New Books in Disability Studies

What do werewolves, enslaved women and immortal beings have in common? And how can they shed light on contemporary questions of ableism and police brutality? In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018), Sami Schalk argues that black women’s speculative fiction changes the rules of literary and textual interpretation by opening up productive spaces of conversation at the intersection of (dis)ability, race and gender. Schalk undertakes a close reading of a variety of genres of speculative fiction including science fiction and neo-slave narratives by authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson and N.K. Jemisin. Her book shows the range of black women authors’ exploration and critique of marginalizing social and political structures and their visions for more just, equitable futures.Sami Schalk is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture, especially African American literature, speculative fiction, and women’s literature. She has published on literature, film, and material culture in a variety of peer-reviewed humanities journals.Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Narratives of Resistance in the Francophone World examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Autism as a condition has received much focused attention recently, but less attention has been paid to its politics. It is a condition that necessitates significant accommodations and interventions, which can be difficult for people with autism and their loved ones to obtain, depending on the state of autism public policy. Sociologist John J. Pitney argues that political science needs to more rigorously study autism policy and politics, as he outlines in his book The Politics of Autism: Navigating the Contested Spectrum (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). In our interview, we explore the evolution of our understanding of autism, how public policy impacts the lives of autistic individuals, and suggestions for future research. For anyone with autism or their loves ones, this interview offers suggestions for meeting important needs and hope for a better future.John J. Pitney Jr., Ph.D. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of The Art of Political Warfare and the coauthor of several books, including Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics as well as After Hope and Change: The 2012 Election and American Politics. In addition to his scholarly work, he has held staff positions in the U.S. Congress and the New York State Legislature. He maintains several blogs, including Autism Policy and Politics.Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City and Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute, where he also chairs their monthly LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know baseball as one of America’s fondest pastimes, but did you know there’s a version of the sport designed specifically for the blind? It’s called Beep Ball, and the players, with the exception of the pitcher, are all visually impaired. Founded by the National Beep Ball Association in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” that put people with disabilities at the center. In their new book, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Aimi Hamraie takes a “sledgehammer to history” in the spirit of one guerrilla activist group that they track in the archives—among many other people, objects, and historical contexts. Hamraie focuses on work around “access-knowledge”—that is, the forms of expertise that were considered legitimate ways of knowing and responding to disability through design. What has counted as legitimate access-knowledge, Hamraie argues, indicates designers’ goals: Was the aim of design to make productive workers, liberal consumers, or structures that materialized a commitment to spacial belonging? Who were the imagined users and how could new political priorities materialize in worlds already built? Answers to these questions made—and continue to remake—our material world and its frictions. Hamraie brings their training in feminist epistemology to never-before-accessed archival materials, along with an array of historical images and documents. The result is a persuasive, beautiful, and intrepidly researched book. Building Access torques received wisdom in disability studies, history of science, and architectural design, and models how to attend to research, writing, and publishing as a material practice.Hamraie is Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health & Society, and Director of Vanderbilt’s Critical Design Lab.This interview was a collective effort among Vanderbilt faculty and graduate students in the course New Approaches to STS. For more information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eugenic sterilization is usually associated with Nazi horrors before and during World War II. But, as Dr. Molly Ladd-Taylor reminds us, it was also practiced in the United States. In her new book Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017),... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zoe Wool‘s ethnography of rehabilitation After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke University Press, 2015) describes how soldiers injured in the war on terror are pulled towards a normal and idealized American life (Duke University Press, 2015). She describes how the iconic military hospital orients its patients (mostly men) towards normative masculine domestic ideals in an attempt to assimilate them to ordinary life. By closely following their lives in and out of rehabilitation (clinical and domestic), Wool shows us how impossible and fraught this “ordinary” is as the men subvert and are caught between multiple desires and realities: to be home, whole, ordinary fathers and husbands, heroes and symbols of exceptionalism. The weight of life is carried by these soldiers and veterans who are asked to do so much cultural work in the service of their nation on and off the battlefield.Zoe Wool is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University, where her teaching and research includes queer theory, personhood and the body, critical disability studies, science and technology studies, and violence and care.Dana Greenfield, PhD is a medical anthropologist and an MD candidate at the University of California, San Francisco. Next year, she will begin a residency in pediatrics. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2010), Sarah D. Phillips offers a compelling investigation of disability policies and movements in Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Scrupulously studied and researched, the data that the author presents reflect social and political changes that have been taking place in the country. Most importantly, this study is centered around people, around the lives of people who change our perception of life, love, and care and our understanding of self and other. In this regard, Sarah Phillips explores how official policies and informal movements, connected with the framing of the concept of disability, shape the ways people with physical impairments are integrated into social consciousness.As Sarah Phillips’s study shows, the concept of disability in Ukraine has undergone considerable transformations which were conditioned and triggered by historical circumstances. A particular attention is given to the Soviet period when official terms for the defining of disability became part not only of the Soviet official language but also of Soviet mentality as well. “Invalid”—a term defining a person who has an impairment—was rather often understood as a social stigma, entailing detrimental consequences for the emotional and psychological health of the individual. This “labelling” contributed to the deepening of a gap, separating citizens without impairments and citizens with disabilities.The current stage of the disability policies in Ukraine is to a large extent shaped by the challenges that were emerging during the Soviet period. As Sarah Phillips convincingly demonstrates, a number of profound changes in terms of the improvement of disability rights movement have taken place. Volunteering initiatives and individual endeavors to recover from injuries and find new ways of social activities considerably re-shaped the understanding of disability. This research recounts personal stories of people who discovered inner strength and stimuli to re-define their lives after severe injuries. When recovering, they do not have much to rely on; their will to rediscover joy and love is probably the most significant factor. In spite of positive changes, postsocialist Ukraine still has a number of problems that hinder an effective and productive re-integration of people with disabilities into society. Lack of equipment and accommodations that would facilitate access to public amenities is one of the factors that reduces physical mobility of people with disabilities.Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine touches upon the question of how the individual develops their relations with the inside and outside worlds after traumatizing experiences that lead to physical impairments. Drawing attention to the issues and concerns that are central to people experiencing spinal injuries, Sarah Philips invites her readers to think about disability as a phenomenon that breaks boundaries. Of course, medical diagnoses matter and in many cases these are, so to speak, official documents that shape the relationships within communities. But what seems to be at stake is the development of individual and societal relations which are based on inclusiveness that marks the individuals endeavor to reach out to others. In this regards, the title itself—Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine—encodes a message: disability, in spite of stereotypes and prejudices, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I (UWA Publishing, 2017), Leigh Straw, a Senior Lecturer in Aboriginal Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame, explores the history of repatriation and return of WWI soldiers to Western Australia. The soldiers’ physical and mental scars, including tuberculosis and what we today call PTSD, did not end with the armistice, as soldiers and their families struggled with the consequences of wartime trauma well into the 1920s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drawing on an ethnography of Down’s syndrome screening in two UK clinics, Gareth M. Thomas‘ Down’s Syndrome and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic (Routledge, 2017) explores how and why we are so invested in this practice and what effects this has on those involved. Informed by theoretical approaches that privilege the mundane and micro practices, discourses, materials, and rituals of everyday life, Downs Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics describes the banal world of the clinic and, in particular, the professionals contained within it who are responsible for delivering this programme. In so doing, it illustrates how Downs syndrome screening is downgraded and subsequently stabilised as a routine part of a pregnancy. Further, the book captures how this routinisation is deepened by a systematic, but subtle, framing of Downs syndrome as a negative pregnancy outcome. By unpacking the complex relationships between professionals, parents, technology, policy, and clinical practice, Thomas identifies how and why screening is successfully routinised and how it is embroiled in both new and familiar debates surrounding pregnancy, ethics, choice, diagnosis, care, disability, and parenthood.Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree from Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are all familiar with the idea that some persons are disabled. But what is disability? What makes it such that a condition–physical, cognitive, psychological–is a disability, rather than, say, a disease or illness? Is disability always and intrinsically bad? Are disabilities things to be cured? Might disabilities be merely ways of being different? And what role should the testimony and experiences of disabled persons play in addressing these questions? In The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2016) Elizabeth Barnes argues that, at least for a range of physical conditions characterized as disabilities, disabilities are merely ways in which bodies can be different, not ways of their being intrinsically badly off. She argues that this view of disability as mere difference has important implications for broader moral and social issues concerning disabled persons; she also argues that her view is better able to respect the experiences and testimony of disabled persons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices