HIST 490: Global Disability Histories (Fall 2024)

- Fully revised and expanded version of the best selling first edition. - Examines emerging and cutting-edge areas as well as core areas of contention. - Contains new chapters from an international selection of leading scholars.

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.

How are disability and rehabilitation conceived of in different cultures? How can these concepts be made accessible? Studies from the fields of sociology, ethnology and educational science address these questions, whilst contributors from rehabilitation projects in development cooperation and from self-help movements highlight culturally different perceptions of disability. A distinctive feature of this reader is the dialogue it creates by bringing together scientific praxis and practical work.

In this ground-breaking new work, Dan Goodley makes the case for a novel, distinct, intellectual, and political project - dis/ability studies - an orientation that might encourage us to think again about the phenomena of disability and ability. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary areas, including sociology, psychology, education, policy and cultural studies, this much needed text takes the most topical and important issues in critical disability theory, and pushes them into new theoretical territory. Goodley argues that we are entering a time of dis/ability studies, when both categories of disability and ability require expanding upon as a response to the global politics of neoliberal capitalism. Divided into two parts, the first section traces the dual processes of ableism and disablism, suggesting that one cannot exist without the other, and makes the case for a research-driven and intersectional analysis of dis/ability. The second section applies this new analytical framework to a range of critical topics, including: The biopolitics of dis/ability and debility Inclusive education Psychopathology Markets, communities and civil society. Dis/ability Studies provides much needed depth, texture and analysis in this emerging discipline. This accessible text will appeal to students and researchers of disability across a range of disciplines, as well as disability activists, policymakers, and practitioners working directly with disabled people.