New Books in Disability Studies

Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and Advocacy: Experiences of Women With Physical Disabilities in China, With Worldwide Implications (IAP, 2024) explores the lived experiences of six women, including the author herself, with physical disabilities in China. The book provides in-depth descriptions of each woman's experiences in different aspects and analyze the commonalities and differences in their experiences through their life courses. The book explores answers to some of these questions: How do physically disabled women make sense of their experiences? What are some of the empowering and/or disempowering moments/events in their lives, if any? What are disabled women's experiences in terms of education, employment, relationships, family life, and social activism? How does some of the disabled women in the book become motivated and mobilized to work on disability issues? This book serves to amplify Chinese disabled women's stories and make their presence more visible. Too often, dominant narratives and depictions of disability are written by people without disabilities, while disabled people's voices are either invisible or secondary. Sadly, this phenomenon is not new and disability advocates have been faced with these types of narratives for quite some years. To have one's own voice and speak up is to claim subjectivity, agency, and power. Different stories told by women with disabilities themselves can enrich our understanding of disability and gender. These stories have the potential to challenge dominant and oppressive narratives prevalent in our ableist societies. The stories included in this book could provide space and potential to connect with disabled people (people with either visible or invisible disabilities) elsewhere. Women's empowering experiences and encounters shown in this book could inspire relevant stakeholders to think of ways to better understand and support disabled women in their environments. This book will have wide implications for readers not only in China, but also in other parts of the world. Many disability stories of exclusion and/or empowerment of the world are still hidden and not reflected upon. The author invites readers to reflect on their own experiences and how societies have impacted the life courses of individuals with or without disabilities in their respective social, political, economic, and cultural environments. Cultural and social change around disability can start with anyone who are touched by genuine stories of vulnerability and reflexivity, as the ones to be shared in this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There exist problematic attitudes and beliefs about dwarfism that have rarely been challenged, but continue to construct people with dwarfism as an inferior group within society. Midgetism: The Exploitation and Discrimination of People with Dwarfism (Routledge, 2023) introduces the critical term 'midgetism', which the author has coined, to demonstrate that the socio-cultural discrimination people with dwarfism experience is influenced by both heightism and disablism. As a result, it unpacks and challenges the problematic social assumptions that reinforce midgetism within society, including the acceptability of 'midget entertainment' and 'non-normate space', to demonstrate how particular spaces can either aid in reinforcing or challenge midgetism. Drawing on the tripartite model of disability, this book demonstrates how midget entertainment is framed as a non-normative positivism, which makes it an acceptable form of employment. Using autocritical discourse analysis, the book exposes, examines and responds to excuses that are used to reinforce midgetism, thus critiquing the numerous beliefs influenced by cultural representations of dwarfism, such as people with dwarfism being acceptable figures of entertainment. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, social history, sociology and cultural geography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (U Chicago Press, 2025) offers a history of how encounters between architects and people with disabilities transformed modern culture. Window Shopping with Helen Keller recovers a series of influential moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of people with disabilities. David Serlin reveals how people with sensory and physical impairments navigated urban spaces and helped to shape modern culture. Through four case studies--the lives of Joseph Merrick (aka "The Elephant Man") and Helen Keller, the projects of the Works Progress Administration, and the design of the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped--Serlin offers a new history of modernity's entanglements with disability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tattoos are not merely decorative; they contain deep meaning for individuals and communities. They document their wearers' personal histories and position in families or society, and they engage with a communal understanding of symbols.Stories on Skin: A Librarian's Guide to Tattoos as Personal Archives (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Terry Baxter & Libby Coyner-Tsosie makes the case that archivists who want to preserve as full a human story as possible must recognize the rich documentation provided by tattoos. It also argues, in a broader sense, that traditional archives are not representative of the ways human beings transmit information through time and that they must be augmented by other types of storytelling to provide a more complete record of our species.Baxter and Coyner-Tsosie touch on timely topics such as historical narratives, storytelling, cultural traditions, the body as a text, social control, and memorialization by considering tattoos as a personal and community archive. Discussing tattoos as a storytelling tool, the authors also challenge how history is kept and who gets included. Stories on Skin is committed to the rights of communities to tell their stories in their own way and to the power that right brings. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Associate Professor Su Kyong Isakson (Community College of Baltimore County, USA) about her 2018 paper, The Case for Heritage ASL Instruction for Hearing Heritage Signers. The conversation focuses on heritage signers, differentiated instruction, and sign language interpreter education. