New Books in Disability Studies

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

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

In Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World (Beacon, 2022), disabled journalist Ben Mattlin weaves together interviews and reportage to introduce a cavalcade of individuals, ideas, and events in engaging, fast-paced prose. He traces the generation that came of age after the ADA reshaped America, and how it is influencing the future. He documents how autistic self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement upended views of those whose brains work differently. He lifts the veil on a thriving disability culture--from social media to high fashion, Hollywood to Broadway--showing how the politics of beauty for those with marginalized body types and facial features is sparking widespread change.He also explores the movement's shortcomings, particularly the erasure of nonwhite and LGBTQIA+ people that helped give rise to Disability Justice. He delves into systemic ableism in health care, the right-to-die movement, institutionalization, and the scourge of subminimum-wage labor that some call legalized slavery. And he finds glimmers of hope in how disabled people never give up their fight for parity and fair play.Beautifully written, without anger or pity, Disability Pride is a revealing account of an often misunderstood movement and identity, an inclusive reexamination of society's treatment of those it deems different. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880-1983 (Ohio UP, 2008) examines the interactions between psychiatrists, patients and their families, and the national state in modern Argentina. This book offers a fresh interpretation of the Argentine state's relationship to modernity and social change during the twentieth century, while also examining the often contentious place of psychiatry in modern Argentina.Drawing on a number of previously untapped archival sources, author Jonathan Ablard uses the experience of psychiatric patients as a case study of how the Argentine state developed and functioned over the last century and of how Argentines interacted with it. Ablard argues that the capacity of the state to provide social services and professional opportunities and to control the populace was often constrained to an extent not previously recognized in scholarly literature. These limitations, including a shortage of hospitals, insufficient budgets, and political and economic instability, shaped the experiences of patients, their families, and doctors and also influenced medical and lay ideas about the nature and significance of mental illness. Furthermore, these experiences, and the institutional framework in which they were imbedded, had a profound impact on how Argentine psychiatrists discussed not only mental illness but also a host of related themes including immigration, poverty, and the role of the state in mitigating social problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Disability, Care and Family Law (Routledge 2021) examines the issues at the intersection of disability, care and family law. Professors Beverley Clough and Jonathan Herring challenge dominant narratives in family law, which disadvantage people with disabilities. The book enables the questioning of structural norms in policy and society which situates disability as private familial concern. It calls to the forefront marginalised voices to unveil complexities in seemingly neutral laws when applied to people with disabilities. The book engages with highly topical issues - for example, mothering a child who is in prison and is disabled, children who care for their disabled parents, deprivations of liberty of children with disabilities, and more. By bringing these complex issues together, the book moves beyond the dyad between care and disability relations in the context of family law. This is an important book for disability lawyers, family lawyers and scholars of vulnerability, care theory and relational theory. It will have significant implications for policy makers and practitioners. Professor Beverley Clough is a Professor of Law and Social Justice at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is also the author of The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries.Professor Jonathan Herring is the DM Wolfe-Clarendon Fellow in Law, Exeter College, University of Oxford. He is the author of several monographs, including The Right To Be Protected From Committing Suicide.  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

American Christianity tends to view disabled persons as problems to be solved rather than people with experiences and gifts that enrich the church. Churches have generated policies, programs, and curricula geared toward "including" disabled people while still maintaining "able-bodied" theologies, ministries, care, and leadership. Ableism―not a lack of ramps, finances, or accessible worship―is the biggest obstacle for disabled ministry in America. In From Inclusion to Justice: Disability, Ministry, and Congregational Leadership (Baylor UP, 2022), Erin Raffety argues that what our churches need is not more programs for disabled people but rather the pastoral tools to repent of able-bodied theologies and practices, listen to people with disabilities, lament ableism and injustice, and be transformed by God’s ministry through disabled leadership. Without a paradigm shift from ministries of inclusion to ministries of justice, our practical theology falls short.Drawing on ethnographic research with congregations and families, pastoral experience with disabled people, teaching in theological education, and parenting a disabled child, Raffety, an able-bodied Christian writing to able-bodied churches, confesses her struggle to repent from ableism in hopes of convincing others to do the same. At the same time, Raffety draws on her interactions with disabled Christian leaders to testify to what God is still doing in the pews and the pulpit, uplifting and amplifying the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities as a vision toward justice in the kingdom of God.Bingwan Tian is a Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo interested in the study of special education and citizenship education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (U Minnesota Press, 2023) examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms.The civil rights and the educational disability rights movements, Mayes shows, have both collaborated and worked at cross-purposes since the beginning of school desegregation. Disability rights advocates built upon the opportunity provided by the civil rights movement to make claims about student invisibility at the level of intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Although special education ostensibly included children from all racial groups, educational disability rights advocates focused on the needs of white disabled students, while school systems used disability discourses to malign and marginalize Black students.From the 1940s to the present, social science researchers, policymakers, school administrators, and teachers have each contributed to the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, The Unteachables explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect.Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change. 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 Nicole Pfau's book Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France (Amsterdam UP, 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

Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre (Routledge, 2023) offers unique insight into the question of 'voice' in learning disabled theatre and what is gained and lost in making performance. It is grounded in the author's 18 years of making theatre with Different Light Theatre company in Christchurch, New Zealand, and includes contributions from the artists themselves.This book draws on an extensive archive of performer interviews, recordings of rehearsal processes, and informal logs of travelling together and sharing experience. These accounts engage with the practical aesthetics of theatre-making as well as their much wider ethical and political implications, relevant to any collaborative process seeking to represent the under- or un-represented. Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre asks how care and support can be tempered with artistic challenge and rigour and presents a case for how listening learning disabled artists to speech encourages attunement to indigenous knowledge and the cries of the planet in the current socio-ecological crisis.This is a vital and valuable book for anyone interested in learning disabled theatre, either as a performer, director, dramaturg, critic, or spectator.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

Heide Hausse's book The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany (Manchester University Press, 2023) uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing practices of removing limbs, uncovering tense moments in which decisions to operate were made. Importantly, it teases out surgeons' ideas about the body embedded in their technical instructions. This unique study also explores the material culture of mechanical hands that amputees commissioned locksmiths, clockmakers, and other artisans to create, revealing their roles in developing a new prosthetic technology. Over two centuries of surgical and artisanal interventions emerged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body - that it was malleable.Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices