Disability Studies Reader

From the Publisher

With the inclusion and integration of the humanities in medical education, every edition of The Disability Studies Reader has been crucial in developing curricular "interventions" that introduce students to the fluid construction of normalcy, the common representations of disability, and the ethical, moral, and political issues associated with accepted diagnostic and clinical practices. The essays on mental health/mental illness, pre-natal genetic screening, chronic illness and gender, race and depression, and cognitive disorders in this fourth edition will enable teachers like myself to offer medical students other ways of thinking, seeing and relating to their future patients. — Therese Jones,. Director, Arts and Humanities in Healthcare Program. University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Editor, Journal of Medical Humanities

With every new edition, Lennard Davis's Disability Studies Reader becomes more pertinent and more necessary. If you are wondering what disability studies is, start here.

- Tobin Siebers, Department of English, University of Michigan

As the interdisciplinary field of disability studies continues to transform our understandings of culture, history, and politics, The Disability Studies Reader remains the touchstone. The new edition pairs the indispensable essays that have founded the field with cutting-edge work in feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonial theory. This is one of the most important volumes in cultural studies available.

- Robert McRuer, English, George Washington University

No one serious about the subject can afford to be without the latest edition of the Disability Studies Reader on their shelf. From politics to poetry, memoir to theory, poster children to posthumans, it is the one indispensable guide to the field for student and scholar alike.

- Douglas Baynton, History, University of Iowa

Since its first appearance the Disability Studies Reader has always been an indispensible volume - but with the new, fourth edition this is even more the case. The new additions here - on intersections with sexuality, technology, the law, questions of the social, and the need to understand disability in global contexts - speak to the evolving ways in which disability works in the contemporary world. It is very rare that a single text can do justice to a highly complex subject, but this book does just that. It is the essential guide for scholars and students.

- Stuart Murray, Contemporary Literatures and Film Director, Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities

"This is an indispensable collection, bringing together foundational arguments in disability studies and provocative new work from emerging young scholars in the field. If you're curious as to why (and how) disability studies has stimulated so much debate in the humanities, The Disability Studies Reader is a great place to start finding out."
—Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, Penn State University

"There is simply no area of contemporary life— be it medical, economic, educational, juridical, athletic, architectural, culinary, recreation, entertainment—that goes unaddressed in the disability studies literature. Just when you thought that there was nothing new to say about social construction, difference, the performative, the universal, the particular and the body, disability studies comes along to demonstrate both the theoretical and practical urgencies to which these and other too often abstract terms really refer. If you've been hearing about disability studies, but didn't quite know what to make of it, this is the anthology for you."
—Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law, Florida International University

"A classic just got even better! Only a few disciplines can claim a founding text. For disability studies, with its far-reaching implications for other fields, this is it. It all starts—and re-starts in a superb second edition—right here."
—David B. Morris, author of The Culture of Pain

"This revised edition demonstrates the significant evolution of the field. Greater attention to such vital issues as globalization, gender, critical race studies, and cultural constructions appear in cogent new essays that enhance and complement the collection. As with the original Disability Studies Reader , this edition challenges its readers with pioneering studies of theoretical models and the politics of disability.
—Susan Burch, author of Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II

"This collection of scholarly essays strikes at the concept of normalcy and touches us on both personal and societal levels. From an academic perspective, the field of disability studies broadens our race, class, and gender discussions to include layers of identity and moments of connection. The Disability Studies Reader challenges us to reexamine human difference."
—I. King Jordan, President, Gallaudet University —This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"The Disability Studies Reader edited by Lennard J. Davis is to the field of Disability Studies what the Norton anthologies are to literature. It is in fact, canon-making. The fourth edition of the reader has just been released in February. It will—and should be—mandatory is every disability studies program in the United States. Those trailblazers whose work remains from the previous editions will continue to gain cultural currency and those writers whose work is being admitted for the first time know they will now be read by students across the country." — Michael Northen, Wordgathering