The onslaught of neoliberalism, austerity measures and cuts, impact of climate change, protracted conflicts and ongoing refugee crisis, rise of far right and populist movements have all negatively impacted on disability. Yet, disabled people and their allies are fighting back and we urgently need to understand how, where and what they are doing, what they feel their challenges are and what their future needs will be. This comprehensive handbook emphasizes the importance of everyday disability activism and how activists across the world bring together a wide range of activism tactics and strategies. It also challenges the activist movements, transnational and emancipatory politics, as well as providing future directions for disability activism. With contributions from senior and emerging disability activists, academics, students and practitioners from around the globe, this handbook covers the following broad themes: • Contextualising disability activism in global activism • Neoliberalism and austerity in the global North • Rights, embodied resistance and disability activism • Belonging, identity and values: how to create diverse coalitions for rights • Reclaiming social positions, places and spaces • Social media, support and activism • Campus activism in higher education • Inclusive pedagogies, evidence and activist practices • Enabling human rights and policy • Challenges facing disability activism The Routledge Handbook of Disability Activism provides disability activists, students, academics, practitioners, development partners and policy makers with an authoritative framework for disability activism.

The Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies takes a multidisciplinary approach to disability and provides an authoritative and up-to-date overview of the main issues in the field around the world today. Adopting an international perspective and consisting entirely of newly commissioned chapters arranged thematically, it surveys the state of the discipline, examining emerging and cutting edge areas as well as core areas of contention. Divided in five sections, this comprehensive handbook covers: different models and approaches to disability how key impairment groups have engaged with disability studies and the writings within the discipline policy and legislation responses to disability studies and to disability activism disability studies and its interaction with other disciplines, such as history, philosophy and science and technology studies disability studies and different life experiences, examining how disability and disability studies intersects with ethnicity, sexuality, gender, childhood and ageing. Containing chapters from an international selection of leading scholars, this authoritative handbook is an invaluable reference for all academics, researchers and more advanced students in disability studies and associated disciplines such as sociology, health studies and social work.

In the last 30 years, a distinctive intersection between disability studies – including disability rights advocacy, disability rights activism, and disability law – and disability arts, culture, and media studies has developed. The two fields have worked in tandem to offer critique of representations of disability in dominant cultural systems, institutions, discourses, and architecture, and develop provocative new representations of what it means to be disabled. Divided into 5 sections: Disability, Identity, and Representation Inclusion, Wellbeing, and Whole-of-life Experience Access, Artistry, and Audiences Practices, Politics and the Public Sphere Activism, Adaptation, and Alternative Futures this handbook brings disability arts, disability culture, and disability media studies – traditionally treated separately in publications in the field to date – together for the first time. It provides scholars, graduate students, upper level undergraduate students, and others interested in the disability rights agenda with a broad-based, practical and accessible introduction to key debates in the field of disability art, culture, and media studies. An internationally recognised selection of authors from around the world come together to articulate the theories, issues, interests, and practices that have come to define the field. Most critically, this book includes commentaries that forecast the pressing present and future concerns for the field as scholars, advocates, activists, and artists work to make a more inclusive society a reality.

This book centres and explores postcolonial theory, which looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial supremacy. It argues that disability is a constitutive material presence in many postcolonial societies and that progressive disability politics arise from postcolonial concerns. By drawing these two subjects together, this handbook challenges oppression, voicelessness, stereotyping, undermining, neo-colonisation and postcolonisation and bridges binary debate between global North and the global South. The book is divided into eight sections i Setting the Scene ii Decolonising Disability Studies iii Postcolonial Theory, Inclusive Development iv Postcolonial Disability Studies and Disability Activism v Postcolonial Disability and Childhood Studies vi Postcolonial Disability Studies and Education vii Postcolonial Disability Studies, Gender, Race and Religion viii Conclusion And comprised of 27 newly written chapters, this book leads with postcolonial perspectives – closely followed by an engagement with critical disability studies – with the explicit aim of foregrounding these contributions; pulling them in from the edges of empirical and theoretical work where they often reside in mainstream academic literature. The book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies and postcolonial studies as well as those working in sociology, literature and development studies.

This handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of the current and emerging research and policy on disability law. Bringing together a team of respected and experienced experts, the handbook offers a range of jurisdictional and multidisciplinary perspectives. The authors consider historical and contemporary, as well as comparative perspectives of disability law. Divided into three parts, the contributors provide a comprehensive reference to the theoretical underpinnings, ongoing debates and emerging fields within the subject. The study provides a strong basis for consideration of contemporary disability law, its research foundations, and progressive developments in the area. The book incorporates interdisciplinary and comparative country perspectives to capture the breadth of current discourse on disability law. This handbook provides a valuable resource for a wide range of scholars, public and private researchers, NGOs, and practitioners working in the area of disability law, and across national and transnational disability schemes. The work will be of important interest to those in the fields of sociology, history, psychology, economics, political science, rehabilitation sciences, medicine, technology, and law, among others.

The Routledge History of Disability explores the shifting attitudes towards and representations of disabled people from the age of antiquity to the twenty-first century. Taking an international view of the subject, this wide-ranging collection shows that the history of disability cuts across racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, gender and class divides, highlighting the commonalities and differences between the experiences of disabled persons in global historical context. The book is arranged in four parts, covering histories of disabilities across various time periods and cultures, histories of national disability policies, programs and services, histories of education and training and the ways in which disabled people have been seen and treated in the last few decades. Within this, the twenty-eight chapters discuss topics such as developments in disability issues during the late Ottoman period, the history of disability in Belgian Congo in the early twentieth century, blind asylums in nineteenth-century Scotland and the systematic killing of disabled children in Nazi Germany. Illustrated with images and tables and providing an overview of how various countries, cultures and societies have addressed disability over time, this comprehensive volume offers a global perspective on this rapidly growing field and is a valuable resource for scholars of disability studies and histories of disabilities.

Disability is defined by hierarchy. Regardless of culture or context, persons with disabilities are almost always pushed to the bottom of the social hierarchy. With the advent of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), disability human rights seemingly provided a path forward for tearing down ableist social hierarchies and ensuring that all persons with disabilities everywhere were treated equally. Despite important progress, the disability human rights project not only remains incomplete, but has often created new hierarchies among persons with disabilities themselves or across the human rights it promotes. Certain groups of persons with disabilities have gained new voices while others remain silenced and certain rights are prioritized over others depending on what states, international organizations, or advocates want rather than what those on the ground need most. This volume was inspired both by the continued need to expose human rights violations against persons with disabilities, but to also explore the nuanced role that hierarchies play in the spread, implementation, and protection of disability human rights. The enjoyment of human rights is not equal nor is the recognition of specific individuals and groups’ rights. In order to change this situation, inequalities across the disability human rights movement must be explored. Divided into five parts: Who counts as disabled? Political, social, and cultural context Which rights on top, whose rights on bottom? Pushed to the periphery in the disability rights movement Representations of disability and comprised of 34 newly-written chapters including case-studies from the Anglophone Caribbean, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Ghana, Haiti, Hungary, India, Israel, Kenya, Latin America, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Serbia and South Africa, and other countries, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, human rights law and social policy.

Grouped around four central themes – illness and impairment, disabling processes, care and control, and communication and representations – this collection offers a fresh perspective on disability research, showing how theory and data can be brought together in new and exciting ways. Disability Research Today starts by showing how engaging with issues around illness and impairment is vital to a multidisciplinary understanding of disability as a social process. The second section explores factors that affect disabled people, such as homelessness, violence and unemployment. The third section turns to social care, and how disabled people are prevented from living with independence and dignity. Finally, the last section examines how different imagery and technology impacts our understandings of disability and deafness. Showcasing empirical work from a range of countries, including Japan, Norway, Italy, Australia, India, the UK, Turkey, Finland and Iceland, this collection shows how disability studies can be simultaneously sophisticated, accessible and policy-relevant. Disability Research Today is suitable for students and researchers in disability studies, sociology, social policy, social work, nursing and health studies.

This book explores the diverse ways in which disability activism and advocacy are experienced and practised by people with disabilities and their allies. Contributors to the book explore the very different strategies and campaigns they have used to have their demands for respect, dignity and rights heard and acted upon by their communities, by national governments and the international community. The book, with its contemporary global focus, makes a significant contribution to the field of disability and social justice studies, particularly at a time of major social, political and cultural upheaval. Global Perspectives on Disability Activism and Advocacy offers a significant intervention within the field of disability at a time of major social upheaval where actors, advocates and activists are seeking to hold onto existing claims for rights, equality and disability justice.

This handbook provides a much-needed holistic overview of disability and sexuality research and scholarship. With authors from a wide range of disciplines and representing a diversity of nationalities, it provides a multi-perspectival view that fully captures the diversity of issues and outlooks. Organised into six parts, the contributors explore long-standing issues such as the psychological, interpersonal, social, political and cultural barriers to sexual access that disabled people face and their struggle for sexual rights and participation. The volume also engages issues that have been on the periphery of the discourse, such as sexual accommodations and support aimed at facilitating disabled people's sexual well-being; the socio-sexual tensions confronting disabled people with intersecting stigmatised identities such as LGBTBI or asexual; and the sexual concerns of disabled people in the Global South. It interrogates disability and sexuality from diverse perspectives, from more traditional psychological and sociological models, to various subversive and post-theoretical perspectives and queer theory. This handbook examines the cutting-edge, and sometimes ethically contentious, concerns that have been repressed in the field. With current, international and comprehensive content, this book is essential reading for students, academics and researchers in the areas of disability, gender and sexuality, as well as applied disciplines such as healthcare practitioners, counsellors, psychology trainees and social workers.