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As a field of inquiry, disability studies in education stands at the broad intersection of disability studies and educational studies. This book introduces graduate students, educational researchers, and teacher educators to the range of scholarly inquiry emerging from this exciting new field. Susan L. Gabel pulls together a sampling of the vast array of available scholarship that includes readings that intersect curriculum theory, critical policy analysis, personal narrative, and much more. Although disability studies in education has only recently been recognized as a field of inquiry with an identifiable body of literature, the chapters in this book present the work of some of the major scholars of disability studies in education. ... Read more

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Too many typos!
I am very disappointed with the number of typos contained in this study guide, especially considering the cost.While the information contained within the book is helpful and covers just about everything that you need to know to prepare for the test, there are typos throughout the book.The answers and their explanations in the pre-test and practice test sometimes do not match the question, are simply incorrect, or do not make any sense in relation to the question.This book needs to be re-edited by a competent editor, not an 8th grader. ... Read more

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This collection of essays takes up the issues surrounding prenatal testing and selective abortion. Both the medical and broader communities view such tests as largely beneficial but this book also reflects the objections raised by the disability rights community. ... Read more

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Airing the disability rights perspective
(A longer version of this review ran in the January 2001 issue of Ragged Edge magazine.) Does prenatal testing for genetic defects "send a message" to disabled people? Adrienne Asch, the Henry L. Luce Professor of Biology, Ethics and Reproduction at Wellesley College, insists that it does. For two years, Asch and Hastings Center bioethicist Eric Parens engaged a group of scholars, philosophers, ethicists, biologists, physicians, sociologists and educators under the auspices of the Hastings Center to grapple with that question, and the disability rights perspective on prenatal testing in general. This book is the product of that project.

After listening to all the opinions expressed by project members, Asch writes in an essay late in the book that she has not changed her mind. She says that people who choose to abort based on a diagnosis of disability are "allowing a single trait to stand in for the whole, to obliterate the whole."People like Baily -- and they are in the large majority in society -- simply do not believe that aborting a fetus because it will likely have a disability "sends a message" that is bigoted; most do not believe that it sends any message at all. Many do not agree that the provision of more accurate information about disabilities or about living with particular disabilities would make any great difference in their decision to abort a fetus they feared carried a "defect." Even knowing about disabled people and their lives, she would still not want to bear a disabled child if it could be avoided, says Baily. Nor do they buy the "any/particular" distinction articulated by Asch, who has been writing about the disability perspective on reproductive choice for decades.The "any/particular distinction" refers to the difference between the decision to simply not have any child at all at the time -- the decision of someone who becomes pregnant when they were not planning a family and thus seeks an abortion, for example -- and the decision to abort a particular fetus, even when the woman in fact wants a child, when prenatal testing has revealed disability in the fetus. The project, funded in part by a grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, did not reach unanimity on any of the "major claims" of the disability rights movement -- not after five intense two-day intense meetings, not despite ongoing email correspondence among participants, notwithstanding meetings with members of the Society for Disability Studies.So are we simply at that juncture in history in which almost no one outside one's tiny community of thought believes one's critique; before one's ideas are accepted? Is this what it was like in the 1800s to hear perfectly nice, logical people say things which we now we see as hopelessly racist? It's hard to tell.This is an important, though academic, book. It lays out both the disability rights critique from Asch, Marsha Saxton and others, and the reasons why people just don't "buy" the argument that life with a disability is alright, which is really what it comes right down to.

"Using prenatal tests to prevent the births of babies with disabilities seems to be self-evidently good to many people," Asch writes. No matter that critics argue that these beliefs stem from unexamined attitudes about disability; this project shows that when the attitudes are examined they are often found to be fine attitudes -- by those who hold them. In her piercingly honest essay "Somewhere A Mockingbird" (which also appeared in the anthology Bigger Than The Sky: Disabled Women on Parenting (Ragged Edge, Jan./ Feb. 2000), Deborah Kent reports what happens when she and her husband begin to plan having a child, knowing it may be born with Kent's genetic blindness: Despite the closeness of the couple, writes Kent, she had failed to convince her husband, even after their years together, "that it is really okay to be blind.""I will always believe that blindness is a neutral trait, neither to be prized nor shunned. Very few people, including those dearest to me, share that conviction... They cannot fully relinquish their negative assumptions....""Though they dread blindness as a fate to be avoided at almost any cost," she writes of her family and friends, "they give me their trust and respect. I don't understand how they live without discomfort amid such contradictions."(emphasis ours.) Yet many of the project's participants live with this contradiction seemingly quite well and without question.If there is a theme to be taken away from this volume, it is that society can quite easily live without examining such contradictions. In one of the most sobering essays in the book, Nancy Press writes that "certain silences in the public discourse have actually enabled the routinization and rapid growth of prenatal testing,.... by obscuring or limiting the need for public debate about two topics about which Americans are deeply conflicted but which lie at the heart of prenatal testing: abortion and disability."This book arrives at a time in our society when prenatal testing is becoming routine -- and a duty. As tests for finding ever more genetic traits and predispositions become ever easier to administer, our country's legal hubris being what it is, women will be told to get them done, or else.Sociologist Dorothy Wertz contends that "even if some lines might be drawn in practice they will not make a difference since market and political forces will determine which prenatal tests are offered and in what kind of an atmosphere they will be offered." Biologist Pilar Ossorio points out that "when prenatal tests become part of routine [medical] practice, courts will find that physicians have a duty to offer them."Detailing the strange and horrific outcome, today's "wrongful birth" and "wrongful life" lawsuits (in which the disabled child argues before the court "that her life is worse than non-existence"), Ossorio's chapter is a sober reminder of the road we head down when we reject the disability rights critique of prenatal testing.

A Must Read for those Interested in Disability Rights
This fascinating and thought-provoking book should be read by anyone interested in disability rights.It presents a variety of views on a challenging topic.The book deals with philosophical issues in understandable terms, and argues for a new paradigm for consideration of prenatal testing.

Different chapters are written by various authors from different backgrounds.Physicians, professors, parents, those with disabilities, therapists and lawyers all contribute to this multifaceted approach to whether or not prenatal testing devalues those with disabilities.Social factors and medical factors are discussed with clarity.This book will cause the reader to question the basis for their pre-concieved beliefs about what it means to have a disability, and will encourage them to look at this issue in a more thoughtful way.

I found this book difficult to put down, and have recommended it to several friends. ... Read more

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Disability is a thorny and muddled concept - especially in the field of disability studies - and social accounts contest with more traditional biologically based approaches in highly politicized debates. Sustained theoretical scrutiny has sometimes been lost amongst the controversy and philosophical issues have often been overlooked in favour of the sociological. Arguing about Disability fills that gap by offering analysis and debate concerning the moral nature of institutions, policy and practice, and their significance for disabled people and society.

This pioneering collection is divided into three sections covering definitions and theories of disability; disabled people in society and applied ethics. Each contributor – drawn from a wide range of academic backgrounds including disability studies, sociology, psychology, education, philosophy, law and health science – uses a philosophical framework to explore a central issue in disability studies. The issues discussed include personhood, disability as a phenomenon, social justice, discrimination and inclusion.

Providing an overview of the intersection of disability studies and philosophical ethics, Arguing about Disability is a truly interdisciplinary undertaking. It will be invaluable for all academics and students with an interest in disability studies or applied ethics, as well as disability activists.

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Collecting together essays written by an international set of contributors, this book provides an important contribution to the emerging field of disability history. It explores changes in understandings of deformity and disability between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and reveal the ways in which different societies have conceptualised the normal and the pathological.

Through a variety of case studies including: early modern birth defects, homosexuality, smallpox scarring, vaccination, orthopaedics, deaf education, eugenics, mental deficiency, and the experiences of psychologically scarred military veterans, this book provides new perspectives on the history of physical, sensory and intellectual anomaly.

Examining changes over five centuries, it charts how disability was delineated from other forms of deformity and disfigurement by a clearer medical perspective. Essays shed light on the experiences of oppressed minorities often hidden from mainstream history, but also demonstrate the importance of discourses of disability and deformity as key cultural signifiers which disclose broader systems of power and authority, citizenship and exclusion.

The diverse nature of the material in this book will make it relevant to scholars interested in cultural, literary, social and political, as well as medical, history.

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From public transportation and education to adequate access to buildings, the social impact of disability has been felt everywhere since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. And a remarkable groundswell of activism and critical literature has followed in this wake.

Customer Reviews (3)

Practical theory at its best!
I highly recommend Linton's work for all those who may, like myself find themselves pushing hard at the school doors of full inclusion in time and space. While a teacher may know the frustrations of not having others "get" why they are doing "it", that is inclusion, Linton's text provides a discursive analysis of those practices, frames and meanings we need to thoroughly engage if inclusion will ever succeed. Timesless, provocative and required reading.

thanks, simi!
in the span of a course titled 'representing disability' i really found simi linton's work to be the most comprehensive and inspiring literature that we covered.linton, in this text lies down not only the challenges facing the disability rights movement today, but also a road map for the future.mad props.

Important, Thoughtful, and Timely
Claiming Disability: Making the Case for Inclusion

In Alice'sRestaurant, Arlo Guthrie archly reminded us that when you've got threepeople, you've got a movement. The disability rights movement has movedmiles beyond the three-person requirement. There have been sit-ins, busboycotts, rallies, and student strikes. Disability studies, by contrast,has been something of a stepchild of that movement and, until recently, hasbeen largely without a coherent manifesto.Simi Linton has remedied thatsituation.In Claiming Disability, she carefully and concisely makes thecase for the legitimacy of disability studies as an academic discipline.She identifies the core areas of inquiry and the domains of discourse towhich disability studies should address itself, and she helps us tounderstand the important contributions that disability studies can maketoward enriching and contextualizing our understanding and experience ofdisability and the disabled.

In making the case for disability studiesshe draws parallels to black studies and women's studies to help us see theimportance of empowering scholars to move beyond the narrow confines of theapplied "fixit" fields of medicine, rehabilitation, remediation,and accommodation that she aptly characterizes as "not disabilitystudies".Both in academia, and in that broader set of endeavors thatwe like to refer to as "the real world", Linton has importantthings to say about both our need to rethink disability and about the waysin which we can ago about doing just that.

The value of this slim volumegoes beyond its important role as a powerful argument for the inclusion ofdisability studies in the liberal arts curriculum.Dr. Linton alsoprovides us with a valuable tool for the analysis of disabiliy associocultural phenomenon . By updating and expanding a taxonomy initiallydeveloped for the anthropological investigation of cross-cultural attitudestowards disability she has crafted a metric of considerable heuristicpower.

As any self-respecting 49er will quickly point out, staking aclaim is only the first of many difficult steps toward finally reapingreward.Nevertheless, a foundation is being built, and Claiming Disabilityis both a tool and a benchmark. It's publication marks a coming of age forthe disability rights movement and a seminal contribution to disabilitystudies. Several recent books have advanced the cause of disabilityawareness (Joseph Shapiro's No Pity and John Hockenberry's MovingViolations come immediately to mind). With Claiming Disability, the nascentfield of disability studies will be strengthened and advanced. You may havegathered by now, that I think that this is an important book.I believethat an increasingly sophisticated public awareness of disability issuesand disability concerns is well served and will be furthered by ClaimingDisability.Read it, talk about it, and pass it on!

September 15, 1998 ... Read more

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Spurred by the United Nation's International Decade for Disabled Persons and medical anthropology's coming of age, anthropologists have recently begun to explore the effects of culture on the lives of the mentally and physically impaired. This major collection of essays both reframes disability in terms of social processes and offers for the first time a global, multicultural perspective on the subject. Using research undertaken in a wide variety of settings--from a longhouse in central Borneo to a community of Turkish immigrants in Stockholm--contributors explore the significance of mental, sensory, and motor impairments in light of fundamental, culturally determined assumptions about humanity and personhood. ... Read more

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An Excellent Introduction to Disability and Culture
Published in 1995 this collection was on the edge of the disability studies movement.Though later text may have surpassed this early edition it is invaluable for it's "medical anthropology" approach to viewing aspects of disability.It contributes to the growing body of literature that examines disability as a socio-political construction rather than just a medical condition. ... Read more

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This collection brings together scholarship and creative writing that brings together two of the most innovative fields to emerge from critical and cultural studies in the past few decades: Disability studies and performance studies. It draws on writings about such media as live performance art, photography, silent film, dance, personal narrative and theatre, using such diverse perspectives and methods as queer theory, gender, feminist, and masculinity studies, dance studies, as well as providing first publication of creative writings by award-winning poets and playwrights.

This book was based on a special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly.

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This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disabilityin particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysiswho challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussingmemoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse.Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United Statessuch works as Juliet Wittmans Breast Cancer Journal, John Hockenberrys Moving Violations, Paul Monettes Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, and Lou Ann Walkers A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a FamilyCouser addresses questions of both poetics and politics. He examines why and under what circumstances individuals choose to write about illness or disability; what role plot plays in such narratives; how and whether closure is achieved; who assumes the prerogative of narration; which conditions are most often represented; and which literary conventions lend themselves to representing particular conditions. By tracing the development of new subgenres of personal narrative in our time, this book explores how explicit consideration of illness and disability has enriched the repertoire of life writing. In addition, Cousers discussion of medical discourse joins the current debate about whether the biomedical model is entirely conducive to humane care for ill and disabled people.With its sympathetic critique of the testimony of those most affected by these conditions, Recovering Bodies contributes to an understanding of the relations among bodily dysfunction, cultural conventions, and identity in contemporary America. ... Read more

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Points of Contact brings together contributions by leading writers, artists, scholars, and critics to provide a remarkably broad and consistently engaging look at the intersection of disability and the arts. The contributions include essays and memoirs by a wide range of disabled and nondisabled writers, including Bell Gale Chevigny, Sandra Gilbert, Joseph Grigely, Georgina Kleege, Victoria Ann Lewis, Carol Poore, Tobin Siebers, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson among others; poetry by Brooke Horvath, Joan Seliger Sidney, William Stafford, and others; fiction by Stephen Dixon, Michael Downs, Georgina Kleege, Dallas Wiebe, and others.
The collection covers a broad range of subjects and concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and the arts, including fetal alcohol syndrome, education, and identity; representations of disability in the visual arts and the complicated position of the disabled spectator; the impact of cancer on the patient and the caregiver; the similarities between beauty pageants and freak shows; Alzheimer's disease; prosthetic devices; the mechanized disabled body; disability and performance; and profiles of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, Christopher Reeve, Franklin Roosevelt, and sado-masochistic performance artist Bob Flanagan.
Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture was originally published as a special double issue of the well regarded literary magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review. Now available in a single, convenient paperback volume, its broad range of perspectives on disability and its entertaining and engaging selections will appeal to general readers, scholars, and students alike.
Susan Crutchfield is lecturer in English, University of Michigan. Marcy Epstein teaches literature at The Roeper School and women's studies at Henry Ford Community College.
... Read more

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With contributions from leading scholars in the USA, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, Japan, India, Australia and Jordan, this text looks at the study of disablity within the context of the "postmodern" world of the 21st century. Organized into three sections, the volume opens with an exploration of theoretical perspectives, looking especially at phenomenology, the body and at concepts of difference and identity. The second section deals with culture, discussing aesthetics, narrative, film, architecture and design; while the final section explores social practice with papers discussing issues which include disabled children's perspectives (which dominate the US approach). The authors aim to demystify the concept of postmodernity and to suggest ways in which it fosters a holistic approach to the study of disability that better represents and reflects the complexity of disabled people's experiences. ... Read more

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Taking Disability Studies in a new direction
This was one of the first books in disability studies to seriously attempt to engage with postmodern social theory.Like all edited collections, it can be somewhat patchy... but some of the contributions are outstanding.

It largely engages with debates in Britain about the social model of disability (which separates impairment from disability) and suggests that a more nuanced approach is necessary.

For those in disability studies, there are some very useful chapters... for those outside academia, less so.

For those of you interested in disability studies, here's some more information:

The (British) social model of disability moved the focus of disability studies away from what is "wrong" with a disabled person's mind/body/senses etc onto the disabling barriers in society. But the social model still left a lot of personal and theoretical questions largely unexplored. For instance, it didn't really grapple with the question of identity in any serious way. And it didn't really engage with contemporary postmodernist thinking. This edited collection, which examines a range of disabilities, goes some way towards suggesting how a more serious engagement with theories like postmodernism might be done.A pretty heavily theoretical topic, one that might be interesting for graduate students especially. ... Read more

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Featuring sample lessons, information on finding age-appropriate materials, and more, this guide helps teachers create thematic units that build literacy skills in students with significant disabilities. ... Read more

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A solid recommendation for any college-level education library
Literacy Beyond Picture Books tells how to teach literacy to middle and high school students, presenting a step-by-step guide to building vocabulary, blending in media and assistive technologies, and setting and meeting student goals. Teachers can build whole units around a selected text by adding hands-on activities - and LITERACY BEYOND PICTURE BOOKS tells how in a solid recommendation for any college-level education library. ... Read more

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Certified Disability Management Specialist Exam Flashcard Study System uses repetitive methods of study to teach you how to break apart and quickly solve difficult test questions on the Certified Disability Management Specialist Exam. Study after study has shown that spaced repetition is the most effective form of learning, and nothing beats flashcards when it comes to making repetitive learning fun and fast. Our flashcards enable you to study small, digestible bits of information that are easy to learn and give you exposure to the different question types and concepts. Certified Disability Management Specialist Exam Flashcard Study System covers: Types of Disabilities, Holistic Approach, Genetic Counseling, Transferable Skills, Multiple Sclerosis, Disability Case Manager, Worker's Disability Syndrome, Medical Terminology, Disability Management, Psychiatric Disorders, TBI, Case Management System, Basic Intervention Categories, Social Security Disability Insurance, Worksite and Job Analysis, Drug Abuse, Americans with Disabilities Act, Ergonomics, Legal Compliance, Disability Management Program, Coronary Artery Disease, Return to Work Plan, Type II Diabetes Mellitus, Confidential Information, Employee Assistance Program, Amputations, HIV Transmission, Orthoses, Retardation, Worker's Compensation, Change Agent, Data Analysis, Team Approach, Disabled Client, Disability Determination, Needs Assessment, Alcoholism, Therapeutic Classification, Long-term Disability, Choice of Vocation, Acute Pain vs. Chronic Pain, Learning Disability, Undue Hardship, Catastrophic Illnesses, and much more... ... Read more