Community Reads

What is the direct impact that disability studies has on the lives of disabled people today? The editors and contributors to this essential anthology, Barriers and Belonging, provide thirty-seven personal narratives thatexplore what it means to be disabled and why the field of disability studies matters. The editors frame the volume by introducing foundational themes of disability studies. They provide a context of how institutions--including the family, schools, government, and disability peer organizations--shape and transform ideas about disability. They explore how disability informs personal identity, interpersonal and community relationships, and political commitments. In addition, there are heartfelt reflections on living with mobility disabilities, blindness, deafness, pain, autism, psychological disabilities, and other issues. Other essays articulate activist and pride orientations toward disability, demonstrating the importance of reframing traditional narratives of sorrow and medicalization. The critical, self-reflective essays in Barriers and Belonging provide unique insights into the range and complexity of disability experience.

In Brilliant Imperfection Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure--the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds. The stories he tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, Clare weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, he adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure. Ultimately Brilliant Imperfection reveals cure to be an ideology grounded in the twin notions of normal and natural, slippery and powerful, necessary and damaging all at the same time.

Create campuses inclusive and supportive of disabled students, staff, and faculty Disability in Higher Education: A Social Justice Approach examines how disability is conceptualized in higher education and ways in which students, faculty, and staff with disabilities are viewed and served on college campuses. Drawing on multiple theoretical frameworks, research, and experience creating inclusive campuses, this text offers a new framework for understanding disability using a social justice lens. Many institutions focus solely on legal access and accommodation, enabling a system of exclusion and oppression. However, using principles of universal design, social justice, and other inclusive practices, campus environments can be transformed into more inclusive and equitable settings for all constituents. The authors consider the experiences of students, faculty, and staff with disabilities and offer strategies for addressing ableism within a variety of settings, including classrooms, residence halls, admissions and orientation, student organizations, career development, and counseling. They also expand traditional student affairs understandings of disability issues by including chapters on technology, law, theory, and disability services. Using social justice principles, the discussion spans the entire college experience of individuals with disabilities, and avoids any single-issue focus such as physical accessibility or classroom accommodations. The book will help readers: Consider issues in addition to access and accommodation Use principles of universal design to benefit students and employees in academic, cocurricular, and employment settings Understand how disability interacts with multiple aspects of identity and experience. Despite their best intentions, college personnel frequently approach disability from the singular perspective of access to the exclusion of other important issues. This book provides strategies for addressing ableism in the assumptions, policies and practices, organizational structures, attitudes, and physical structures of higher education.

Ronald Berger provides students with a comprehensive, accessible introduction to the key themes and controversies in disability studies.

This innovative textbook: provides historical context, from ancient times to the present, traces disability's impact throughout the life course, gives prominence to the voices of people with disabilities, explores popular culture's role in distorting ideas about disability, and addresses emerging ethical issues, such as the implications of genetic selection

Illustrating the profound consequences of differing conceptions of physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments, Berger provides a solid foundation for making sense of disability as a social phenomenon.