If you are an advocate for people with disabilities, should you also be vegan? How does your position on assisted suicide relate to how you think about euthanizing pets? Recent work in disability studies has called for greater engagement with animal studies, but disability activists and scholars have long been uncomfortable with comparisons between animals and people with disabilities or chronic and terminal illnesses. The long and problematic history of dehumanizing and animalizing disabl...

Why has the academy struggled to link advocacy for animals to advocacy for various human groups? Within cultural studies, in which advocacy can take the form of a theoretical intervention, scholars have resisted arguments that add "species" to race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other human-identity categories as a site for critical analysis.Species Matters considers whether cultural studies should pay more attention to animal advocacy and whether, in turn, ani...

A book that challenges common misconceptions about the nature of intelligenceSatoshi Kanazawa's Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (written with Alan S. Miller) was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a rollicking bit of pop science that turns the lens of evolutionary psychology on issues of the day." That book answered such burning questions as why women tend to lust after males who already have mates and why newborns look more like Dad tha...

In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay ...

A timely anthology that explores power, privilege, and oppression and their relationship to marginalized bodiesAsserting that the body is the main site of oppression in Western society, the contributors to this pioneering volume explore the complex issue of embodiment and how it relates to social inclusion and marginalization. In a culture where bodies of people who are brown, black, female, transgender, disabled, fat, or queer are often shamed, sexualized, ignored...

"Cathy Riessman is the leading figure in narrative research and her new book is a delight. Covering basic issues of transcription and research credibility as well as visual data and engagingly written, it is a goldmine for students and researchers alike. If we want to make narrative research serious and revealing, it is to this book that we should turn."—David Silverman, Professor Emeritus, Goldsmiths′ College, University of London*"*Narrative Methods for th...

Grounded theory is an open-ended approach to research that can be adapted to many uses. This article shows how adaptable grounded theory is and was meant to be. Originating in the Chicago school of Sociology about 100 years ago, GT does not have to be about technicalities, but researchers can use it as an adaptable and open-ended approach to developing understandings of human situations.When researchers view GT this way, the goal is to listen, hear, and understand what others are s...

"Disability Theory is just the book we've been waiting for. Clear, cogent, compelling analyses of the tension between the 'social model' of disability and the material details of impairment; of identity politics and unstable identities; of capability rights and human interdependence; of disability and law, disability as masquerade, disability and sexuality, disability and democracy---they're all here, in beautifully crafted and intellectually startling essays. Disability Theor...

Researchers' own experiences affect every aspect of the research they do, from conceptualization of the issues to be researched, relationships with research participants, to interpretation of findings, to writing up results, to dissemination. This article discusses reflexivity and provides examples of what it is.Reflexivity is important topic for qualitative researchers to consider and to experiment with. For research to be credible, researchers must be reflexive no matter which me...

Introduces key terms, concepts, debates, and histories for Disability StudiesKeywords for Disability Studies aims to broaden and define the conceptual framework of disability studies for readers and practitioners in the field and beyond. The volume engages some of the most pressing debates of our time, such as prenatal testing, euthanasia, accessibility in public transportation and the workplace, post-traumatic stress, and questions about the beginning and...

"Thomas Couser's Signifying Bodies comes at a crucial moment when debates about physician assisted suicide, genetic engineering, and neo-natal screening are raising the question of what constitutes a 'life worth living' for persons with disabilities. Couser's work engages these debates by exploring the extensive number of personal narratives by or about persons with disabilities. As Couser brilliantly demonstrates through synoptic readings, these works challenge the 'preferred rhe...