Interdisciplinary Disability Studies – serie

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is the only UN treaty to date in which the people who are its target, that is disabled people, were actively involved in its drafting and the only one which requires the active participation of disabled people in its implementation. This does not, of course, automatically guarantee the direct participation of all disabled people. This is especially so for children with disabilities, whose status as legal minors may inhibit them from participating in decisions affecting their lives. This book focuses on the participation rights of the disabled child with regard to health, education, homelife and relationships, highlighting ways in which these rights are safeguarded and promoted throughout the EU, as well as exploring the factors that put these rights at risk. Finally, this groundbreaking text analyses whether disabled children’s needs for assistance in order to realise their participation rights results in fewer opportunities to participate or in an increase in support in order for them to be able to do so.

Research has long substantiated the fact that living with a disability creates significant and complex challenges to identity negotiation, the practice of communication, and the development of interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, individuals without disabilities often lack the knowledge and tools to experience self-efficacy in communicating with their differently-abled peers. So how do these challenges translate to the incorporation of disability studies in a classroom context and the need to foster an inclusive environment for differently-abled students?Bringing together a range of perspectives from communication and disability studies scholars, this collection provides a theoretical foundation along with practical solutions for the inclusion of disability studies within the everyday curriculum. It examines a variety of aspects of communication studies including interpersonal, intercultural, health, political and business communication as well as ethics, gender and public speaking, offering case study examples and pedagogical strategies as to the best way to approach the subject of disability in education.It will be of interest to students, researchers and educators in communication and disability studies as well as scholars of sociology and social policy, gender studies, public health and pedagogy. It will also appeal to anyone who has wondered how to bring about a greater degree of inclusion and ethics within the classroom.

This is the first book to explore how far disability challenges dominant understandings of rurality, identity, gender and belonging within the rural literature. The book focuses particularly on the ways disabled people give, and are given, meaning and value in relation to ethical rural considerations of place, physical strength, productivity and social reciprocity. A range of different perspectives to the issues of living rurally with a disability inform this work. It includes the lived experience of people with disabilities through the use of life history methodologies, rich qualitative accounts and theoretical perspectives. It goes beyond conventional notions of rurality, grounding its analysis in a range of disability spaces and places and including the work of disability sociologists, geographers, cultural theorists and policy analysts. This interdisciplinary focus reveals the contradictory and competing relations of rurality for disabled people and the resultant impacts and effects upon disabled people and their communities materially, discursively and symbolically. Of interest to all scholars of disability, rural studies, social work and welfare, this book provides a critical intervention into the growing scholarship of rurality that has bypassed the pivotal role of disability in understanding the lived experience of rural landscapes.

The provision of assistive technology is an important individual and collective service of the welfare state. The state plays a significant role towards linking users and products, and the matching of devices and users is both a science and an art. However, many people feel it is stigmatising to use individually designed assistive technologies as they often, in a subtle way, convey discriminating barriers in society. The major challenges of assistive technology are thus to reduce social exclusion and marginalisation and, importantly, to reduce individual risks and societal costs related to non-use due to deficiencies in usability, aesthetics and design of the technologies.This groundbreaking book discusses the relationships among society, disability and technology by using different empirical examples (e.g., school, everyday life) to show why the combination of disability studies and STS-studies (science, technology and society) is a fruitful approach to understanding and meeting these challenges. The book explores the significance of the technologies for users, society and the field; identifies challenges to designing, adopting and using assistive technologies; and points at theoretical challenges in research as well as professional challenges in assistive technology service provision. The book also scrutinises the role of assistive technology devices, as well as the organisational structure of the assistive technology market, in relation to disabled people’s lives.This book will be valuable reading for students, academics, teachers and social educators interested in Disability Studies, STS Studies, Product Design, Sociology, Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy, as well as engineers working in the field of assistive technology.

This book examines the relationship between contemporary cultural representations of disabled children on the one hand, and disability as a personal experience of internalised oppression on the other. In focalising this debate through an exploration of the politically and emotionally charged figure of the disabled child, Harriet Cooper raises questions both about what it means to ‘speak for’ the other and about what resistance means when one is unknowingly invested in one’s own abjection. Drawing on both the author’s personal experience of growing up with a physical impairment and on a range of critical theories and cultural objects – from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden to Judith Butler’s work on injurious speech – the book theorises the making of disabled and ‘rehabilitated’ subjectivities. With a conceptual framework informed by both psychoanalysis and critical disability studies, it investigates the ways in which cultural anxieties about disability come to be embodied and lived by the disabled child. Posing new questions for disability studies and for identity politics about the relationships between lived experiences, cultural representations and dominant discourses – and demonstrating a new approach to the concept of ‘internalised oppression’ – this book will be of interest to scholars and students of disability studies, medical humanities, sociology and psychosocial studies, as well as to those with an interest in identity politics more generally.

This book, the first to specifically focus on disability hate speech, explains what disability hate speech is, why it is important, what laws regulate it (both online and in person) and how it is different from other forms of hate. Unfortunately, disability is often ignored or overlooked in academic, legal, political, and cultural analyses of the broader problem of hate speech. Its unique personal, ideological, economic, political and legal dimensions have not been recognized – until now. Disability hate speech is an everyday experience for many people, leaving terrible psycho-emotional scars. This book includes personal testimonies from victims discussing the personal impact of disability hate speech, explaining in detail how such hatred affects them. It also presents legal, historical, psychological, and cultural analyses, including the results of the first surveys and in-depth interviews ever conducted on this topic in some countries. This book makes a vital contribution to understanding disability hatred and prejudice, and will be of particular interest to those studying issues associated with hate speech, disability, psychology, law, and prejudice.

In the twenty-first century there is increasing global recognition of pain relief as a basic human right. However, as Susan Honeyman argues in this new take on child pain and invisible disability, such a belief has historically been driven by adult, ideological needs, whereas the needs of children in pain have traditionally been marginalised or overlooked in comparison. Examining migraines in children and the socially disabling effects that chronic pain can have, this book uses medical, political and cultural discourse to convey a sense of invisible disability in children with migraine and its subsequent oppression within educational and medical policy. The book is supported by authentic migraineurs’ experiences and first-hand interviews as well as testimonials from a range of historical, literary, and medical sources never combined in a child-centred context before. Representations of child pain and lifespan migraine within literature, art and popular culture are also pulled together in order to provide an interdisciplinary guide to those wanting to understand migraine in children and the identity politics of disability more fully.Child Pain, Migraine, and Invisible Disability will appeal to scholars in childhood studies, children’s rights, literary and visual culture, disability studies and medical humanities. It will also be of interest to anyone who has suffered from migraines or has cared for children affected by chronic pain.

What is life like for women with learning disabilities detained in a secure unit? This book presents a unique ethnographic study conducted in a contemporary institution in England. Rebecca Fish takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on both the social model of disability and intersectional feminist methodology, to explore the reasons why the women were placed in the unit, as well their experiences of day-to-day life as played out through relationships with staff and other residents. She raises important questions about the purpose of such units and the services they offer.Through making the women’s voices heard, this book presents their experiences and unique perspectives on topics such as seclusion, restraint, and resistance. Exploring how the ever present power disparity works to regulate women’s behaviour, the book shows how institutional responses replicate women’s bad experiences from the past, and how women’s responses are seen as pathological. It demonstrates that women are not passive recipients of care, but shape their own identity and futures, sometimes by resisting the norms expected of them (within allowed limits) and sometimes by transgressing the rules. These insights thus challenge traditional institutional accounts of gender, learning disability and deviance and highlight areas for reform in policy, practice, methodology, and social theory.This ground-breaking book will be of interest to scholars, students, policymakers and advocates working in the fields of learning disability and disability studies more widely, gender studies and sociology.

This book is a case study which narrates the history of the National Organization of the Spanish Blind (ONCE), established in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Contrary to other affluent countries where most blind people live on welfare benefits, the Spanish blind enjoy full employment. Furthermore, the average income of the Spanish blind is higher than that of the sighted. Why is this so? Why the blind, and not the deaf mute, or any other group of disabled people? This book shows that ONCE answers these questions. The book explains ONCE'S origins, the shifting strategies that the organization has pursued to adapt to an ever-changing environment, its original goals and the way they have mutated and been interpreted, its conflicting relationship with an authoritarian regime, its struggle to find its place in a democratic regime, and its relations with other groups of disabled people. A historical narrative, the book lies at the intersection between disability and organization studies, history and sociology. It will be of interest to all scholars of disability studies, the sociology of work, the history of medicine and contemporary Spanish history.

In the decades following the collapse of state socialism at the end of 1980s, disabled people in Central and Eastern Europe endured economic marginalisation, cultural devaluation and political disempowerment. Some of the mechanisms producing these injustices were inherited from state socialism, while others emerged with postsocialist neoliberalisation.State socialism promised social security guaranteed by the public, and postsocialist neoliberalisation promised independent living underpinned by the market. This book argues that both promises failed as far as disabled people were concerned, drawing on a wide range of scholarly reports and analyses, policy documents, legislation, and historical accounts, as well as on disability studies and social justice theory. Besides differences, the book also illuminates continuities between state socialism and postsocialist capitalism, providing on this basis a more general and historically grounded critique of contemporary neoliberalisation and its impact on individual and collective life.The book will appeal to anyone interested in disability studies and postsocialism, as well as social policy, social movements and critical theory. It will also be of interest to professionals involved in disability-related service provision, as well as to disability activists and policy makers.

Drawing upon vivid and harrowing life history narratives of people labelled intellectually disabled, this book examines the ways in which disabled subjects are constituted, regulated, governed, and violated through an account of abjection. Extending interdisciplinary dialogues and approaches, it abandons a construct of violence (which by law requires a stable notion of a victim and a perpetrator) and moves to a theorisation of abjection to explore the ways in which disabled subjects are (re)produced, constituted, and treated through time. Deploying a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, this book sits at the intersections of criminology and sociology, re-thinks notions of dis/ability, violence, and subjectivity, and utilises crip and queer theory to imagine dis/ability differently. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology and criminology, and specifically those working the areas of life history work, post-structuralism, hate crime, and post-modern criminology.

Inspired by the author’s personal experience of sustaining acquired brain injury (ABI), this path-breaking book explores the (re)construction of identity after ABI. It offers a way of understanding ABI through a social scientific lens, promoting an understanding that is generated through close engagement with the lives and experiences of ABI survivors.The author follows the everyday experiences of six male survivors and critically investigates their identity (re)construction after their ABI. As well as demonstrating identity (re)construction after ABI, the experiences of the participants allow the reader to investigate neurological rehabilitation from their perspective. This book suggests that rehabilitation after ABI is often a continual process that extends beyond the formal, medically prescribed period. It also shows that identity after ABI is often (re)constructed in an unpredictable way; a way that emphasises the importance of reciprocal support and the uncertainty of future life. A Sociological Approach to Acquired Brain Injury and Identity is essential reading for academics and students from a range of social scientific disciplines with an interest in biographical or ethnographic research methods. This book offers a social scientific view of rehabilitation and as such is also essential reading for academics, students and professionals with an interest in health and illness, particularly neurological rehabilitation and brain injury rehabilitation.

This book is a critical disability studies examination of the lived experience of chronic pain, engaging with and making a significant contribution to crip theory and the concept of ‘crip time’.Exploring experiences of pain and fatigue for people who live with chronic pain and based on narratives told through in-depth detailed interviews interwoven with theory at the cutting edge of critical disability studies, it demonstrates that our knowledge and understanding of chronic pain is incomplete without a critical disability studies approach. Through conceptualizing the concept of ‘crip time’ via participants’ narratives of living with chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and variable disabilities, this book demonstrates how thinking about chronic pain and fatigue with ‘crip time’ exposes normative, ableist, assumptions underlying both how pain and the ideas of cure and recovery are understood.It will be of interest to all academics and students working in the fields of disability studies, critical disability studies, crip theory, medical sociology, sexuality, and studies of embodiment, corporeality, and temporality more generally.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the social and spatial experiences of people with dwarfism, an impairment that results in a person being no taller than 4' 10". This book engages with the concept that dwarfism’s most prominent feature – body size and shape – can form the basis of social discrimination and disadvantages within society. By ignoring body size as a disability, it is hard to see the resulting disabling consequences of the built environment. Using a mixed-methods approach and drawing on the work undertaken by human geographers and disability studies academics, this book analyses how the relationship between harmful cultural stereotypes and space shapes everyday experiences of people with dwarfism and works to socially exclude them in diverse ways. Showing how spatial and social barriers are not mutually exclusive but can influence one another, this book responds to the limited academic work on the subject of dwarfism, whilst also contributing to the study of geographies of body size. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, human geography, the built environment, sociology and medical humanities.

Focusing on the case of disability, this book examines what happens when previously marginalised individuals obtain the legal recognition of their equal citizenship rights but cannot fully enjoy these rights because of structural inequality. Bringing together disability and citizenship studies, it explores an original conceptualisation of disability as a distinct social division and approaches citizenship as a developing institution. In addition to providing innovative theoretical perspectives on citizenship and disability, this book is grounded in the empirical analysis of the claims of disability activists in Sweden. Drawing on a wide range of blog posts and debate articles, it sheds light upon the inequality and domination faced by disabled people in Sweden and underlines the disability activists’ proactive ideas and solutions for constructing a more equal citizenship. This book will be of interest to scholars, activists and policymakers in the fields of disability, citizenship, social inequality, human rights, politics, activism, social welfare and sociology.

This book provides insight into the globally interlinked disability rights community and its political efforts today. By analysing what disability rights activism contributes to a global power apparatus of disability-related knowledge, it demonstrates how disability advocacy influences the way we categorise, classify, distribute, manipulate, and therefore transform knowledge.By unpacking the mutually constitutive relations between (practical) moral knowledge of international disability advocates and (formal) disability rights norms that are codified in international treaties such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the author shows that the disability rights movement is largely critical of statements that attempt to streamline it. At the same time, cross-cultural disability rights advocacy requires images of uniformity to stabilise its global legitimacy among international stakeholders and retain a common meta-code that visibly identifies its means and aims. As an epistemic community, disability rights advocates simultaneously rely on and contest the authority of international human rights infrastructure and its language. Proving that disability rights advocates contribute immensely to a global culture that standardises what is considered morally and legally ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, thereby shaping the human body and the body politic, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of critical disability studies, sociology of knowledge, legal and linguistic anthropology, social inequality, and social movements.

Using sources from a wide variety of print and digital media, this book discusses the need for ample and healthy portrayals of disability and neurodiversity in the media, as the primary way that most people learn about conditions.It contains 13 newly written chapters drawing on representations of disability in popular culture from film, television, and print media in both the Global North and the Global South, including the United States, Canada, India, and Kenya. Although disability is often framed using a limited range of stereotypical tropes such as victims, supercrips, or suffering patients, this book shows how disability and neurodiversity are making their way into more mainstream media productions and publications with movies, television shows, and books featuring prominent and even lead characters with disabilities or neurodiversity.Disability Representation in Film, TV, and Print Media will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, and sociology more broadly.

This volume analyzes representations of disability in art from antiquity to the twenty-first century, incorporating disability studies scholarship and art historical research and methodology.This book brings these two strands together to provide a comprehensive overview of the intersections between these two disciplines. Divided into four parts:Ancient History through the 17th Century: Gods, Dwarfs, and Warriors17th-Century Spain to the American Civil War: Misfits, Wounded Bodies, and Medical Specimens Modernism, Metaphor and CorporealityContemporary Art: Crips, Care, and Portraitureand comprised of 16 chapters focusing on Greek sculpture, ancient Chinese art, Early Italian Renaissance art, the Spanish Golden Age, nineteenth century art in France (Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec) and the US, and contemporary works, it contextualizes understandings of disability historically, as well as in terms of medicine, literature, and visual culture. This book is required reading for scholars and students of disability studies, art history, sociology, medical humanities and media arts.

This volume analyzes representations of disability in art from antiquity to the twenty-first century, incorporating disability studies scholarship and art historical research and methodology.This book brings these two strands together to provide a comprehensive overview of the intersections between these two disciplines. Divided into four parts:Ancient History through the 17th Century: Gods, Dwarfs, and Warriors17th-Century Spain to the American Civil War: Misfits, Wounded Bodies, and Medical Specimens Modernism, Metaphor and CorporealityContemporary Art: Crips, Care, and Portraitureand comprised of 16 chapters focusing on Greek sculpture, ancient Chinese art, Early Italian Renaissance art, the Spanish Golden Age, nineteenth century art in France (Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec) and the US, and contemporary works, it contextualizes understandings of disability historically, as well as in terms of medicine, literature, and visual culture. This book is required reading for scholars and students of disability studies, art history, sociology, medical humanities and media arts.

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has facilitated the understanding that disability is both a human rights and development issue. In order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, the focus on disability inclusion has become increasingly important in the discourse of international and national efforts for "leaving no one behind", the motto of the SDGs. This book discusses pertinent and emerging themes such as disability rights, globalization, inequalities, international cooperation and representation.Evidence which has been obtained tends to show that persons with disabilities have been disproportionately left behind without proper representation, participation and inclusion. This book critically investigates the gaps at different levels, from top to bottom, and as importantly, within the global disability movement, for the realization of global disability rights, and theorizes the intersection of disability, globalization and human rights. Empirical case studies from different countries and contexts are introduced to deepen analysis on theories of critical disability studies from a global perspective. Co-edited by a disability researcher and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Disability, this book will be of interest to all students, academics, policy makers and practitioners working to advance the cause of disability rights around the world.

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.

Drawing upon vivid and harrowing life history narratives of people labelled intellectually disabled, this book examines the ways in which disabled subjects are constituted, regulated, governed, and violated through an account of abjection. Extending interdisciplinary dialogues and approaches, it abandons a construct of violence (which by law requires a stable notion of a victim and a perpetrator) and moves to a theorisation of abjection to explore the ways in which disabled subjects are (re)produced, constituted, and treated through time. Deploying a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, this book sits at the intersections of criminology and sociology, re-thinks notions of dis/ability, violence, and subjectivity, and utilises crip and queer theory to imagine dis/ability differently. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology and criminology, and specifically those working the areas of life history work, post-structuralism, hate crime, and post-modern criminology.

This book investigates how being diagnosed with various disabilities impacts on identity. Once diagnosed with a disability, there is a risk that this label can become the primary status both for the person diagnosed as well as for their family. This reification of the diagnosis can be oppressive because it subjugates humanity in such a way that everything a person does can be interpreted as linked to their disability. Drawing on narrative approaches to identity in psychology and social sciences, the bio-psycho-social model and a holistic approach to disabilities, the chapters in this book understand disability as constructed in discourse, as negotiated among speaking subjects in social contexts, and as emergent. By doing so, they amplify voices that may have otherwise remained silent and use storytelling as a way of communicating the participants' realities to provide a more in-depth understanding of their point of view. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, medical humanities, disability research methods, narrative theory, and rehabilitation studies.

This interdisciplinary volume links dis/ability and agency by exploring LatDisCrit’s theory and activist emancipatory practice. It uses the author’s experiential and analytical views as a blind brown Latinx engaged scholar and activist from the global south living and struggling in the highly racialized global north context of the United States. LatDisCrit integrates critically LatCrit and DisCrit which look at the interplay of race/ethnicity, diasporic cultures, historical sociopolitics and disability within multiple Latinx identities in mostly global north contexts, while incorporating global south epistemologies. Using intersectional analysis of key concepts through critical counterstories, following critical race theory methodological traditions, and engaging possible decoloniality treatments of material precarity and agency, this book emphasizes intersectionality’s complex underpinnings within and beyond Latinidades. Through a careful interplay of dis/ability identity and dis/ability rights/empowerment, the volume opens avenues for intersectional solidarity and spaces for radical transformational learning.This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies; intersectional disability justice activists; critical Latinx/Chicanx studies; critical geographies; intersectional political philosophy; and political and public sociology.

This interdisciplinary volume links dis/ability and agency by exploring LatDisCrit’s theory and activist emancipatory practice. It uses the author’s experiential and analytical views as a blind brown Latinx engaged scholar and activist from the global south living and struggling in the highly racialized global north context of the United States. LatDisCrit integrates critically LatCrit and DisCrit which look at the interplay of race/ethnicity, diasporic cultures, historical sociopolitics and disability within multiple Latinx identities in mostly global north contexts, while incorporating global south epistemologies. Using intersectional analysis of key concepts through critical counterstories, following critical race theory methodological traditions, and engaging possible decoloniality treatments of material precarity and agency, this book emphasizes intersectionality’s complex underpinnings within and beyond Latinidades. Through a careful interplay of dis/ability identity and dis/ability rights/empowerment, the volume opens avenues for intersectional solidarity and spaces for radical transformational learning.This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies; intersectional disability justice activists; critical Latinx/Chicanx studies; critical geographies; intersectional political philosophy; and political and public sociology.

Focusing on the case of disability, this book examines what happens when previously marginalised individuals obtain the legal recognition of their equal citizenship rights but cannot fully enjoy these rights because of structural inequality. Bringing together disability and citizenship studies, it explores an original conceptualisation of disability as a distinct social division and approaches citizenship as a developing institution. In addition to providing innovative theoretical perspectives on citizenship and disability, this book is grounded in the empirical analysis of the claims of disability activists in Sweden. Drawing on a wide range of blog posts and debate articles, it sheds light upon the inequality and domination faced by disabled people in Sweden and underlines the disability activists’ proactive ideas and solutions for constructing a more equal citizenship. This book will be of interest to scholars, activists and policymakers in the fields of disability, citizenship, social inequality, human rights, politics, activism, social welfare and sociology.

Drawing on rich empirical work emerging from core conflict regions within the island nation of Sri Lanka, this book illustrates the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development.This pathbreaking book shows the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development. Through offering a rare yet important insight into the processes of gendered-disability advocacy activation within the post-conflict environment, it provides a unique counter narrative to the powerful images, symbols and discourses that too frequently perpetuate disabled women’s so-called need for paternalistic forms of care. Rather than being the mere recipients of aid and help, the narratives of women with disabilities reveal the generative praxis of social solidarity and cohesion, progressed via their nascent collective practices of gendered-disability advocacy.It will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of disability studies, gender studies, post-conflict studies, peace studies and social work.

This collection identifies the key tensions and conflicts being debated within the field of critical disability studies and provides both an outline of the field in its current form and offers manifestos for its future direction. Traversing a number of disciplines from science and technology studies to maternal studies, the collection offers a transdisciplinary vision for the future of critical disability studies. Some common thematic concerns emerge across the book such as digital futures, the usefulness of anger, creativity, family as disability allies, intersectionality, ethics, eugenics, accessibility and interdisciplinarity. However, the contributors who write as either disabled people or allies do not proceed from a singular approach to disability, often reflecting different or even opposing positions on these issues. Containing contributions from established and new voices in disability studies outlining their own manifesto for the future of the field, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students working within the fields of disability studies, cultural studies, sociology, law, history and education. The concerns introduced here are further explored in its sister volume Interdisciplinary approaches to disability: looking towards the future.