New Books in Disability Studies

Nate Holdren is the author of Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Injury Impoverished looks at the history of U.S. workplace injuries in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries. As the workers, employers, and reformers attempted to tackle the drastically high rates of workplace injuries and deaths, th...

Jeanne Simons devoted her career as a social worker and educator to the study, treatment, and care of children with autism. In 1955, she established the Linwood Children's Center in Ellicott City, Maryland, one of the first schools dedicated to children with autism. Her Linwood Model, developed there, was widely adopted and still forms the basis for a variety of autism intervention techniques. Inc...

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Practice: A Comparative Analysis of the Role of Courts (Oxford UP, 2018) brings together an extraordinary collection of data and analysis which concerns how domestic courts interpret and apply the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It is the first thorough comparative collection of research which brings together th...

In this episode, I interview Michael Snediker, professor of English at the University of Houston, about his book, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment, recently published by University of Minnesota Press. At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates...

Dennis Frost’s More than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan is a history of disability sports in modern Japan. The 1964, 1998, and upcoming Paralympics are important case studies, but Frost’s interests go far beyond this pinnacle of international, competitive disability sports. More than Medals explores the history and development of disability sports, high...

Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability (2020, University of Minnesota Press) provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization wit...

It’s often said that the time in our lives can often pass without us noticing. Old age can come before we realize it, and it brings with it new elements to our own daily lives that we couldn’t have anticipated before. Observed from a distance and growing old can seem like a universal experience, but observed up close, it becomes clear that the different ways people age are as varied and unique as...

Leon Brenner's The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) makes a forceful case for the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the understanding and treatment of autism. Refusing both cognitive and identitarian approaches to the topic, Brenner rigorously theorizes autism as a unique mode of subjectivity and relation to language that sits alongside the classical...

In The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans (St. Martin's Press, 2020), anthropologist Eben Kirksey visits the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to ask: Whose values are guiding gene editing experiments? And what does this new era of scientific inquiry mean for the future of the human species? At a conference in Hong Kong in November 2018, Dr. He Jianku...

Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey (University of California Press, 2020) is an exploration of “the ways in which . . .veterans’ gendered and classed experiences of warfare and disability are hardened into politics . . .how self, community, and the world-making practices of disabled veterans get tangled up with ultranationalist politics in contemporary Tur...

Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with...

At first glance, the term “expressive individualism” seems benign enough. After all, people throughout the Western world value their personal freedom and the liberty to make crucial life decisions such as whether to have children and how and when they wish to die. What could possibly be wrong with the idea that everyone should be in control of his or her own body and fate to the greatest extent po...

Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as monstrous and deformed beings. The English drew on pre-existing European ideas about monstrosity and deformity to argue that Africans were a monstrous race, suspended between human and animal, and as such only fit for servitude. Joining blackness to disability transformed English ideas about defective bod...

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most. Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspi...

Out of the carnage of World War II comes an unforgettable tale about defying the odds and finding hope in the most harrowing of circumstances. Wheels of Courage: How Paralyzed Veterans from World War II Invented Wheelchair Sports, Fought for Disability Rights, and Inspired a Nation (Center Street, 2020) tells the stirring story of the soldiers, sailors, and marines who were paralyzed on the battle...

In this episode, I speak with Federico R. Waitoller about his book, Excluded by Choice: Urban Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketplace (Teachers College Press). This book highlights the challenges faced by students of color who have special needs and their parents who evaluate their educational options. We discuss the services to which students with disabilities are entitled, how th...

Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (Stanford University Press, 2020) tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the H...

In The Autistic Stage: How Cognitive Disability Changed 20th-Century Performance (Sense Publishers, 2015) (Sense Publishers, 2015), Telory Arendell creates a revolutionary fusion of disability studies and performance studies. Arendell touches on the work of autistic poet and librettist Christopher Knowles, portrayal of autism in film, and the use of theatre as a therapy for those on the autism spe...

In 1999, the Organization of African Unity cited dissatisfaction with the solely “global” approach that the UN had applied in their International Decade for Disabled Persons (1983–1992), and declared an African Decade of Persons with Disabilities (1999–2009) to explore “local” approaches. Was the UN’s approach truly detached from the ground reality? In this podcast, Sam De Schutter discusses his a...

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Jay Timothy Dolmage of the University of Waterloo on the new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2018), a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American...

The right to decision making is important for all people. It allows us to choose how to we our lives – both on a daily basis, and also in terms of how we wish to express ourselves, to live in accordance with our values and desires. However, the right to make decisions has been, and continues to be, routinely denied to people with disabilities – sometimes by family members and carers, or by institu...

Throughout her new book, HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth (University of Michigan Press 2019), Elizabeth A. Wheeler uses a fictional place called HandiLand as a yardstick for measuring how far American society has progressed toward social justice and how much remains to be done. In a rich array of chapters, Wheeler considers the new prominence of youth with disabilities in contemporary young...

In her new book Fat, Pretty, and Soon to Be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society (AK Press 2019), sociologist and storyteller Kimberly Dark considers what it means to look a certain way. Integrating memoir with cultural critique, Dark describes her experience navigating the world as a fat, queer, white-privileged, gender-conforming, eventually disabled, and inevitably aging “girl with a pretty fac...

David Pettinicchio has written Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform (Stanford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. In Politics of Empowerment, David Pettinicchio offers a history of the political development of disability rights in the United States. Since the 1920s, policy makers have framed and...

All wars, in a practical sense, center on the destruction of the human body, and in Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Handley-Cousins, a clinical assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, shows how disability was a necessary by-product of the U.S. Civil War. Handley-Cousins argues that disability in the Civil War North extended far...