Disability is history and futurity, culture and society, practice and theory, work and play, an immense desire for life by which body and mind are dragged kicking and screaming into each and every new day.Using autocritical discourse analysis, a new hybrid research method that combines aspects of the established methods of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and autoethnography, this book explores the formative cultural identity politics of disability via cultural stations of UK popu...

More than being counter to what we must surely endeavour to consider the status quo of honesty, not to mention the pursuit of truth that should still be fundamental in academia and education more broadly, dishonesty involves deceit and thus victimisation, which is to say it tends to be used either against someone or to give someone an unfair advantage. Such personal interactions are sometimes and, in the context of this book, revealingly referred to as the games people play.When an...

In the disability community, which can have multiple meanings in itself, we often experience poignant moments in sociocultural discourse. Our pathways to knowledge and understanding of identity are defined by life’s landmarks, many of which resonate with what thereby become formative figures or artefacts. This mapping of key moments involves recognising, and reflecting upon, cultural stations of disability.More than being demarcations of disruption to the normative social order, cu...

This edited volume explores blindness as a construct with which we the contributors engage as part of our social existence and/or academic research. Irrespective of eye conditions, or the lack thereof, blindness is an understanding at which we have all come to arrive. On the way to this conceptual point, which is in any case unlikely ever to be fixed, we have passed or visited many formative cultural stations.In the terms of autocritical disability studies (i.e. an explicitly embodi...

This book explores multiple metanarratives of disability to introduce and investigate the critical concept of assumed authority and the normative social order from which it derives.The book comprises 15 chapters developed across three parts and, informed by disability studies, is authored by those with research interests in the condition on which they focus as well as direct or intimate experiential knowledge. When out and about, many disabled people know only too well what it is t...

Over the last few decades disability studies has emerged not only as a discipline in itself but also as a catalyst for cultural disability studies and Disability Studies in Education. In this book the three areas become united in a new field that recognises education as a discourse between tutors and students who explore representations of disability on the levels of everything from academic disciplines and knowledge to language and theory; from received understandings and social attitudes...

Although the theme of blindness occurs frequently in literature, literary criticism has rarely engaged the experiential knowledge of people with visual impairments. The Metanarrative of Blindness counters this trend by bringing to readings of twentieth-century works in English a perspective appreciative of impairment and disability. Author David Bolt examines representations of blindness in more than forty literary works, including writing by Kipling, Joyce, Synge, Orwell, H. G. W...

Disability is a widespread phenomenon, indeed a potentially universal one as life expectancies rise. Within the academic world, it has relevance for all disciplines yet is often dismissed as a niche market or someone else’s domain. This collection explores how academic avoidance of disability studies and disability theory is indicative of social prejudice and highlights, conversely, how the academy can and does engage with disability studies.This innovative book brings together wor...

Whilst legislation may have progressed internationally and nationally for disabled people, barriers continue to exist, of which one of the most pervasive and ingrained is attitudinal. Social attitudes are often rooted in a lack of knowledge and are perpetuated through erroneous stereotypes, and ultimately these legal and policy changes are ineffectual without a corresponding attitudinal change.This unique bookprovides a much needed, multifaceted exploration of changing social attit...

Offering a sociocultural approach to education and learning, this fascinating exploration of childhood provides an in-depth understanding of how children make sense of the world and the people in it. Examining the ways in which children express their thoughts, feelings and actively generate meaning through experience and interaction, this fully revised and updated new edition is illustrated throughout by extensive case studies and covers a diverse range of topics, including:

Deborah Marks examines current theories and practices relating to disability. The focus of the work is not disabled people as 'objects' of study but rather an analysis of disability as it has been historically and culturally constructed and psychically experienced. The chapters cover:* language and discourse* the disabled people's movement* the 'disability' professions* public policy* unconscious investments and interpersonal relationships* knowled...

Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering: Trauma, History, and Memory offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives that highlight the problem of traumatic memory. Because trauma fragments memory, storytelling is impeded by what is unknowable and what is unspeakable. Each of the contributors tackles the problem of narrativizing memory that is constructed from fragments that have been passed along the generations. When trauma is cultural as well as personal, it becomes ev...