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (Duke UP, 2025), Jina B. Kim develops what she calls crip-of-color critique, bringing a disability lens to bear on feminist- and queer-of-color literature in the aftermath of 1996 US welfare reform and the subsequent evisceration of social safety nets. She examines literature by contemporary feminist, queer, and disabled writers of color such as Jesmyn Ward, Octavia Butler, Karen Tei Yamashita, Samuel Delany, and Aurora Levins Morales, who each bring disability and dependency to the forefront of their literary freedom dreaming. Kim shows that in their writing, liberation does not take the shape of the unfettered individual or hinge on achieving independence. Instead, liberation emerges by recuperating dependency, cultivating radical interdependency, and recognizing the numerous support systems upon which survival depends. At the same time, Kim demonstrates how theories and narratives of disability can intervene into state-authored myths of resource parasitism, such as the welfare queen. In so doing, she highlights the alternate structures of care these writers envision and their dreams of life organized around reciprocity and mutual support. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Jina B. Kim is Assistant Professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College. Kim is a scholar, writer, and educator of feminist disability studies, queer-of-color critique, and contemporary multi-ethnic U.S. literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic is the first book to document the experiences of those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City—disabled people. Diverse disability communities across the five boroughs have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence—as much as by the virus itself. Disabled and chronically-ill activists have protested plans for medical rationing and refuted the eugenic logic of mainstream politicians and journalists who “reassure” audiences that only older people and those with disabilities continue to die from COVID-19. At the same time, as exemplified by the viral hashtag #DisabledPeopleToldYou, disability expertise has become widely recognized in practices such as accessible remote work and education, quarantine, and distributed networks of support and mutual aid.  How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, 2025) charts the legacies of this “mass disabling event” for uncertain viral futures, exploring the dialectic between disproportionate risk and the creativity of a disability justice response. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic includes contributions by wide-ranging disability scholars, writers, and activists whose research and lived experiences chronicle the pandemic's impacts in prisons, migrant detention centers, Chinatown senior centers, hospitals in Queens and the Bronx, working from bed in Brooklyn, subways, schools, housing shelters, social media, and other locations of public and private life. By focusing on New York City over the course of three years, the book reveals key themes of the pandemic, including hierarchies of disability vulnerability, the deployment of disability as a tool of population management, and innovative crip pandemic cultural production. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic honors those lost, as well as those who survived, by calling for just policies and caring infrastructures, not only in times of crisis but for the long haul. A full transcript of this interview is available at the link here Mara Mills is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Mills is cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies and coeditor of Crip Authorship: Disability as Method. Harris Kornstein is Assistant Professor of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona. They have published research and essays in Surveillance & Society, Curriculum Inquiry, Wired, and others. Faye Ginsburg is Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Ginsburg is cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies and author of Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community and coauthor of Disability Worlds. Rayna Rapp is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, and the author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America and coauthor of Disability Worlds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The last few years have brought increased writings from activists, artists, scholars, and concerned clinicians that cast a critical and constructive eye on psychiatry, mental health care, and the cultural relations of mental difference. With particular focus on accounts of lived experience and readings that cover issues of epistemic and social injustice in mental health discourse, the Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health (Routledge, 2024) brings together voices that advance anti-sanist approaches to scholarship, practice, art, and activism in this realm. Beyond offering a theoretical and historical overview of mad studies, this Reader draws on the perspectives, voices, and experiences of artists, mad pride activists, humanities and social science scholars, and critical clinicians to explore the complexity of mental life and mental difference.  Voices from these groups confront and challenge standard approaches to mental difference. They advance new structures of meaning and practice that are inclusive of those who have been systematically subjugated and promote anti-sanist approaches to counter inequalities, prejudices, and discrimination. Confronting modes of psychological oppression and the power of a few to interpret and define difference for so many, the Mad Studies Reader asks the critical question of how these approaches may be reconsidered, resisted, and reclaimed. This collection will be of interest to mental health clinicians; students and scholars of the arts, humanities and social sciences; and anyone who has been affected by mental difference, directly or indirectly, who is curious to explore new perspectives. Bradley Lewis is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a background in the arts and humanities. He is Associate Professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and he is on the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Humanities. His books include Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry; Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Encounters; and Experiencing Epiphanies in Literature, Cinema, and Everyday Life (forthcoming). Alisha Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University. Her research focuses on the mental health effects of oppression, including violence, racism, discrimination, and trauma. She is the co-editor of the book Silencing the Self Across Cultures (Oxford University Press) as well as the co-editor of The Crisis of Connection (NYU Press). Jazmine Russell is the co-founder of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA), a transformative mental health training institute, and host of Depth Work: A Holistic Mental Health Podcast. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of mad studies, critical psychology, and neuroscience, with experience working both within and outside the mental health system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances.  Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016, Harvard University Press). He's also the editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011, Routledge). Matt's latest book is titled Reader's Block: A History of Reading Differences (2022, Stanford University Press).  In this fascinating conversation, we discuss the long history of recorded literature; the weird shame around audiobook reading and its cultural roots; the interplay between disability, neurodivergence, and alternate forms of reading; and what an audiobook criticism might look like.  And for our patrons, we'll have our What's Good segment at the end of the show, where Matt will tell us something good to read, something good to listen to. Something good to do. You can become a patron of the show at patreon.com/phantompower. Today's show was edited by Mack Hagood. Transcription by Katelyn Phan. Music by Graeme Gibson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shahd Alshammari's Confetti and Ashes: Reflections on Wellness (Literary Mentor Words for Wellness, 2025) is a speculative memoir that questions what it means to live a good life. Blending personal experiences with the voices of ghosts and a seductive Qareen, this is a meditative exploration of consciousness and the liminal spaces we exist in. As a passionate Squash player, the narrator delves into the transformative power of sports. This lyrical narrative is genre-defying, refusing to adhere to conventional ways of narrating stories we carry within our bodies. Multi-layered and in many voices, this is a narrative of memory, disability, and movement. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Shahd Alshammari about her creative process, her personal journey with multiple sclerosis, as well as how her writings explore illness, wellness, and the search for meaning. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In contemporary China, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses have long been placed under the guardianship of close relatives who decide on their hospitalization and treatment. Despite attempts at reforms to ensure patient rights, the 2013 Mental Health Law reinforced the family's rights and responsibilities.  In Between Families and Institutions, Zhiying Ma examines how ideological, institutional, and technological processes shape families' complicated involvement in psychiatric care. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, and family support groups as well as interviews with policymakers and activists, Ma maps the workings of what she calls "biopolitical paternalism"--a mode of governance that sees vulnerable individuals as sources of risk, frames risk management as the state's paternalistic intervention, and shifts responsibilities for care and management onto families. Ma outlines the ethical tensions, intimate vulnerabilities in households, and health disparities across the population that biopolitical paternalism produces. By exploring these implications, Ma demonstrates the myriad ways biopower enables, inhibits, and transforms medical care in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Through a thoughtful investigation, Disability in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Hellenistic World: Plato's Stepchildren (Routledge, 2024) reveals often-overlooked narratives of disability within Ptolemaic Egypt and the larger Hellenistic world (332 BCE to 30 BCE). Chapters explore evidence of physical and intellectual disability, ranging from named individuals; representations of people and mythological figures with dwarfism, blindness and vision impairments; cerebral palsy; mobility impairments; spinal disability; and medicine, healing, and prosthetics. Morris examines the historiographical ways in which disability has been approached, and how ancient disability histories are (mis)represented in various contemporary spaces. It uses terminology informed by the disability community and offers guidance for disability inclusivity in curatorial and pedagogical museum and university contexts, as well as prioritizing disability as an essential area of research in ancient world studies and assisting readers with the identification of ancient disability artefacts. The first-book length treatment of the subject, Disability in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Hellenistic World provides a much-needed resource for students and scholars of ancient Egypt, Egyptology, Classics, Classical Studies, and disability in the ancient world. It is also suitable for researchers in Disability Studies, practitioners in broader Ancient World Studies, and museum and heritage professionals. It is accessible to disabled people curious about their own history, as well as nondisabled people interested in disability history and those interested in a more accurate view of ancient Egyptian history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum (Oxford UP, 2025) reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws." Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability (NYU Press, 2024) explores how the institutional management of children's sexualities in boarding schools affected children's future social, political, and economic opportunities Tracing the US's investment in disciplining minoritarian sexualities since the late nineteenth century, Mary Zaborskis focuses on a ubiquitous but understudied figure: the queer child. Queer Childhoods examines the lived and literary experiences of children who attended reform schools, schools for the blind, African American industrial schools, and Native American boarding schools. In mapping the institutional terrain of queer childhoods in educational settings of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century, the book offers an original archive of children's sexual and embodied experiences. Zaborskis argues that these boarding schools--designed to segregate racialized, criminalized, and disabled children from mainstream culture--produced new forms of childhood. These childhoods have secured American futures in which institutionalized children (and the adults they become) have not been considered full-fledged citizens or participants. By locating this queerness in state archives and institutions, Queer Childhoods exposes a queer social history entangled with genocide, eugenics, and racialized violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whitney Dirks joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Monstrosity, Bodies, and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Curiosity to See and Behold (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). In 1680, the poor cottager Mary Herring gave birth to conjoined twins. At two weeks of age, they were kidnapped to be shown for money, and their deaths shortly thereafter gave rise to a four-year legal battle over ownership and income. The Herring twins' microhistory weaves throughout this book, as the chapter structure alternates between the family's ordeal and the broader cultural context of how so-called 'monstrous births' (a contemporary term for deformed humans and animals) were discussed in cheap print, exhibited in London's pubs and coffeehouses, examined by the Royal Society, portrayed in visual culture, and litigated in London's legal courts. This book ties together social and medical history, Disability Studies, and Monster Studies to argue that people discussed unusual bodies in early modern England because they provided newsworthy entertainment, revealed the will of God, and demonstrated the internal workings of Nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai. Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science. Jaipreet Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology and disability. Her research and teaching interests include the history of medicine, the history of science, disability history, disability technologies and material/visual culture studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto (2014). Mara Mills is Associate Professor and Ph.D. Director in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is cofounder and Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies; a founding editor of the award-winning journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; and a founding member of the steering committees for the NYU cross-school minors in Science and Society and Disability Studies. Sarah Rose is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she founded and directs the Minor in Disability Studies. There are more than 120 Disability Studies graduates from UTA now. She also co-founded and serves as faculty advisor for UTA Libraries' Texas Disability History Collection, for which she and Trevor Engel co-curated the Building a Barrier-Free Campus traveling and digitized exhibit. Her book, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s, was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2017 and was awarded the 2018 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working Class History and the 2018 Disability History Association Outstanding Book Award, among other awards. She has also published with Dr. Joshua Salzmann in LABOR on how baseball players and teams have managed health and fitness and in the Journal of Policy History on disabled veterans' access to the GI bill and higher education after World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Sterne is one of the most influential scholars working on sound and listening. His 2003 book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, had a formative influence on the then-nascent field of sound studies. His 2012 book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, was both a fascinating cultural history and a deep meditation on the purpose of compression technology in capitalism. Today, Sterne talks to Phantom Power about his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP 2022). Specifically, he tells the story of the “Dork-o-phone,” a vocal amplifier he wears to give talks or communicate in loud spaces. Jonathan explains why he wears the Dork-o-phone, what it's taught him about voice, technology, and disability, and how his experience informs Diminished Faculties' “phenomenology of impairment.” This is the third and final part of our series, Voices. Although you don't need to listen to the other episodes first to enjoy this one, here are the links to part one and part two. All of this episode's sound art and music are performed by Jonathan Sterne and/or groups he appears in: Cancerscapes: Recordings made during Sterne's thyroid cancer treatment Volte: An instrumental post rock band The Buddha Curtain: solo electronic music Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology at McGill University. He does research in sound studies; media theory and historiography; science and technology studies; new media; disability studies; music; and cultural studies. You can read Jonathan Sterne's cancer diaries at https://www.cancerscapes.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) by Dr. Sunaura Taylor, tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican-American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Dr. Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires. Our guest is: Dr. Sunaura Taylor, who is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the American Book Award–winning Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Playlist for listeners: A conversation about Sitting Pretty Pandemic Perspectives The Killer Whale Journals The Well-Gardened Mind Endless Forms Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You'll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People with dementia are uniquely qualified to discuss the challenges of their condition and the features of effective support, but their voices are all too often drowned out in research and debates about policy. According to People with Dementia at the Heart of Research: Co-Producing Research through The Dementia Enquirers Model (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024) by Rachael Litherland & Philly Hare, it's time for that to change. Dementia Enquirers is an ambitious and novel programme of work which has tested out what it means for people with dementia to lead research and has developed a new 'driving seat' approach to co-research. This ground-breaking book features 26 research projects led by groups of people with dementia, supported by group facilitators and academics, to make their voices heard. Topics include giving up driving, GP dementia reviews, living alone with dementia, and using AI platforms such as smart speakers. The book also describes how people with dementia shaped the entire programme, and addressed head-on issues such as ethics approval processes and complex research language. The book is a key read for anyone involved in dementia support, this research brings the voices of people with dementia to the fore to explore their experiences of researching the condition. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life. In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can't get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, "Sick Woman Theory", became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism--a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies--we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others. How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom (Zando-Hillman Grad Books, 2024) expands upon Hedva's paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal--from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America's byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness--relying on and fueling ableism--to the detriment of us all. With the insight of Anne Boyer's The Undying and Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva's debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive. Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the essay collection How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, published September 2024, by Hillman Grad Books. They are also the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell, as well as Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; in Los Angeles at JOAN, HRLA, in the Getty's Pacific Standard Time, and the LA Architecture and Design Museum; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; Buk-Seoul Museum of Art and Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; the 14th Shanghai Biennial; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich; Modern Art Oxford; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano; the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, Rewire, and Creepy Teepee Festivals. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Spike, Die Zeit, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023). In addition to being a professor, Alper is also an educational researcher who has worked over the past 20 years to make inclusive and accessible learning products with media organizations such as Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and PBS KIDS. Vinsel and Alper talk about disability studies, the nature of Alper's empirical work, the arc of Alper's career, including her future projects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric (U Alabama Press, 2024) is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between cancer rhetoric, American ideals, and eugenic influences in the twentieth century. This groundbreaking work delves into the paradoxical interplay between acknowledging the genuine threat of cancer and the ingrained American ethos of confidence and control. Agnew's meticulous research traces the topic's historical context, unveiling how cancer discourses evolved from a hushed personal concern to a public issue thanks to the rise of cancer research centers and advocacy organizations. However, she unearths a troubling dimension to these discussions--subtle yet persistent eugenic ideologies that taint cancer arguments and advocacy groups. By dissecting prevailing cancer narratives, Agnew brings into focus how ideals rooted in eliminating imperfections and embracing progress converge with concerns for safeguarding societal fitness. Fitter, Happier scrutinizes the military origins and metaphors that permeate government policies and medical research, the transformation of cancer's association with melancholy into a rallying cry for a positive outlook, and the nuanced implications of prevention-focused dialogues. Reflecting on the varied experiences of actual cancer patients, Agnew resists the neat assimilation of these stories into a eugenic framework. Agnew's insights prompt readers to contemplate the societal meanings of disease and disability as well as how language constructs our shared reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Raquel Velho, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about her recent book, Hacking the Underground: Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System (U Washington Press, 2023). Hacking the Underground provides a fascinating ethnographic investigation of how disabled people navigate a transportation system that is far from accessible.  Velho finds disabled passengers constantly hacking and finding workarounds, including lots of fix-y maintenance tasks, to get from one place to another. While these workarounds involve obvious creativity, they are also the products of an unequal system and the failure to enact a more-thoroughgoing and radically-transformative redesigning of public transportation systems in the name of accessibility. Vinsel and Velho also touch on a wide range of other topics, including issues of theory and method, and they talk about what Velho is up to next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future.  Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a comprehensive overview of various services, programs, and collaborations to help libraries serve high-needs patrons as well as strategies for supporting staff working with these individuals. While public libraries are struggling to address growing numbers of high-needs patrons experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, mental health problems, substance abuse, and poverty-related needs, this book will help librarians build or contribute to library services that will best address patrons' psychosocial needs. Beth Wahler and Sarah C. Johnson, experienced in both library and social work, begin by providing an overview of patrons' psychosocial needs, structural and societal reasons for the shift in these needs, and how these changes impact libraries and library staff. Chapters focus on best practices for libraries providing person-centered services and share lessons learned, including information about special considerations for certain patron populations that might be served by individual libraries. The book concludes with information about how library organizations can support public library staff. Librarians and library students who are concerned about both patrons and library staff will find the practical advice in this book invaluable. NBN can get 20% off Creating a Person-Centered Library by using the discount code NBN20 on the Blooomsbury.com US website. Beth Wahler, PhD, MSW is founder and principal consultant at Beth Wahler Consulting, LLC and affiliated research faculty and previous director of the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina- Charlotte. Dr. Wahler is a social work consultant, researcher, and experienced administrator whose primary focus is trauma-informed librarianship, library strategies for addressing patrons' or community psychosocial needs, supporting library staff with serving high-needs patrons and reducing work-related stress/trauma, and various kinds of collaborations, services, and programs to meet patron, staff, or community needs. She has also published and presented internationally on library patron and staff needs, trauma-informed librarianship, and library/social work collaborations.  Sarah C. Johnson, MLIS, LMSW, is an Adjunct Lecturer at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she teaches a graduate course on Library Social Work. As a researcher and educator, Sarah is the creator and host of the Library Social Work podcast which aims to inform the public about interdisciplinary collaborations between social service providers and public libraries. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Dr. Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films. This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Dr Theodora Wildcroft, a researcher, anthropologist, and long-time teacher of what she calls “post-lineage yoga.” We discuss Theo's ethnographic research on yoga in the UK, focusing on its connections with animism, paganism, and other somatic practices. We also dive into Theo's personal approach to yoga as a liberatory practice that allows diverse bodies and minds to thrive. Along the way, we touch on disability, neuro-divergence, cultural appropriation, and the inescapable influence of colonialism for contemporary yogis. Remember, if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhism, Asian medicine, and embodied spirituality, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes. Please enjoy! Resources mentioned in this episode: Theodora Wildcroft, Post Lineage Yoga: From Guru to #MeToo (2020) Theo Wildcroft & Harriet Mcatee, The Yoga Teacher's Survival Guide: Social Justice, Science, Politics, and Power (2024) Barbora Sojkova & Theodora Wildcroft, Yoga Studies in 5 Minutes (2025) Theo's website: https://theowildcroft.com Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University's Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ella Houston's book Advertising Disability (Routledge, 2024) invites Cultural Disability Studies to consider how advertising, as one of the most ubiquitous forms of popular culture, shapes attitudes towards disability. The research presented in the book provides a much-needed examination of the ways in which disability and mental health issues are depicted in different types of advertising, including charity 'sadvertisements', direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements and 'pro-diversity' brand campaigns. Textual analyses of advertisements from the eighteenth century onwards reveal how advertising reinforces barriers facing disabled people, such as stigmatising attitudes, ableist beauty 'ideals', inclusionism and the unstable crutch of charity. As well as investigating how socio-cultural meanings associated with disability are influenced by multimodal forms of communication in advertising, insights from empirical research conducted with disabled women in the United Kingdom and the United States are provided. Moving beyond traditional textual approaches to analysing cultural representations, the book emphasises how disabled people and activists develop counternarratives informed by their personal experiences of disability, challenging ableist messages promoted by advertisements. From start to finish, activist concepts developed by the Disabled People's Movement and individuals' embodied knowledge surrounding disability, impairments and mental health issues inform critiques of advertisements. Its critically informed approach to analysing portrayals of disability is relevant to advertisers, scholars and students in advertising studies and media studies who are interested in portraying diversity in marketing and promotional materials as well as scholars and students of disability studies and sociology more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Pacheco speaks with Professor Jemina Napier (Heriot-Watt University, Scotland) about her book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). The conversation focuses on child and sign language brokering, the innovative methodology Dr. Napier employed in her study, and the impacts of researching sign language brokering as a languaging practice. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fella Benabed's book Applied Global Health Humanities: Readings in the Global Anglophone Novel (de Gruyter, 2024) highlights the importance of global Anglophone literature in global health humanities, shaping perceptions of health issues in the Global South and among minorities in the Global North. Using twelve novels, it explores the historical, political, sociocultural, ethical, and environmental aspects of health by analyzing the experiences of characters who suffer from infectious diseases, mental disorders, or disabilities, and who seek holistic healing practices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing belief that performance could provide job opportunities for people with disabilities.  Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (NYU Press, 2024) offers an original cultural history of disability and performance in modern America, exploring rehabilitation's competing legacies. The book highlights an unexpected alliance of rehabilitation professionals, deaf teachers, policy makers, disability activists, queer artists, and religious leaders who championed performance's rehabilitative potential. At the same time, some disabled artists imagined a different political itinerary for theatrical practice. Rather than acquiescing to the terms of productive citizenship, these artists recuperated rehabilitation as a creative resource for imagining and building a world beyond work.  Using previously unexplored archives, Disability Works portrays the history of disabled Americans' performance labor as both a national aspiration and a national problem. The book reveals how disabled artists and activists ingeniously used rehabilitative resources to fuel their performance practices, breaking free from the grasp of rehabilitation and fostering more just institutions. From state-funded “sign-mime” to Black modern dance, community theatre to Stanislavskian actor training, speculative infrastructures to epistolary performance, Disability Works recovers an expansive repertoire of aesthetic and infrastructural investigations into the terms of how disability works in modern American culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mental health care and its radical possibilities reimagined in the context of its global development under capitalism. The contemporary world is oversaturated with psychiatric programs, methods, and reforms promising to address any number of "crises" in mental health care. When these fail, alternatives to the alternatives simply pile up and seem to lead nowhere. In an original and compelling account of radical experimentation in psychiatry, Warren traces a double movement in the global development of mental health services throughout the 20th century: a radical current pushing totalizing and idealistic visions of care to their practical limits and a reactionary one content with managing or eliminating chronically idle surplus populations. Moral treatment is read in light of the utopian socialist movement; the theory of communication in the French Institutional Psychotherapy of Félix Guattari is put into conversation with the Brazilian art therapy of Nise da Silveira; the Mexican anti-psychiatry movement's reflections on violence are thought together with theories of violence developed in Argentinian psychoanalysis and Frantz Fanon's anticolonial therapeutic practice; the social form of the Italian Democratic Psychiatry and Brazilian anti-institutional movements are contrasted with the anti-psychiatry factions of the 1960s-70s North American counterculture. Storming Bedlam: Madness, Mental Health, and Revolt (Common Notions, 2024) subverts the divisions between social and biological approaches to mental health or between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. By exploring the history of psychiatry in the context of revolution, war, and economic development, Warren outlines a minor history of approaches to mental health care grounded in common struggles against conditions of scarcity, poverty, isolation, and exploitation. Sasha Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis. His experiences within the psychiatric system and commitment to radical politics led him to cofound the group Hearing Voices Twin Cities, which provides an alternative social space for individuals to discuss often stigmatized extreme experiences and network with one-another. Following the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, he founded the project Of Unsound Mind to trace the histories of psychiatry, social work, and public health's connections to policing, prisons, and various disciplinary and managerial technologies. Resources: North American Networks of Alternatives to Psychiatry altpsy.net Of Unsound Mind Substack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Movements that take issue with conventional understandings of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability, have become increasingly visible. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, Dr. Catherine Tan investigates two autism-focused movements, shedding new light on how members contest expert authority. Examining their separate struggles to gain legitimacy and represent autistic people, she develops a new account of the importance of social movements as spaces for constructing knowledge that aims to challenge dominant frameworks. Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 2024) examines the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which reimagine autism in different and conflicting ways: as a difference to be accepted or as a sickness to treat. Both, however, provide a window into how ideas that conflict with dominant beliefs develop, take hold, and persist. The autistic rights movement is composed primarily of autistic adults who contend that autism is a natural human variation, not a disorder, and advocate for social and cultural inclusion and policy changes. The alternative biomedical movement, in contrast, is dominated by parents and practitioners who believe in the disproven idea that vaccines trigger autism and seek to reverse it with scientifically unsupported treatments. Both movements position themselves in opposition to researchers, professionals, and parents outside their communities. Spaces on the Spectrum offers timely insights into the roles of shared identity and communal networks in movements that question scientific and medical authority. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John T. Maier's The Disabled Will: A Theory of Addiction (Routledge Press, 2024) defends a comprehensive new vision of what addiction is and how people with addictions should be treated. The author argues that, in addition to physical and intellectual disabilities, there are volitional disabilities - disabilities of the will - and that addiction is best understood as a species of volitional disability. This theory serves to illuminate long-standing philosophical and psychological perplexities about addiction and addictive motivation. It articulates a normative framework within which to understand prohibition, harm reduction, and other strategies that aim to address addiction. The argument of this book is that these should ultimately be evaluated in terms of reasonable accommodations for addicted people and that the priority of addiction policy should be the provision of such accommodations. What makes this book distinctive is that it understands addiction as a fundamentally political problem, an understanding that is suggested by standard legal approaches to addiction, but which has not received a sustained defense in the previous philosophical or psychological literature. This text marks a significant advance in the theory of addiction, one which should reshape our understanding of addiction policy and its proper aims. Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While many live-action films portray disability as a spectacle, "crip animation" (a genre of animated films that celebrates disabled people's lived experiences) uses a variety of techniques like clay animation, puppets, pixilation, and computer-generated animation to represent the inner worlds of people with disabilities. Crip animation has the potential to challenge the ableist gaze and immerse viewers in an alternative bodily experience. In Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship (Indiana University Press, 2023), Dr. Slava Greenberg analyses over 30 animated works about disabilities, including Rocks in My Pockets, An Eyeful of Sound, and A Shift in Perception. He considers the ableism of live-action cinematography, the involvement of filmmakers with disabilities in the production process, and the evocation of the spectators' senses of sight and hearing, consequently subverting traditional spectatorship and listenership hierarchies. In addition, Dr. Greenberg explores physical and sensory accessibility in theatres and suggests new ways to accommodate cinematic screenings. Offering an introduction to disability studies and crip theory for film, media, and animation scholars, Animated Film and Disability demonstrates that crip animation has the power to breach the spectator's comfort, evoking awareness of their own bodies and, in certain cases, their social privileges. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've ever worked with dementia patients before, you know how unique and bizarre the experience can be, and how little the stereotypes actually hold up to the experience. Even knowing about the diagnosis often does little to help us in caring for people, and many caregivers find themselves getting sucked into behavioral loops of their own. This is because your brain is not wired to deal with the altered form of reality that dementia patients inhabit. Evolution has not equipped us to deal with these dynamics. Unpacking all this is our guest today, Dasha Kiper in her book Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain (Random House, 2023). Having both worked with dementia patients and run support groups for caregivers, she's seen patterns play out over countless situations, and has mapped the cognitive landscape of people working to take care of those afflicted with the disease. In a series of engaging and provocative essays, she's able to elucidate our limitations, the various neurological traps we are often tempted to fall into, hopefully offering caregivers some clarity on themselves and just how far from reality this work often takes them. Dasha Kiper is the consulting clinical director of support groups at an Alzheimer's organization, and holds an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Season Two erupts in our ears with a film-noir soundscape—an eerie voice utters strange and disjointed phrases and echoing footsteps lead to sirens and gunshots. What on Earth are we listening to? We unravel the mystery with NYU media professor Mara Mills  who studies the historical relationship between disability and media technologies. In Episode 8, “Test Subjects,” we examine the strange and obscure history of sound's use as a psychological diagnostic tool. In the late 20th century, while many disabilities were eliminated through medical interventions, a host of new disabilities were invented, especially within the realm of psychology. Mills's historical work in the audio archives of American Foundation for the Blind reveals how auditory projective testing was used to diagnose blind people with additional psychological disabilities. As we listen to these strange archival sounds, we learn how culture and technology shape the history of human ability and disability. Read Mara Mill's article on auditory projective tests, “Evocative Object: Auditory Inkblot” and visit NYU's Center for Disability Studies, which she co-directs with Faye Ginsburg.  Thanks to archivist Helen Selsdon and the American Foundation for the Blind for the use of the auditory projective tests. This episode's theme music is by Mack Hagood with additional music by Graeme Gibson, Blue Dot Sessions, Claude Debussy, and Duke Ellington. The show was edited by Craig Eley and Mack Hagood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Pacheco speaks with writer and researcher Jessica Kirkness about her memoir, The House with All the Lights on: Three Generations, One Roof, a Language of Light (Allen & Unwin, 2023). Jessica has published in Meanjin and The Conversation, as well as other outlets. Her PhD focused on the ‘hearing line': the invisible boundary between Deaf and hearing cultures. She is also a teacher of nonfiction writing at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The House With All The Lights On explores linguistic and cultural dynamics within Deaf-hearing families. Jessica shares her experience having Deaf grandparents and navigating the cultural borderline between Deaf and hearing cultures. It is a wonderful memoir about family, the complexities of identity, and linguistic diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Disability Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City's wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children's lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists in larger struggles for recognition and rights. Disability consciousness, they show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions. Chapters consider dilemmas of genetic testing and neuroscientific research, reimagining kinship and community, the challenges of “special education,” and the perils of transitioning from high school. They also highlight the vitality of neurodiversity activism, disability arts, politics, and public culture.  Disability Worlds reflects the authors' anthropological commitments to recognizing the significance of this fundamental form of human difference. Ginsburg and Rapp's conversations with diverse New Yorkers reveal the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures. A transcript of this discussion is available here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the COVID pandemic, billions of dollars in relief aid was sent out to help us ride out the storm, although many people who struggled through it might scratch their heads at such a number, having seen little of it make any concrete impact in their own lives. This discrepancy is indicative of the underlying problem with the contemporary care economy, a series of federal and state programs, healthcare facilities and NGO's, all trying to bend the needs of those under their care to the mechanisms and incentives laid out by capitalism. The result is a massive apparatus that regularly fails to fulfill its supposed intentions, leaving workers and those in need of help in precarious and often dangerous situations.  This apparatus is untangled and explained in clear detail by Premilla Nadasen in her book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023). Informed by both her work as a historian and as a political activist, she manages to untangle and explain why the massive apparatus regularly fails to fulfill its purpose. She also outlines offramps, forms of resistance that workers and activists have taken to develop alternative anticapitalist forms of care that might someday allow us to truly flourish together. Premilla Nadasen is a professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the co-director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is also the author of Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does an inclusive society look like? And what are the challenges and opportunities when the society in question, Timor-Leste, is one of the most resource-constrained in Southeast Asia? My guest today is interested in these questions of inclusion and participation, and argues that people with a disability are a key component of a truly inclusive society – and that employment can be a key policy lever for inclusion. With Timor-Leste recently ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), now is the time, she says, for building an evidence base for employment as a foundational right that has transformational potential not only for people with disability but for the broader community. Dr Kim Bulkeley from the Faculty of Medicine and Health joins Dr Natali Pearson to share the work she is doing ion disability and work in Timor-Leste. Dr Kim Bulkeley is a Co-head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for strengthening rehabilitation capacity in health systems, senior lecturer in the Sydney School of Health Sciences and a stream leader in the Centre for Disability Research and Policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance. Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires. A full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility. Sunaura Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Society and Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor is a scholar and artist who works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental humanities, animal studies, environmental justice, feminist science studies, and art practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices