Janice Rieger's book Design, Disability and Embodiment: Spatial Justice and Perspectives of Power (Routledge, 2023) explores the spatial and social injustices within our streets, malls, schools, and public institutions. Taken-for-granted acts like going for a walk, seeing an exhibition with a friend, and going to school are, for people with disabilities, conditional or precluded acts due to exclusion by design.This book stimulates debate and discussion about current practice and studies in spatial design in the context of disability and the growing need for inclusive design globally. Case studies of inclusive design in spaces like museums, malls, galleries and universities are presented to challenge and expose the perspectives of power and spatial injustices that still exist within these spaces today. The international case studies presented purposely privilege the voices and perspectives of people with disabilities, to expose the multisensorial perspectives of spatial justice in order to understand inclusion more holistically through embodiment.If you are an architect, designer, arts educator, curator or museum professional or just want a world where spatial justice is possible, then this book will provide you with a new perspective of spatial design through critical disability studies, allyship and codesign, where tangible approaches and practices for inclusive design are explored.Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessica Lowell Mason and Nicole Crevar's Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art (Vernon Press, 2023) boldly reasserts the importance of the Madwoman more than four decades after the publication of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal work in feminist literary criticism, 'The Madwoman in the Attic'. Since Gilbert and Gubar's work was published, the Madwoman has reemerged to do important work, rock the academic boat, and ignite social justice agency inside and outside of academic spaces, moving beyond the literary context that defined the Madwoman in the late 20th century.In this dynamic collection of essays, scholars, creative writers, and Mad activists come together to (re)define the Madwoman in pluralistic and expansive ways and to realize new potential in Mad agency. This collection blazes new directions of thinking through Madness as a gendered category, comprised of a combination of creative works that (re)imagine the figure of the Madwoman, speeches in which Mad-identifying artists and writers reclaim the label of "Madwoman," and scholarly essays that articulate ambitious theories of the Madwoman.The collection is an interdisciplinary scholarly resource that will appeal to multiple academic fields, including literary studies, disability studies, feminist studies, and Mad studies. Additionally, the work contributes to the countermovement against colonial, sanist, patriarchal, and institutional social practices that continue to silence women and confine them to the metaphorical attic. Appealing to a broad audience of readers, 'Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art' is a cutting-edge inquiry into the implications of Madness as a theoretical tool in which dissenting, deviant, and abnormal women and gender non-conforming writers, artists, and activists open the door to Mad futurities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With no known cause or cure despite a century of research, Alzheimer's disease is a true medical mystery. In Mediating Alzheimer's: Cognition and Personhood (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Scott Selberg examines the nature of this enduring national health crisis by looking at the disease's relationship to media and representation. He shows how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with this disease.Selberg demonstrates how the cognitive abilities that Alzheimer's threatens--memory, for example--are integrated into the operations of representational technologies, from Polaroid photographs to Post-its to digital artificial intelligence. Focusing on a wide variety of media technologies, such as neuroimaging, art therapy, virtual reality, and social media, he shows how these cognitively oriented media ultimately help define personhood for people with Alzheimer's. Media have changed the practices of successful aging in the United States, and Selberg takes us deep into how technologies like digital brain-training and online care networks shape ideas of cognition and healthy aging.Packed with startlingly fresh insights, Mediating Alzheimer's contributes to debates around bioethics, the labor of caregiving, and a national economy increasingly invested in communication and digital media. Probing the very technologies that promise to save and understand our brains, it gives us new ways of understanding Alzheimer's disease and aging in America.Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system.Tracing Minnesota's eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety of worldviews and political agendas than previously understood. She describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent children without helping the "undeserving" poor. She also sheds new light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In Ladd-Taylor's provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender.Drawing on institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people who were labeled "feebleminded" and targeted for sterilization. She chronicles the routine operation of Minnesota's three-step policy of eugenic commitment, institutionalization, and sterilization in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how surgery became the "price of freedom" from a state institution. Combining innovative political analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in Minnesota's welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization.Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Valentina Capurri's book Not Good Enough for Canada: Canadian Public Discourse Around Issues of Inadmissibility for Potential Immigrants with Diseases And/Or Disabilities (U Toronto Press, 2020) investigates the development of Canadian immigration policy with respect to persons with a disease or disability throughout the twentieth century. With an emphasis on social history, this book examines the way the state operates through legislation to achieve its goals of self-preservation even when such legislation contradicts state commitments to equality rights.Looking at the ways federal politicians, mainstream media, and the judicial system have perceived persons with disabilities, specifically immigrant applicants with disabilities, this book reveals how Canadian immigration policy has systematically omitted any reference to this group, rendering them socially invisible.Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. Aleksandra Pfau, Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners sought the king’s mercy as an alternative to local justice. The resulting narratives about the mentally ill in late medieval France constructed madness as an inability to live according to communal rules. Although such texts defined madness through acts that threatened social bonds, those ties were reaffirmed through the medium of the remission letter. The composers of the letters presented madness as a communal concern, situating the mad within the household, where care could be provided. Those considered mad were usually not expelled but integrated, often through pilgrimage, surveillance, or chains, into their kin and communal relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The well-known Admiral Horatio Nelson fought all of his most historically significant battles after he lost his right arm and the sight in one eye. With this notable exception, however, disabled members of the military on active duty remain largely invisible.Teresa Michals' book Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals: Amputee Officers in Nelson's Navy (U Virginia Press, 2021) reveals that at least twenty-four other Royal Navy officers reached the rank of Commander or higher through continued service after the loss of a limb. It focuses on the lives and careers of three particularly distinguished amputee officers: Admiral Sir Michael Seymour, Admiral Sir Watkin Owen Pell, and Admiral Sir James Alexander Gordon.Given that the number of talented and ambitious naval officers far exceeded the number of ships the Royal Navy had to give them throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, we might expect that contracting any physical impairment would disqualify an officer from further command positions and promotion. Instead, it seems that losing a limb in battle could become a mark of honor, one that a successful officer and his friends could use to increase his chances of winning so-called "hero promotion" and additional employment at sea. Bringing together military disability and the social history of the Royal Navy, Teresa Michals examines how active-duty amputee officers attended to the difference between ideals of masculinity and military heroism, on the one hand, and the complex and changeable realities of military service, on the other.Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Johanna Dobrich, author of Working with Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: Ability and Disability in Clinical Process (Routledge, 2021), is the recipient of the 2023 Sandor Ferenczi Award. The award is given for the best published work in the realm of psychoanalysis related to trauma and dissociation in adults and/or children. Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: (Ability and Disability in Clinical Process is the first book to address the topic of relational trauma within the families of a child with severe disabilities.Working with Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: Ability and Disability in Clinical Process explores a previously neglected area in the field of psychoanalysis, addressing undertheorized concepts on siblings, disabilities, and psychic survivorship, and broadening our conceptualization of the enduring effects of lateral relations on human development.What happens to a person’s sense of self both personally and professionally when they grow up alongside a severely disabled sibling? Through a series of qualitative interviews held between the author and a sample of psychoanalysts, this book examines both the unconscious experience and the interpersonal field of survivor siblings. Through a trauma-informed contemporary psychoanalytic lens, Dobrich combines data analysis, theory-building, memoir, and clinical storytelling to explore and explicate the impact of lateral survivorship on the clinical moment, making room for a contemporary and nuanced appreciation of siblings in psychoanalysis.Working with Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: Ability and Disability in Clinical Process will be of immense interest and value to psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals, and for all therapists who work with and treat patients that are themselves survivor siblings. Uniquely integrating both academic and memoir writing, this book will also engage those building theory around the implications of the analyst’s subjectivity on clinical processes.Johanna Dobrich is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Psychoanalyst with a private practice in New York City that specializes in the treatment of dissociative disorders, among other conditions. Johanna has a master’s degree in political science from Rutgers University and an MSW from New York University. Johanna teaches courses in relational psychoanalysis and its intersection with traumatology and supervises post-graduate psychoanalytic candidates-in-training at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and at the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center. Johanna enjoys writing, supervising, engaging and coming together with those who share an interest in understanding the complexities, joys and pains of human connection and expression.Judith Tanen, MA LP CANDIDATE. Email: judithtanen@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gerald O'Brien's book Eugenics, Genetics, and Disability in Historical and Contemporary Perspective: Implications for the Social Work Profession (Oxford UP, 2023) focuses on the conceptual relationship between the American eugenic movement of the early 1900s and contemporary genetic research, policy and practices, and their relevance for social work and related professions. While the expansion of pre-natal testing and other genetic innovations are often couched as a form of "new eugenics," this description is only partially correct. This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the relationship between the emerging social work profession and the eugenic movement during the first quarter of the twentieth century and considers the historical importance of this for the profession today.Social workers played a particularly important role in the movement of eugenic policies from targeting persons with disabilities to limiting procreation among "welfare" recipients, especially minority women. As the profession attempts to come to terms with this problematic history, it also needs to understand the dual "faces" it displays to persons with disabilities. Often purported as supporters of such persons, social workers' continued embracement of the medical model of disabilities keeps them from being accepted by many as true allies in the fight for social justice related to disability inclusion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices