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Speaking Out: Gifts of Ministering Undeterred by Disabilities
by Edited by Robert L. WalkerReaders of "Speaking Out: Gifts of Ministering Undeterred by Disabilities" will enter the worlds of one Episcopal and 24 United Methodist ministers who cope with various forms of disabilities. Read how each one is a living testimony that will surprise, inspire, and remind you that they are people with God-given gifts who were spiritually strengthened during their individual life journeys, all the while remaining faithful to their respective calls to church ministry. <p><p>Unfortunately, people with disabilities frequently experience physical and discriminatory barriers, several of which are described by the contributors to this book; undeterred, they overcame or are overcoming the barriers through grace, resiliency, and support from many sources. The book focuses on ministers, but their stories are applicable to non-ministerial persons in our all too common negating ways of both the sacred and secular societies. <p><p>This book is sponsored by the United Methodist Association of Ministers with Disabilities (UMAMD), and all royalties from sales of the book will go to the UMAMD in support of its activities.
Hanging Out and Hanging On: From the Projects to the Campus
by Elsa NunezThis book chronicles the progress of students from Hartford and Manchester, Connecticut, who are enrolled in the Dual College Enrollment Program (DCEP) at Eastern Connecticut State University. <p><p>“Hanging Out” sets the stage for describing the program by first reaching back in time to tell of Dr. Núñez’s own beginnings in Puerto Rico and Newark, New Jersey, of her struggles as a non-English speaking elementary school student and her triumphs in high school and college. The next section of the book describes the lives of Latinos in Connecticut and the social, economic, and educational challenges they have faced over time. Her personal experiences and desire to improve the lives of the underprivileged led Dr. Núñez to create the DCEP Program. <p><p>Through the words of faculty and staff and the personal accounts of six DCEP students, you will read stories of desperation and hope, of struggle and triumph, of heart-breaking failure and stunning success. We hope their story can serve as a model for other communities to follow.
Invisible: My Journey through Vision and Hearing Loss (2nd Edition)
by Ruth SilverRuth Silver's young life was challenged with vision and hearing loss. Inspired by her own experiences and challenges, she founded the Center for Deaf-Blind Persons in Milwaukee, a nonprofit agency dedicated to helping others living with the double disability of deaf-blindness. Ruth's story demonstrates how a resilient spirit can propel a profoundly disabled person forward toward a happy, productive life.
Know the Night
by Maria MutchAn unforgettable memoir on the experience of isolation and the miraculous power of human connection. As a baby, Gabriel's first words and affinity for sign language enthralled his adoring parents. When these words fell away, and his medical diagnoses multiplied, Maria Mutch committed herself entirely to her son's care. Then, for about two years, Gabe slept very little, drawing mother and son into a nocturnal existence of almost constant wakefulness. In breathtaking prose, Maria shares the intensely personal challenges and revelations brought about by this period. As Gabe's sleeping hours dwindled, care took place within an isolated, often frightening world, in which Maria's desire for connection and meaning expanded. She became fascinated with stories of Antarctic exploration, and found a companion in Admiral Richard E. Byrd, an explorer who lived by himself in the polar darkness for months in 1934 and later wrote about his struggle for survival in a book called Alone. Reimagining Byrd's story and interweaving it with her own, Maria illuminates a search for love, understanding and comfort against the terrors of the unknown that will resonate with anyone who has lain awake in the dark, or longed to protect a loved one. Know the Night is a powerful journey into the mysteries of nighttime and the human mind, and a testament to the extraordinary bond between mother and child.
The Boy Who Loved Too Much: A True Story of Pathological Friendliness
by Jennifer LatsonThe poignant story of a boy’s coming-of-age complicated by Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that makes people biologically incapable of distrust.What would it be like to see everyone as a friend? Twelve-year-old Eli D’Angelo has a genetic disorder that obliterates social inhibitions, making him irrepressibly friendly, indiscriminately trusting, and unconditionally loving toward everyone he meets. It also makes him enormously vulnerable. Eli lacks the innate skepticism that will help his peers navigate adolescence more safely—and vastly more successfully. Journalist Jennifer Latson follows Eli over three critical years of his life as his mother, Gayle, must decide whether to shield Eli entirely from the world and its dangers or give him the freedom to find his own way and become his own person. By intertwining Eli and Gayle’s story with the science and history of Williams syndrome, the book explores the genetic basis of behavior and the quirks of human nature. More than a case study of a rare disorder, however, The Boy Who Loved Too Much is a universal tale about the joys and struggles of raising a child, of growing up, and of being different.
No Excuses
by Derrick Coleman Jr. Marcus BrothertonThe first deaf athlete to play offense in the NFL (and win a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks!) relates his inspirational story of hard work and determination in his own words. Great for readers of all ages.The inspirational memoir from the popular current Seattle Seahawks running back Derrick Coleman Jr., who, in just his second year in the NFL, won the 2014 Super Bowl with the Seahawks. Showcasing his unlikely and challenging journey to become the first deaf offensive NFL player, he talks about overcoming internal obstacles and external obstacles (bullies and naysayers) in the course of reaching your true potential.
When Fraser Met Billy: An Autistic Boy, a Rescue Cat, and the Transformative Power of Animal Connections
by Louise BoothIn the spirit of A Street Cat Named Bob and Dewey comes a mother's touching, true story of how a rescue cat named Billy transformed her autistic boy's life.Louise Booth and her husband had always dreamed of having a child. But when their son Fraser was born, Louise immediately knew something was wrong. Fraser was an angry child, prone to frequent screaming fits. When the family moved to the Balmoral Estate (Queen Elizabeth's summer residence), where Louise's husband had been hired to be the Queen's electrician, Louise plummeted into depression, worn down by her son's constant needs. At eighteen months, Fraser was diagnosed with autism and hypotonia, a muscle tone condition that affected his ability to walk and use his hands. Louise and her husband Chris were given the devastating news that Fraser would never go to a mainstream school, and it seemed all hope was lost. Then came Billy. A grey cat who'd been found in an abandoned house and left at a shelter, Billy came home with the family, purred, and laid his paws across Fraser's lap. The two became inseparable from that moment on, and slowly but surely, Billy transformed Fraser's life. Within two years of Billy coming home with them, Louise watched her son move from being a child prone to anxiety, tantrums, and sudden emotional meltdowns to a much calmer, less moody child with a bright future. In their home on the beautiful Balmoral Estate, Billy still acts as Fraser's guardian, never leaving his side at mealtimes and bedtimes or whenever he's feeling low. Their profound bond has immeasurably improved both their lives and the family's, bringing them countless hilarious and touching moments along the way. A Sunday Times bestseller in the UK, When Fraser Met Billy is both a powerful testament to a family's love for their child and a treat for cat lovers everywhere.
Two Seeing Eye Dogs Take Manhattan: A Love Story
by Lloyd BurlingameTo their owners all Seeing Eye dogs are miracle workers. However, there are the rare few, like the two exceptionally stalwart heroes of this book, who triumph brilliantly over the obstacles of a huge city. They are the canine equivalents of the intrepid "Navy Seals. " Undaunted, they meet the challenges of the "Big Apple. " Dodging cars, crowds, and one emergency situation after another, they guide their visually challenged partners safely to any destination. Readers of all ages will be fascinated by these pooches who lavish the gifts of independence, dignity, and freedom on their human partners.
Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices
by Toby BeauchampIn Going Stealth Toby Beauchamp demonstrates how the enforcement of gender conformity is linked to state surveillance practices that identify threats based on racial, gender, national, and ableist categories of difference. Positioning surveillance as central to our understanding of transgender politics, Beauchamp examines a range of issues, from bathroom bills and TSA screening practices to Chelsea Manning's trial, to show how security practices extend into the everyday aspects of our gendered lives. He brings the fields of disability, science and technology, and surveillance studies into conversation with transgender studies to show how the scrutinizing of gender nonconformity is motivated less by explicit transgender identities than by the perceived threat that gender nonconformity poses to the U.S. racial and security state. Beauchamp uses instances of gender surveillance to demonstrate how disciplinary power attempts to produce conformist citizens and regulate difference through discourses of security. At the same time, he contends that greater visibility and recognition for gender nonconformity, while sometimes beneficial, might actually enable the surveillance state to more effectively track, measure, and control trans bodies and identities.
Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus
by Jane GallopDrawing on her own experiences with late-onset disability and its impact on her sex life, along with her expertise as a cultural critic, Jane Gallop explores how disability and aging work to undermine one's sense of self. She challenges common conceptions that equate the decline of bodily potential and ability with a permanent and irretrievable loss, arguing that such a loss can be both temporary and positively transformative. With Sexuality, Disability, and Aging, Gallop explores and celebrates how sexuality transforms and becomes more queer in the lives of the no longer young and the no longer able while at the same time demonstrating how disability can generate new forms of sexual fantasy and erotic possibility.
See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Thought in the Act)
by Ralph James Savarese“We each have Skype accounts and use them to discuss [Moby-Dick] face to face. Once a week, we spread the worded whale out in front of us; we dissect its head, eyes, and bones, careful not to hurt or kill it. The Professor and I are not whale hunters. We are not letting the whale die. We are shaping it, letting it swim through the Web with a new and polished look.”—Tito Mukhopadhyay Since the 1940s researchers have been repeating claims about autistic people's limited ability to understand language, to partake in imaginative play, and to generate the complex theory of mind necessary to appreciate literature. In See It Feelingly Ralph James Savarese, an English professor whose son is one of the first nonspeaking autistics to graduate from college, challenges this view. Discussing fictional works over a period of years with readers from across the autism spectrum, Savarese was stunned by the readers' ability to expand his understanding of texts he knew intimately. Their startling insights emerged not only from the way their different bodies and brains lined up with a story but also from their experiences of stigma and exclusion. For Mukhopadhyay Moby-Dick is an allegory of revenge against autism, the frantic quest for a cure. The white whale represents the autist's baffling, because wordless, immersion in the sensory. Computer programmer and cyberpunk author Dora Raymaker skewers the empathetic failings of the bounty hunters in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Autistics, some studies suggest, offer instruction in embracing the nonhuman. Encountering a short story about a lonely marine biologist in Antarctica, Temple Grandin remembers her past with an uncharacteristic emotional intensity, and she reminds the reader of the myriad ways in which people can relate to fiction. Why must there be a norm? Mixing memoir with current research in autism and cognitive literary studies, Savarese celebrates how literature springs to life through the contrasting responses of unique individuals, while helping people both on and off the spectrum to engage more richly with the world.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals
by Aurora Levins MoralesIn this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice. Calling for a politics of integrity that recognizes the complicated wholeness of individual and collective lives, Levins Morales delves among the interwoven roots of multiple oppressions, exposing connections, crafting strategies, and uncovering the wellsprings of resilience and joy. Throughout these twenty-eight essays—twenty-one of which are new or extensively revised—she exposes the structures and mechanisms that silence voices and divide movements. The result is a medicine bag full of techniques and perspectives to build a universal solidarity that is flexible, nuanced, and strong enough to fundamentally shift our world toward justice. Intimately personal and globally relevant, Medicine Stories brings clarity and hope to tangled, emotionally charged social issues in beautiful and accessible language.
Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Sign, Storage, Transmission)
by Mack HagoodFor almost sixty years, media technologies have promised users the ability to create sonic safe spaces for themselves—from bedside white noise machines to Beats by Dre's “Hear What You Want” ad campaign, in which Colin Kaepernick's headphones protect him from taunting crowds. In Hush, Mack Hagood draws evidence from noise-canceling headphones, tinnitus maskers, LPs that play ocean sounds, nature-sound mobile apps, and in-ear smart technologies to argue the true purpose of media is not information transmission, but rather the control of how we engage our environment. These devices, which Hagood calls orphic media, give users the freedom to remain unaffected in the changeable and distracting spaces of contemporary capitalism and reveal how racial, gendered, ableist, and class ideologies shape our desire to block unwanted sounds. In a noisy world of haters, trolls, and information overload, guarded listening can be a necessity for self-care, but Hagood argues our efforts to shield ourselves can also decrease our tolerance for sonic and social difference. Challenging our self-defeating attempts to be free of one another, he rethinks media theory, sound studies, and the very definition of media.
Black Madness: : Mad Blackness
by Therí Alyce PickensIn Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.
For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Thought in the Act)
by Erin ManningWhat has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactility, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: "All black life is neurodiverse life." This is not an equation, but an "approximation of proximity." Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity "schizz" around the baseline, uselessly, pragmatically, figuring a more-than of life living. Manning, in dialogue with Félix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition's accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality, proposes a "schizoanalysis" of the more-than, charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning.
Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment
by Jonathan SterneIn Diminished Faculties Jonathan Sterne offers a sweeping cultural study and theorization of impairment. Drawing on his personal history with thyroid cancer and a paralyzed vocal cord, Sterne undertakes a political phenomenology of impairment in which experience is understood from the standpoint of a subject that is not fully able to account for itself. He conceives of impairment as a fundamental dimension of human experience, examining it as both political and physical. While some impairments are enshrined as normal in international standards, others are treated as causes or effects of illness or disability. Alongside his fractured account of experience, Sterne provides a tour of alternative vocal technologies and practices; a study of “normal” hearing loss as a cultural practice rather than a medical problem; and an intertwined history and phenomenology of fatigue that follows the concept as it careens from people to materials science to industrial management to spoons. Sterne demonstrates how impairment is a problem, opportunity, and occasion for approaching larger questions about disability, subjectivity, power, technology, and experience in new ways. Diminished Faculties ends with a practical user’s guide to impairment theory.
Work Requirements: Race, Disability, and the Print Culture of Social Welfare
by Todd CarmodyThroughout the history of the United States, work-based social welfare practices have served to affirm the moral value of work. In the late nineteenth century this representational project came to be mediated by the printed word with the emergence of industrial print technologies, the expansion of literacy, and the rise of professionalization. In Work Requirements Todd Carmody asks how work, even the most debasing or unproductive labor, came to be seen as inherently meaningful during this era. He explores how the print culture of social welfare—produced by public administrators, by economic planners, by social scientists, and in literature and the arts—tasked people on the social and economic margins, specifically racial minorities, incarcerated people, and people with disabilities, with shoring up the fundamental dignity of work as such. He also outlines how disability itself became a tool of social discipline, defined by bureaucratized institutions as the inability to work. By interrogating the representational effort necessary to make work seem inherently meaningful, Carmody ultimately reveals a forgotten history of competing efforts to think social belonging beyond or even without work.
The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (ASTERISK)
by Cameron Awkward-RichIn The Terrible We Cameron Awkward-Rich thinks with the bad feelings and mad habits of thought that persist in both transphobic discourse and trans cultural production. Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal. By tracing the coproduction of the categories of disabled and transgender in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and analyzing transmasculine literature and theory by Eli Clare, Elliott DeLine, Dylan Scholinski, and others, Awkward-Rich suggests that thinking with maladjustment might provide new perspectives on the impasses arising from the conflicted relationships among trans, feminist, and queer. In so doing, he demonstrates that rather than only impeding or confining trans life, thought, and creativity, forms of maladjustment have also been and will continue to be central to their development.Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds
by Arseli DokumaciFor people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances, Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumacı shows how they use improvisation to imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds through the smallest of actions and the most fleeting of movements---what she calls “activist affordances.” Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance opens up to allow disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise. Dokumacı shows how disabled people’s activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us.
Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines
by Sony Coráñez BoltonIn Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colonialism and queer-of-color critique, Coráñez Bolton extends theorizations of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America while considering how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought fundamentally enhances understandings of the colonial body and the racial histories of disability.
Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)
by Mel Y. ChenIn Intoxicated Mel Y. Chen explores the ongoing imperial relationship between race, sexuality, and disability. They focus on nineteenth-century biopolitical archives in England and Australia to show how mutual entanglements of race and disability take form through toxicity. Examining English scientist John Langdon Down’s characterization of white intellectual disability as Asian interiority and Queensland’s racialization and targeting of Aboriginal peoples through its ostensible concern with black opium, Chen explores how the colonial administration of race and disability gives rise to “intoxicated” subjects often shadowed by slowness. Chen charts the ongoing reverberations of these chemical entanglements in art and contemporary moments of political and economic conflict or agitation. Although intoxicated subjects may be affected by ongoing pollution or discredited as agents of failure, Chen affirmatively identifies queer/crip forms of unlearning and worldmaking under imperialism. Exemplifying an undisciplined thinking that resists linear or accretive methods of inquiry, Chen unsettles conventional understandings of slowness and agitation, intellectual method, and the toxic ordinary.
dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss
by Mimi KhúcIn dear elia Mimi Khúc revolutionizes how we understand mental health. Khúc traces the contemporary Asian American mental health crisis from the university into the maw of the COVID-19 pandemic, reenvisioning mental health through a pedagogy of unwellness—the recognition that we are all differentially unwell. In an intimate series of letters, she bears witness to Asian American unwellness up close and invites readers to recognize in it the shapes and sources of their own unwellness. Khúc draws linkages between student experience, the Asian immigrant family, the adjunctification of the university, and teaching methods pre- and post-COVID-19 to illuminate hidden roots of our collective unwellness: shared investments in compulsory wellness and meritocracy. She reveals the university as a central node and engine of unwellness and argues that we can no longer do Asian American studies without Asian American mental health—and vice versa. Interspersed throughout the book are reflective activities, including original tarot cards, that enact the very pedagogy Khúc advances, offering readers alternative ways of being that divest from structures of unwellness and open new possibilities for collective care.
Black Disability Politics
by Sami SchalkIn Black Disability Politics Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism. She points out that this work has not been recognized as part of the legacy of disability justice and liberation because Black disability politics differ in language and approach from the mainstream white-dominant disability rights movement. Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project alongside interviews with contemporary Black disabled cultural workers, Schalk identifies common qualities of Black disability politics, including the need to ground public health initiatives in the experience and expertise of marginalized disabled people so that they can work in antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist ways. Prioritizing an understanding of disability within the context of white supremacy, Schalk demonstrates that the work of Black disability politics not only exists but is essential to the future of Black liberation movements.
Disability Worlds
by Faye Ginsburg Rayna RappIn Disability Worlds, 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.
Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (Crip #1)
by Robert McRuerContends that disability is a central but misunderstood element of global austerity politics. Broadly attentive to the political and economic shifts of the last several decades, Robert McRuer asks how disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or “crip times.” Throughout Crip Times, McRuer considers how transnational queer disability theory and culture—activism, blogs, art, photography, literature, and performance—provide important and generative sites for both contesting austerity politics and imagining alternatives. The book engages various cultural flashpoints, including the spectacle surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; the murder trial of South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius; the photography of Brazilian artist Livia Radwanski which documents the gentrification of Colonia Roma in Mexico City; the defiance of Chilean students demanding a free and accessible education for all; the sculpture and performance of UK artist Liz Crow; and the problematic rhetoric of “aspiration” dependent upon both able-bodied and disabled figurations that emerged in Thatcher’s England. Crip Times asserts that disabled people themselves are demanding that disability be central to our understanding of political economy and uneven development and suggests that, in some locations, their demand for disability justice is starting to register. Ultimately, McRuer argues that a politics of austerity will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined “us” in need of protection from “them.”