ABSTRACT

Grouped around four central themes – illness and impairment, disabling processes, care and control, and communication and representations – this collection offers a fresh perspective on disability research, showing how theory and data can be brought together in new and exciting ways.

Disability Research Today starts by showing how engaging with issues around illness and impairment is vital to a multidisciplinary understanding of disability as a social process. The second section explores factors that affect disabled people, such as homelessness, violence and unemployment. The third section turns to social care, and how disabled people are prevented from living with independence and dignity. Finally, the last section examines how different imagery and technology impacts our understandings of disability and deafness.

Showcasing empirical work from a range of countries, including Japan, Norway, Italy, Australia, India, the UK, Turkey, Finland and Iceland, this collection shows how disability studies can be simultaneously sophisticated, accessible and policy-relevant. Disability Research Today is suitable for students and researchers in disability studies, sociology, social policy, social work, nursing and health studies.

chapter |5 pages

Introduction

The role of the family

part |53 pages

Illness and impairment

chapter |16 pages

Learning from tojisha kenkyu

Mental health “patients” studying their difficulties with their peers 1

chapter |17 pages

The psycho-social impact of impairments

The case of motor neurone disease

part |72 pages

Disabling processes

chapter |16 pages

Sites of oppression

Dominant ideologies and women with disabilities in India

chapter |21 pages

‘The invisibles’

Conceptualising the intersectional relationships between dyslexia, social exclusion and homelessness

part |49 pages

Care and control

chapter |14 pages

Spaces of indifference

Bureaucratic governance and disability rights in Iceland

chapter |16 pages

‘My sister won't let me’

Issues of control over one's own life as experienced by older women with intellectual disabilities

part |66 pages

Communication and representation

chapter |15 pages

The problem of the supercrip

Representation and misrepresentation of disability

chapter |16 pages

User, client or consumer?

Construction of roles in video interpreting services

chapter |14 pages

Reading other minds

Ethical considerations on the representation of intellectual disability in fiction