Disability and Other Human Questions


Book Description

Goodley draws on decades of research to argue that disability has much to offer when we contemplate what it means to be human in the 21st Century. He addresses questions such as 'who's allowed to be human?'; 'are human beings dependent?'; and 'what does it mean to be human in the digital age?'




Disability Studies for Human Services


Book Description

Delivers knowledge critical to understanding the multidimensional aspects of working with varied populations with disabilities This is the only introduction to disability book with an interdisciplinary perspective that offers cross-disability and intersectionality coverage, as well as a special emphasis on many unique populations. Comprehensive and reader-friendly, it provides current, evidence-based knowledge on the key principles and practice of disability, while addressing advocacy, the disability rights movement, disability legislation, public policy, and law. Focusing on significant trends, the book provides coverage on persistent and emerging avenues in disability studies that are anticipated to impact a growing proportion of individuals in need of disability services. Woven throughout is an emphasis on psychosocial adaptation to disability supported by case studies and field-based experiential exercises. The text addresses the roles and functions of disability service providers. It also examines ethics in service delivery, credentialing, career paths, cultural competency, poverty, infectious diseases, and family and lifespan perspectives. Reinforcing the need for an interdisciplinary stance, each chapter discusses how varied disciplines work together to provide services addressing the whole person. Active learning is promoted through discussion boxes, self-check questions, and learning exercises. Faculty support includes PowerPoints, model syllabi, test bank, and instructor manual. Purchase includes digital access for use on most mobile devices or computers. Key Features: Provides readers with key knowledge and skills needed to effectively practice in multidisciplinary settings Offers interdisciplinary perspectives on conceptualization, assessment, and intervention across a broad range of disabilities and client populations Underscores the intersectionality of disability to correspond with trends in education focusing on social justice and underrepresented populations Includes research and discussion boxes citing current research activities and excerpts from noted experts in various human service disciplines Promotes active learning with discussion boxes, multiple-choice questions, case studies with discussion questions, and field-based experiential exercises Includes instructor manual, sample syllabi, PowerPoint slides, and test bank Identifies key references at the end of chapters and provides resources for additional information Purchase includes digital access for use on most mobile devices or computers.




Being Heumann


Book Description

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year for Nonfiction "...an essential and engaging look at recent disability history."— Buzzfeed One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human. A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn’t built for all of us and of one woman’s activism—from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington—Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann’s lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society. Paralyzed from polio at eighteen months, Judy’s struggle for equality began early in life. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a “fire hazard” to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license because of her paralysis, Judy’s actions set a precedent that fundamentally improved rights for disabled people. As a young woman, Judy rolled her wheelchair through the doors of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco as a leader of the Section 504 Sit-In, the longest takeover of a governmental building in US history. Working with a community of over 150 disabled activists and allies, Judy successfully pressured the Carter administration to implement protections for disabled peoples’ rights, sparking a national movement and leading to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Candid, intimate, and irreverent, Judy Heumann’s memoir about resistance to exclusion invites readers to imagine and make real a world in which we all belong.




A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability


Book Description

Responding to how little theological research has been done on intellectual (as opposed to physical) disability, this book asks, on behalf of individuals with profound intellectual disabilities, what it means to be human. That question has traditionally been answered with an emphasis on an intellectual capacity--the ability to employ concepts or to make moral choices--and has ignored the value of individuals who lack such intellectual capacities. The author suggests, rather, that human being be understood in terms of participation in relationships of mutual responsiveness, which includes but is not limited to intellectual forms of communicating. She supports her argument by developing a phenomenology of how an individual with a profound intellectual disability relates, drawn from her clinical experience as a physical therapist. She thereby demonstrates that these individuals participate in relationships of mutual responsiveness, though in nonsymbolic, bodily ways. To be human, to image God, she argues, is to respond to the world around us in any number of ways, bodily or symbolically. Such an understanding does not exclude people with intellectual disabilities but rather includes them among those who participate in the image of God.




Disability and Spirituality


Book Description

Disability and spirituality have traditionally been understood as two distinct spheres: disability is physical and thus belongs to health care professionals, while spirituality is religious and belongs to the church, synagogue, or mosque and their theologians, clergy, rabbis, and imams. This division leads to stunted theoretical understanding, limited collaboration, and segregated practices, all of which contribute to a lack of capacity to see people with disabilities as whole human beings and full members of a diverse human family. Contesting the assumptions that separate disability and spirituality, William Gaventa argues for the integration of these two worlds. As Gaventa shows, the quest to understand disability inevitably leads from historical and scientific models into the world of spirituality--to the ways that values, attitudes, and beliefs shape our understanding of the meaning of disability. The reverse is also true. The path to understanding spirituality is a journey that leads to disability--to experiences of limitation and vulnerability, where the core questions of what it means to be human are often starkly and profoundly clear. In Disability and Spirituality Gaventa constructs this whole and human path before turning to examine spirituality in the lives of those individuals with disabilities, their families and those providing care, their friends and extended relationships, and finally the communities to which we all belong. At each point Gaventa shows that disability and spirituality are part of one another from the very beginning of creation. Recovering wholeness encompasses their reunion--a cohesion that changes our vision and enables us to everyone as fully human.




Fables and Futures


Book Description

How new biomedical technologies—from prenatal testing to gene-editing techniques—require us to imagine who counts as human and what it means to belong. From next-generation prenatal tests, to virtual children, to the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, new biotechnologies grant us unprecedented power to predict and shape future people. That power implies a question about belonging: which people, which variations, will we welcome? How will we square new biotech advances with the real but fragile gains for people with disabilities—especially when their voices are all but absent from the conversation? This book explores that conversation, the troubled territory where biotechnology and disability meet. In it, George Estreich—an award-winning poet and memoirist, and the father of a young woman with Down syndrome—delves into popular representations of cutting-edge biotech: websites advertising next-generation prenatal tests, feature articles on “three-parent IVF,” a scientist's memoir of constructing a semisynthetic cell, and more. As Estreich shows, each new application of biotechnology is accompanied by a persuasive story, one that minimizes downsides and promises enormous benefits. In this story, people with disabilities are both invisible and essential: a key promise of new technologies is that disability will be repaired or prevented. In chapters that blend personal narrative and scholarship, Estreich restores disability to our narratives of technology. He also considers broader themes: the place of people with disabilities in a world built for the able; the echoes of eugenic history in the genomic present; and the equation of intellect and human value. Examining the stories we tell ourselves, the fables already creating our futures, Estreich argues that, given biotech that can select and shape who we are, we need to imagine, as broadly as possible, what it means to belong.




Disability Visibility


Book Description

“Disability rights activist Alice Wong brings tough conversations to the forefront of society with this anthology. It sheds light on the experience of life as an individual with disabilities, as told by none other than authors with these life experiences. It's an eye-opening collection that readers will revisit time and time again.” —Chicago Tribune One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.




What Can a Body Do?


Book Description

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.




Disability


Book Description

The third edition of Disability remains an indispensable tool for human service practitioners in understanding disability from an empowerment perspective. The authors address policy, theory, description, and practice, stressing the difference of disability rather than the dysfunction of disability. The text is illustrated with in-depth personal narratives by those living with disability and thought-provoking sidebars that ask readers to consider the implications of their own reactions to disability. Mackelprang and Salsgiver establish the historical and societal context in which those with disabilities are marginalized, discuss the major groupings of disabilities, and finally offer a model for assessment and practice that human service practitioners can adopt. The book develops a contemporary perspective in which people with disabilities are considered valuable and contributing members of society. Using this book, students will find not only a prescription for professional assessment and practice, but also the necessary understanding of common issues those with disabilities face, the social contexts in which they live, and the tools to work with people with disabilities as equals and partners.




Disability and the Good Human Life


Book Description

This collection of original essays, from both established scholars and newcomers, takes up a recent debate in philosophy, sociology, and disability studies on whether disability is intrinsically a harm that lowers a person's quality of life. While this is a new question in disability scholarship, it also touches on one of the oldest philosophical questions: what is the good human life? Historically, philosophers have not been interested in the topic of disability, and when they are it is usually only in relation to questions such as euthanasia, abortion, or the moral status of disabled people. Consequently disability has been either ignored by moral and political philosophers or simply equated with a bad human life, a life not worth living. This collection takes up the challenge that disability poses to basic questions of political philosophy and bioethics, among others, by focusing on fundamental issues and practical implications of the relationship between disability and the good human life.