Fostering a dialog between Critical Disability Studies, American Studies, InterAmerican Studies, and Global Health Studies, the edited compilation conceptualizes disability and (mental) illnesses as a cultural narrative enabling a deeper social critique. By looking at contemporary cultural productions primarily from the USA, Canada, and the Caribbean, the books’ objective is to explore how literary texts and other cultural productions from the Americas conceptualize, construct, and represent disability as a narrative and to investigate the deep structures underlying the literary and cultural discourses on and representations of disability including parameters such as disease, racism, and sexism among others. Disability is read as a shifting phenomenon rooted in the cultures and histories of the Americas.
There are over thirty million disabled people in Russia and Eastern Europe, yet their voices are rarely heard in scholarly studies of life and well-being in the region. This book brings together new research by internationally recognised local and non-native scholars in a range of countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It covers, historically, the origins of legacies that continue to affect well-being and policy in the region today. Discussions of disability in culture and society highlight the broader conditions in which disabled people must build their identities and well-being whilst in-depth biographical profiles outline what living with disabilities in the region is like. Chapters on policy interventions, including international influences, examine recent reforms and the difficulties of implementing inclusive, community-based care. The book will be of interest both to regional specialists, for whom well-being, equality and human rights are crucial concerns, and to scholars of disability and social policy internationally.
The Routledge International Handbook of Therapeutic Stories and Storytelling is a unique book that explores stories from an educational, community, social, health, therapeutic and therapy perspectives, acknowledging a range of diverse social and cultural views in which stories are used and written by esteemed storytellers, artists, therapists and academics from around the globe. The book is divided into five main sections that examine different approaches and contexts for therapeutic stories and storytelling. The collected authors explore storytelling as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in education, social and community settings, and in health and therapeutic contexts. The final section offers an International Story Anthology written by co-editor Sharon Jacksties and a final story by Katja Gorečan. This book is of enormous importance to psychotherapists and related mental health professionals, as well as academics, storytellers, teachers, people working in special educational needs, and all those with an interest in storytelling and its applied value.
“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.
As a response to real or imagined subordination, popular culture reflects the everyday experience of ordinary people and has the capacity to subvert the hegemonic order. Drawing on central theoretical approaches in the field of critical disability studies, this book examines disability across a number of internationally recognised texts and objects from popular culture, including film, television, magazines and advertising campaigns, children’s toys, music videos, sport and online spaces, to attend to the social and cultural construction of disability. While acknowledging that disability features in popular culture in ways that reinforce stereotypes and stigmatise, Disability and Popular Culture celebrates and complicates the increasing visibility of disability in popular culture, showing how popular culture can focus passion, create community and express defiance in the context of disability and social change. Covering a broad range of concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and cultural studies, including media representation, identity, the beauty myth, aesthetics, ableism, new media and sport, this book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the critical analysis of popular culture, across disciplines such as disability studies, sociology and cultural and media studies.
For its breadth and depth of research, Disability Alliances and Allies: Opportunities and Challenges is essential reading for researchers and students across the social sciences interested in disability, social movements, activism, and identity.
If America worships success, then why has the nation's literature dwelled obsessively on failure? This book explores encounters with failure by nineteenth-century writers - ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to Mark Twain and Sarah Orne Jewett - whose celebrated works more often struck readers as profoundly messy, flawed and even perverse. Reading textual inconsistency against the backdrop of a turbulent nineteenth century, Gavin Jones describes how the difficulties these writers faced in their faltering search for new styles, coherent characters and satisfactory endings uncovered experiences of blunder and inadequacy hidden in the culture at large. Through Jones's treatment, these American writers emerge as the great theorists of failure who discovered ways to translate their own social insecurities into complex portrayals of a modern self, founded in moral fallibility, precarious knowledge and negative feelings.
This practical text addresses a gap in the literature by mapping the links between philosophy, research method and practice in an accessible, readable way. It offers guidance to allied health professionals – increasingly involved in research as the emphasis grows on evidence-based practice – on how to engage in meaningful, good quality qualitative research. To help researchers take on this challenge, the book: highlights some of the choices involved in carrying out qualitative research offers a wide range of practical examples to show how different ways of doing qualitative research can be managed critically examines a variety of qualitative research methodologies of particular interest to allied health professionals clarifies the links between epistemology, methodology and method. The book is structured in three parts. Part I sensitises readers to the complex issues which challenge qualitative researchers at the planning stage of their projects. In Part II, the challenge of using different methodologies is critically explored by fifteen authors, who describe their individual research experiences. Part III examines the choices researchers make when they evaluate and present research.
Updated second edition: “A bold and imaginative book which moves our thinking about narratives of illness in new directions.” —Sociology of Heath and Illness Since it was first published in 1995, The Wounded Storyteller has occupied a unique place in the body of work on illness. A collective portrait of a so-called “remission society” of those who suffer from illness or disability, as well as a cogent analysis of their stories within a larger framework of narrative theory, Arthur W. Frank’s book has reached a large and diverse readership including the ill, medical professionals, and scholars of literary theory. Drawing on the work of such authors as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known—Gilda Radner’s battle with ovarian cancer—to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilities. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: They abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. In this new edition Frank adds a preface describing the personal and cultural times when the first edition was written. His new afterword extends the book’s argument significantly, discussing storytelling and experience, other modes of illness narration, and a version of hope that is both realistic and aspirational. Reflecting on his own life during the creation of the first edition and the conclusions of the book itself, he reminds us of the power of storytelling as way to understand our own suffering. “Arthur W. Frank’s second edition of The Wounded Storyteller provides instructions for use of this now-classic text in the study of illness narratives.” —Rita Charon, author of Narrative Medicine “Frank sees the value of illness narratives not so much in solving clinical conundrums as in addressing the question of how to live a good life.” —Christianity Today
