scholarly journals Reviews of The New Political Economy of Disability by van Toorn & Disability and Neoliberal State Formations, by Soldatic

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 268-274
Author(s):  
Ravi Malhotra

Two recent disability studies monographs from Routledge devoted in part to the Australian state and its policies with respect to disabled people break exciting new ground in analyzing the economic marginalization of disabled people and how to empower them. Both volumes are creative, well-researched, and thoughtful contributions to disability studies because of the questions they pose and the insightful, novel ways they encourage us to think about the questions.

Author(s):  
Daniel Blackie

A common claim in disability studies is that industrialization has marginalized disabled people by limiting their access to paid employment. This claim is empirically weak and rests on simplified accounts of industrialization. Use of the British coal industry during the period 1780–1880 as a case study shows that reassessment of the effect of the Industrial Revolution is in order. The Industrial Revolution was not as detrimental to the lives of disabled people as has often been assumed. While utopian workplaces for disabled people hardly existed, industrial sites of work did accommodate quite a large number of workers with impairments. More attention therefore needs to be paid to neglected or marginalized features of industrial development in the theorization of disability. Drawing on historical research on disability in the industrial workplace will help scholars better understand the significance of industrialization to the lives of disabled people, both in the past and the present.


PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 627-634
Author(s):  
David T. Mitchell ◽  
Sharon L. Snyder

While disability studies has opened up new discursive spaces for revising cultural attitudes and beliefs about disability, its increasing legitimation in the contemporary academy comes with conflicts. The university as a research location cannot merely divorce itself from the ethical and restrictive practices that have characterized the past two centuries. In fact, it does so only at its own risk and, even more important, at the risk of further entrenching disabled people in its institutional grounding. The institutionalization of disability studies is just that—a formal cultural ingestion process that churns out knowledge about disability while resisting reflexive inquiries about whether or not more detail is inherently better. More knowledge is inherently better for the institution because it keeps the research mill active, but here we want to contemplate the degree to which generating more professionally based data about disability threatens to reproduce some of the problems that have characterized the study of disability to this point in history.


Author(s):  
Patrick McKelvey

“Choreographing the Chronic” brings together dance studies, queer disability studies, and performance studies to examine Octavio Campos’s 2007 dance-theater piece, The Bugchasers. The essay considers Campos’s work alongside other representations of bugchasers—people who deliberately pursue HIV—in popular journalism, queer theory, and social media. It argues that Campos’s work illuminates what these other representations obfuscate: that bugchasers stage alternative temporalities of seroconversion and HIV/AIDS more broadly. The bugchasers populating Campos’s piece thwart seroconversion’s prominence as ostensibly the most important event governing queer life. By extension, they challenge dominant understandings of people with HIV and other disabled people deprived of the capacity to represent anything other than disablement.


Sociology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-413
Author(s):  
Janice McLaughlin

The right to a supported independent life is a central dimension to disability politics. This focus has been used to challenge institutionalised living and the exclusion of disabled people from areas such as education and employment. The importance given to independence has also led to a critique of care. This critique has been a point of contention between disability studies and feminist theorising. In this article I argue it is important to return to these debates because contemporary conditions mean advocacy of independence is being co-opted into rhetorics of self-sufficiency. At the same time care on its own does not offer a productive alternative. The article draws from an ESRC project undertaken with disabled young people to advocate for the importance of both supported independence and of support being caring. It concludes by arguing that an expansive welfare state is required to create the conditions that can make that possible.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Shakespeare ◽  
Harriet Cooper ◽  
Dikmen Bezmez ◽  
Fiona Poland

Rehabilitation is a controversial subject in disability studies, often discussed in terms of oppression, normalisation, and unwanted intrusion. While there may be good reasons for positioning rehabilitation in this way, this has also meant that, as a lived experience, it is under-researched and neglected in disabilities literature, as we show by surveying leading disability studies journals. With some notable exceptions, rehabilitation research has remained the preserve of the rehabilitation sciences, and such studies have rarely included the voices of disabled people themselves, as we also demonstrate by surveying a cross-section of rehabilitation science literature. Next, drawing on new research, we argue for reframing access to rehabilitation as a disability equality issue. Through in-depth discussion of two case studies, we demonstrate that rehabilitation can be a tool for inclusion and for supporting an equal life. Indeed, we contend that rehabilitation merits disability researchers’ sustained engagement, precisely to ensure that a ‘right-based rehabilitation’ policy and practice can be developed, which is <em>not</em> oppressive, but reflects the views and experiences of the disabled people who rehabilitation should serve.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 142
Author(s):  
Diane Driedger

Approaching Disability: Critical Issues and Perspectives, by Rachel Mallett and Katherine Runswick-Cole, is meant to be an introductory text for disability studies at the undergraduate and graduate studies levels, and for disabled people and scholars in general.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 136
Author(s):  
Lyusyena Kirakosyan ◽  
Manoel Osmar Seabra Jr.

While the concept of legacy of sporting mega-events has been highly debated and filled with the promise to deliver tangible and measurable benefits, in the context of the Paralympics, defining legacy has been a challenge, due to a lack of universally understood and accepted nature and objectives of the Paralympic Games themselves. Although many authors and disability rights activists expect the Paralympics to accelerate agenda of inclusion of disabled people, a growing number of studies found that the Paralympics misrepresent disability and the reality of disabled people, and consequently reinforce negative stereotypes. Informed by critical disability studies, the central research aim of this article is to examine the social legacies of the 2012 and 2016 Paralympic Games for disabled people as identified in the media coverage of three selected periodicals, The Guardian, and O Globo. The article presents a summary of the qualitative analysis of the media coverage related to the topic of Paralympic legacy and disability rights, highlights its central themes and offers a discussion of the findings through the lens of critical disability studies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 183
Author(s):  
Laurence Parent

Les concepts « ableism » et « disablism » sont bien connus dans les disability studies et sont de plus en plus utilisés par activistes et artistes. Pourtant, ils commencent à peine à émerger dans la littérature francophone. Ces concepts importants ont jusqu’à présent été traduits de diverses façons (capacitisme, handicapisme, incapacitisme et validisme) sans qu’aucune traduction ne parvienne à s’imposer. Cet article fait état du retard des études francophones québécoise et canadienne sur le handicap et présente les récents développements relatifs à l’utilisation des concepts de capacitisime et de handicapisme. En tant qu’activiste, chercheure et femme handicapée francophone québécoise, je soutiens qu’il est nécessaire de développer un « isme » en français pour mieux comprendre l’oppression vécue par les personnes handicapées. The concepts, “ableism” and “disablism” are well known within the field of disability studies, and are being used more often by both activists and artists. However, they are only just starting to emerge in Francophone academic literature with terms such as capactitisme, handicapisme, incapacitisme and valisme. Although beginning to make waves, these terms have yet to be embraced. This article explores the major gap that exists in Francophone disability studies between Québec and Anglophone Canada, and presents recent developments of the usage of the concepts capacitisme and handicapisme. I will argue, from the stance as an activist, academic, Francophone from Quebec, disabled woman, the need to develop an “ism” in the French language to highlight and give a deeper understanding to the lived oppression of disabled people.


Author(s):  
Tobin Siebers

The standard locus of disability in Shakespeare has been Richard III, spanning from Freud’s seminal interpretation of Richard as a narcissist to readings in the emerging field of disability studies. Richard III represents the possibility for disability scholars to argue for the role that disability plays as a marker of villainy, one that obscures the humanity of disabled people, and they have made this case with precision and energy. It is crucial, however, to ask the price that disability scholars have paid by fitting Richard III so securely to their emerging discipline. If a certain disability studies chooses Richard III as its standard bearer, what would another disability studies look like that refuses him, and which Shakespearean character would be the standard bearer of this differently disabled disability studies?


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