The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader’s tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.
PART I. Historical Perspectives PART II. The Politics of Disability PART III. Stigma and Illness PART IV. Theorizing Disability PART V. Identities and Intersectionalities PART VI. Disability and Culture PART VII. Fiction, Memoir, and Poetry
Biography
Lennard J. Davis is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Departments of Disability and Human Development, English, and Medical Education. He is the author of, among other works, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body; Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions; My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness; Obsession: A History, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era.
If legislation like the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 can be seen as major leaps forward in creating a legal and political climate of inclusion for the disabled, Lennard Davis' groundbreaking anthology The Disability Studies Reader may be seen as carrying that same spirit of progress into the academic and the world of cultural studies.
Shmoop Editorial Team, http://www.shmoop.com/disability-studies/timeline.html
The fifth edition of Lennard Davis’ The Disability Studies Reader adds a range of new essays on topics from disability and work to disability and sexual abuse. It remains the gold standard to teach your introductory course on disability studies or as the perfect supplement to a medical humanities course to provide materials on disability and culture.
Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences; Professor of Psychiatry
What is disability? What is disability studies? The first edition of The Disability Studies Reader played a foundational role in leading beginning students and advanced scholars to these questions. The newest edition of this canonical anthology, the best one yet, offers an ideal selection of texts through which to explore how both the field and the concept of disability itself are being reconsidered, resisted, extended and reclaimed.
Susan Schweik, Professor of English, UC Berkeley
Disability experiences are diverse, nuanced and deeply political. As scholars, advocates and policy-makers, we need to think more and better – and this volume is the best place to start.
Tom Shakespeare, Professor of Disability Research, University of East Anglia, UK
The Disability Studies Reader remains the indispensable volume for all scholars and students working in the interdisciplinary field of disability studies. The new edition continues a solid tradition of providing readers with foundational essays in the field, even as it opens out onto the most exciting new work centering disability and social justice, insisting on the centrality of race to a critical disability studies, or locating disability in a global context.
Robert McRuer, Professor of English at George Washington University, author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
The Disability Studies Reader provides critical information for scholars of the field. The thoughtful essays in this text explore the ways in which disability intersects with law, technology, medicine, education, and the world of media. Lennard Davis guides readers through our disability history with fascinating insights and surprising information. This is an excellent book through which to understand disability in today’s increasingly interdependent world.
Haben Girma, Global Accessibility Leader
