New Books in Disability Studies

Exploring Autism is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and one of the world’s leading experts on autism Uta Frith, Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London. Topics that are examined in this extensive conversation are what autism actually is, the reasons behind the increased number of diagnoses over the last few years, autism spectrum disorders, Asperger’s syndrome, mentalizing, brain imaging to research the cognitive and neurobiological bases of autism and much more.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mental Capacity in Relationship: Decision-Making, Dialogue, and Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), challenges the current legal landscape of mental capacity law and human rights legislation, arguing that assessments of mental capacity should take account the role of relationships in the decision-making capacity of individuals with impairments and mental disorders. Dr. Camillia Kong's is an interdisciplinary exploration, combining philosophy, legal analysis on the law of England and Wales, the European Convention of Human Rights, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Kong defends a concept of mental capacity, but one which at times provides scope for justifiable interventions into disabling relationships. The implications of Kong's hypothesis are groundbreaking; she provides a framework which articulates the practice of capacity assessments to help to better situate, interpret, and understand the decisions and actions of people with impairments. This monograph is the basis of another publication (co-written with Alex Ruck Keene) Overcoming Challenges in the Mental Capacity Act 2005: Practical Guidance for Working with Complex Issues (Jessica Kingsley, 2018). You can listen to that interview with Dr. Kong and Ruck-Keene here.Dr Camillia Kong is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice, Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the Principal Investigator of Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law.Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Building on work in feminist studies, queer studies and critical race theory, this volume challenges the universality of propositions about human nature, by questioning the boundaries between predominant neurotypes and 'others', including dyslexics, autistics and ADHDers.Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm (Routledge, 2020) is the first work of its kind to bring cutting-edge research across disciplines to the concept of neurodiversity. It offers in-depth explorations of the themes of cure/prevention/eugenics; neurodivergent wellbeing; cross-neurotype communication; neurodiversity at work; and challenging brain-bound cognition. It analyses the role of neuro-normativity in theorising agency, and a proposal for a new alliance between the Hearing Voices Movement and neurodiversity. In doing so, we contribute to a cultural imperative to redefine what it means to be human. To this end, we propose a new field of enquiry that finds ways to support the inclusion of neurodivergent perspectives in knowledge production, and which questions the theoretical and mythological assumptions that produce the idea of the neurotypical.Working at the crossroads between sociology, critical psychology, medical humanities, critical disability studies, and critical autism studies, and sharing theoretical ground with critical race studies and critical queer studies, the proposed new field - neurodiversity studies - will be of interest to people working in all these areas.Christina Anderson Bosch is faculty at the California State University, Fresno. She is curious about + committed to public, inclusive education in pluralistic societies where critical perspectives on questions of social and ecological justice are valued enough to enact material dignity and metaphysical wellbeing on massive scales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drawing 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: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus (Duke UP, 2019), 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.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The laws that govern psychiatric treatment under coercion have remain largely unchanged since the eighteenth century. But this is not because of their effectiveness, rather, these laws cling to outdated notions of disability, mental illness and mental disorder why deny the fundamental rights of this category of people on an equal basis with all others. In Men in White Coats: Treatment Under Coercion (Oxford University Press, 2017) Professor George Szmukler examines the violation of these rights, such as the right to autonomy, self-determination, liberty, and security and integrity of the person in the context of the domestic laws which themselves perpetuate ongoing discrimination against people with mental impairments.Tracing first the history of the medical coercion and involuntary treatment of people with mental illnesses and mental disorders, Professor Szmukler offers a potential path which he argues would end discrimination against this category of people. He puts forward a legal framework which is non-discriminatory and is based on a person's decision-making abilities and best interests, as opposed to a diagnosis. Crucially, he argues that this law is generic, and would not apply by reason of a person's mental disorder. His solution - Fusion Law - would better support people's autonomy, better engage with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and have significant social value by recognising the dignity and equality of people with mental health impairments. It would also have implications for the forensics system, in particular, with regards to defendants who have mental disorders. Professor George Szmukler is a psychiatrist who started practising in the field as a trainee in 1972. He retired from clinical work in 2012, and is now an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Society at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's college London. His major research now concerns methods of reducing compulsion and ’coercion’ in psychiatric care, for example, through the use of ’advance statements’. A related interest is mental health law, particularly the possibility of generic legislation centred on impaired decision-making capacity which would apply to all persons, regardless of the cause of the underlying disturbance of mental functioning. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nate Holdren is the author of Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Injury Impoverished looks at the history of U.S. workplace injuries in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries. As the workers, employers, and reformers attempted to tackle the drastically high rates of workplace injuries and deaths, the nation passed a number of compensation laws that fundamentally changed how the law approached workplace injuries. Holdren, in examining this history illustrates the many shortcomings of these laws, and how laws meant to help employees were often used to do the exact opposite. At the heart of Holdren’s study is whether or not the economy and the legal system was interested in and able to do justice for a workers.Dr. Holdren is an Assistant Professor at Drake University.Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeanne Simons devoted her career as a social worker and educator to the study, treatment, and care of children with autism. In 1955, she established the Linwood Children's Center in Ellicott City, Maryland, one of the first schools dedicated to children with autism. Her Linwood Model, developed there, was widely adopted and still forms the basis for a variety of autism intervention techniques. Incredibly—although unknown at the time—Jeanne was herself autistic.Behind the Mirror: The Story of a Pioneer in Autism Treatment and Her Work with Children on the Spectrum (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) reveals the remarkable tale of Simons. In this interview I speak with Dr. Sabine Oishi, who co-author this book with Simons and also the book, the hidden child.Sabine Oishi, PhD, was educated first as a teacher and then as a child psychologist at the University of Geneva. She earned her PhD in child development and family therapy from the University of Maryland. She has worked as a teacher, researcher, and therapist both in Switzerland and the United States. With Jeanne Simons, she was the coauthor of The Hidden Child.Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Practice: A Comparative Analysis of the Role of Courts (Oxford UP, 2018) brings together an extraordinary collection of data and analysis which concerns how domestic courts interpret and apply the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It is the first thorough comparative collection of research which brings together the approaches to the interpretation and application of the CRPD in domestic courts across thirteen jurisdictions from around the world. In this groundbreaking book, leading global scholars in disability law, Professor Lisa Waddington and Professor Anna Lawson, give the reader unique insight into the influence that the CRPD is having in domestic courts. The first part of the book provides an extensive comparative analysis of the role of the courts in bringing about compliance with the Convention. The second half of the book brings together these findings, offering understandings into the implications for human rights law and theory, contextualised more broadly in international human rights law. This work will be the basis for extensive research into the uses and application of the CRPD, especially with regards to the function and limits of the role of the courts in disability rights enforcement. The book is be an essential resource for any scholar or student of disability law, international law, and human rights.  Lisa Waddington is a Professor, and Endowed Chair of International and European Law in the faculty of law in Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She holds the European Disability Forum Chair in European Disability Law and her principal area of interest lies in European and comparative disability law, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and European and comparative equality law.Anna Lawson is a Professor in disability and law at the University of Leeds. She is the Joint Director of the University wide interdisciplinary Centre for Disability Studies and the Co-ordinator of the Disability Law Hub. She holds membership, trustee and advisory positions in a range of local, national and international disabled people’s and human rights organisations and regularly advises policy-makers, governments and intergovernmental organisations. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I interview Michael Snediker, professor of English at the University of Houston, about his book, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment, recently published by University of Minnesota Press. At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain’s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable.Suffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience, Contingent Figure resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes Contingent Figure an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention. Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading’s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dennis Frost’s More than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan is a history of disability sports in modern Japan. The 1964, 1998, and upcoming Paralympics are important case studies, but Frost’s interests go far beyond this pinnacle of international, competitive disability sports. More than Medals explores the history and development of disability sports, highlighting Japan as an international actor, Oita prefecture as a domestic and international disability sports mecca, and most of all the ongoing tension between two visions of the purpose of disability sports: one which is primarily rehabilitative and the other which emphasizes elite athletic competition. This, as Frost shows, is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of accessibility and inclusivity in disabled sports. More than Medals will appeal to readers interested in the history of Japan, sports, and mega-events such as the Paralympics, as well as to those interested in disability studies.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices