Disability Studies is interdisciplinary, examining the experience of disability from a spectrum of “truths”. However, people living with disability and their experiences are integral to what we learn and understand. Disability Studies scholars are lawyers, philosophers, social workers, medical professionals, public health officials, educators, artists, anthropologists, architects, and more. Scholars are encouraged to think inclusively and creatively. The deconstruction of assumed knowledge, stigma, and bias are integral to the field with a focus on unraveling the boundaries between “normal” and “abnormal” and what these terms actually mean. Disability is understood to be conditional to environmental and social factors as well as physical, cognitive, and mental factors (Adams, Reiss, & Serlin, 2015). The term “disability” has not remained stable throughout history and will likely continue to change. This is an important facet of disability.
Text for this section courtesy of UT's Texas Center for Disability Studies.
Terminology may be offensive and inaccurate
Historical Lack of Cataloging
Text for this section courtesy of Stacy Reardon and Jennifer Dorner from the UC Berkeley Libraries.
Keywords for Disability Studies, ebook by
Keywords for Disability Studies aims to broaden and define the conceptual framework of disability studies for readers and practitioners in the field and beyond. The volume engages some of the most pressing debates of our time, such as prenatal testing, euthanasia, accessibility in public transportation and the workplace, post-traumatic stress, and questions about the beginning and end of life. Each of the 60 essays in Keywords for Disability Studies focuses on a distinct critical concept, including “ethics,” “medicalization,” “performance,” “reproduction,” “identity,” and “stigma,” among others. Although the essays recognize that “disability” is often used as an umbrella term, the contributors to the volume avoid treating individual disabilities as keywords, and instead interrogate concepts that encompass different components of the social and bodily experience of disability. The essays approach disability as an embodied condition, a mutable historical phenomenon, and a social, political, and cultural identity. An invaluable resource for students and scholars alike, Keywords for Disability Studies brings the debates that have often remained internal to disability studies into a wider field of critical discourse, providing opportunities for fresh theoretical considerations of the field’s core presuppositions through a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.
The Disability Studies Reader, 2013 edition, ebook by
The Fourth Edition of the Disability Studies Reader breaks new ground by emphasizing the global, transgender, homonational, and posthuman conceptions of disability. Including physical disabilities, but exploring issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities, this edition explores more varieties of bodily and mental experience. New histories of the legal, social, and cultural give a broader picture of disability than ever before. Now available for the first time in eBook format 978-0-203-07788-7.
The Disability Studies Reader, 2016 edition, print book by
The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader¿s tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.
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