pedagogical approaches. Contributors explore the tensions that shape the way disability and aging are understood, experienced, and responded to at both individual and systemic levels, while avoiding the common tendency to conflate these overlapping elements and map them onto a normative, faulty notion of the human life trajectory. This perceptive work analyzes the distinction between aging with a disability and aging into disability, and reveals how multiple identities, socio-economic forces, culture, and community give form to our experiences.

As the global population ages, disability demographics are shifting. Societal transformation and global health inequities have changed who is likely to reach old age, who is likely to live with disability, and the relationship between aging and disability in various socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts.The Aging–Disability Nexus breaks new ground by bringing gerontology and disability studies into dialogue with each other through a variety of empirical, conceptual, and pedagogical approaches. Contributors explore the tensions that shape the way disability and aging are understood, experienced, and responded to at both individual and systemic levels, while avoiding the common tendency to conflate these overlapping elements and map them onto a normative, faulty notion of the human life trajectory. This perceptive work analyzes the distinction between aging with a disability and aging into disability, and reveals how multiple identities, socio-economic forces, culture, and community give form to our experiences.

Intersex and/as/is/with disability. The connections between intersex and disability deserve nuanced attention if we are to strengthen intersex human rights claims and understand the experiences of intersex people living with the disabling consequences of medical intervention.Cripping Intersex examines three key themes: the medical management of people with intersex characteristics; the mainstream fascination with sport sex-testing policies and procedures; and the eugenic implications of preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Celeste E. Orr investigates how intersex and interphobia intersect with disability and ableism to propose a new approach to intersex studies and activism. The integration of feminist disability studies with intersex studies provides tools to break down the traditional sex dyad and the entrenched cultural mandate against intersex traits.This necessary work offers a radical new understanding of intersex-with-disability, pushing analyses of intersex histories, experience, and embodiment further than feminist or queer theory can do alone.

Intersex and/as/is/with disability. The connections between intersex and disability deserve nuanced attention if we are to strengthen intersex human rights claims and understand the experiences of intersex people living with the disabling consequences of medical intervention.Cripping Intersex examines three key themes: the medical management of people with intersex characteristics; the mainstream fascination with sport sex-testing policies and procedures; and the eugenic implications of preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Celeste E. Orr investigates how intersex and interphobia intersect with disability and ableism to propose a new approach to intersex studies and activism. The integration of feminist disability studies with intersex studies provides tools to break down the traditional sex dyad and the entrenched cultural mandate against intersex traits.This necessary work offers a radical new understanding of intersex-with-disability, pushing analyses of intersex histories, experience, and embodiment further than feminist or queer theory can do alone.

Ableism is embedded in Canadian criminal justice institutions, policies, and practices, making incarceration and institutionalization dangerous – even deadly – for disabled people. Disability Injustice brings together highly original work by a range of scholars and activists who explore disability in the historical and contemporary Canadian criminal justice system.The contributors confront challenging topics such as eugenics and crime control; the pathologizing of difference as deviance; processes of criminalization based on discretionary, biased approaches to physical and mental health; and the role of disability justice activism in contesting longstanding discrimination and exclusion. Weaving together disability and sociolegal studies, criminology, and law, Disability Injustice examines disability in contexts that include policing and surveillance, sentencing and the courts, prisons and other carceral spaces, and alternatives to confinement.This provocative collection highlights how, with deeper understanding of disability, we can and should challenge the practices of crime control and the processes of criminalization.

Ableism is embedded in Canadian criminal justice institutions, policies, and practices, making incarceration and institutionalization dangerous – even deadly – for disabled people. Disability Injustice brings together highly original work by a range of scholars and activists who explore disability in the historical and contemporary Canadian criminal justice system.The contributors confront challenging topics such as eugenics and crime control; the pathologizing of difference as deviance; processes of criminalization based on discretionary, biased approaches to physical and mental health; and the role of disability justice activism in contesting longstanding discrimination and exclusion. Weaving together disability and sociolegal studies, criminology, and law, Disability Injustice examines disability in contexts that include policing and surveillance, sentencing and the courts, prisons and other carceral spaces, and alternatives to confinement.This provocative collection highlights how, with deeper understanding of disability, we can and should challenge the practices of crime control and the processes of criminalization.

"Disability is not our worst-case scenario – our worst-case scenario would be its annihilation." This is the starting point for this powerful collection of writing by and about Catherine Frazee, disability activist, Officer of the Order of Canada, and poetic scholar of justice. For Frazee, disability is not something to be dreaded or overcome but a force to be reckoned with – a prism of insight and experience that refracts new light upon our fundamental ideals of justice, beauty, and community.Catherine Frazee has been a central figure in the disability rights landscape in Canada for decades. Her reasoned and passionate insights are topical and often ahead of their time. Always bold, always progressive, and frequently provocative, Frazee's work presents an unwavering, fierce commitment to engage in public debate from a position that centres the lives of disabled people. Taken together, these writings chronicle the rising consciousness of a social movement of disabled people staking their claim in public policy and popular culture, a claim that is overdue for honest recognition.

Into the twenty-first century, millions of disabled people and people experiencing mental distress were segregated from the rest of society and confined to residential institutions. Deinstitutionalization – the closure of these sites and integration of former residents into the community – has become increasingly commonplace. But this project is unfinished. Sites of Conscience explores use of the concept of sites of conscience, which involves place-based memory activities such as walking tours, survivor-authored social histories, and performances and artistic works in or generated from sites of systemic suffering and injustice. These activities offer new ways to move forward from the unfinished deinstitutionalization project and its failures. Covering diverse national contexts, this volume proposes that acknowledging the memories and lived experiences of former residents – and keeping histories and social heritage of institutions alive rather than simply closing sites – holds the greatest potential for recognition, accountability, and action.

Into the twenty-first century, millions of disabled people and people experiencing mental distress were segregated from the rest of society and confined to residential institutions. Deinstitutionalization – the closure of these sites and integration of former residents into the community – has become increasingly commonplace. But this project is unfinished. Sites of Conscience explores use of the concept of sites of conscience, which involves place-based memory activities such as walking tours, survivor-authored social histories, and performances and artistic works in or generated from sites of systemic suffering and injustice. These activities offer new ways to move forward from the unfinished deinstitutionalization project and its failures. Covering diverse national contexts, this volume proposes that acknowledging the memories and lived experiences of former residents – and keeping histories and social heritage of institutions alive rather than simply closing sites – holds the greatest potential for recognition, accountability, and action.

As global rates of autism diagnosis rise, dominant cultural representations continue to define autism as a tragic neurological disorder. And mothers – as primary caregivers and advocates – are centrally implicated in the impulse to find both cause and cure. How should we care about autism and autistic people?Unmothering Autism emerged from Patty Douglas's desire to understand a contradiction: she and her two sons (one autistic) experienced beauty living together, while their public encounters with doctors, school professionals, and agencies were fraught and sometimes violent. In this book, Douglas offers a critical history of popular and biomedical assumptions about autism, expressed through shifting social constructs that blame or valorize maternal care. Throughout, she also intersperses her own insights and shares conversations she has had with other "autism mothers."Unmothering Autism theorizes an "ethics of disruption," reorienting us to autism and autistic people as valuable and fundamentally human. It centres the previously marginalized perspectives of mothers and autistic individuals to affirm their knowledge of living well together in, and through, difference.

As global rates of autism diagnosis rise, dominant cultural representations continue to define autism as a tragic neurological disorder. And mothers – as primary caregivers and advocates – are centrally implicated in the impulse to find both cause and cure. How should we care about autism and autistic people?Unmothering Autism emerged from Patty Douglas's desire to understand a contradiction: she and her two sons (one autistic) experienced beauty living together, while their public encounters with doctors, school professionals, and agencies were fraught and sometimes violent. In this book, Douglas offers a critical history of popular and biomedical assumptions about autism, expressed through shifting social constructs that blame or valorize maternal care. Throughout, she also intersperses her own insights and shares conversations she has had with other "autism mothers."Unmothering Autism theorizes an "ethics of disruption," reorienting us to autism and autistic people as valuable and fundamentally human. It centres the previously marginalized perspectives of mothers and autistic individuals to affirm their knowledge of living well together in, and through, difference.

Applied behaviour therapies are highly proscriptive and controversial evidence-based autism interventions that have, in many settings, become the standard of care. Autism and the Culture of Therapy is the first empirical study of applied behaviour therapies. To understand such therapies, we need to assess them in everyday practice, through the multiple interpretations, ethical frameworks, and applications of practitioners.Julia Gruson-Wood examines how applied behaviour checklists, forms, protocols, and plans shape professional consciousness, how managerial governance strategically appropriates clinical data, how the rise of para-practitioners democratizes science, and how gender, sexuality, and identity politics imbue clinical practice and social responses to autism.Drawing on Ontario as a case study, Autism and the Culture of Therapy reveals the fascinating and complex workplace culture of therapy providers, telling the story of a clinical field that has risen along with rates of autism diagnosis, and redefined what autism means.