Description: Redefining Disability features all disabled authors and creators. By combining traditional academic works with personal reflections, graphic art, and poetry, the volume centers disability by drawing from the experiences and expertise of disabled individuals.
Review Quotes: Praise for Redefining Disability:
Redefining Disability offers a unique and vivid combination of lucid explanations and evocative accounts. Featuring essay, narrative, poetry, and photography, this outstanding collection opens a creative window into the richness of disabled experience and calls out systemic ableism that radically diminishes the lives of disabled folks. This provocative, insightful book is essential reading for anyone committed to the work of inclusivity, diversity, equity, and access. - Laura L. Ellingson, PhD, Patrick A. Donohoe, S.J. Professor of Communication, Santa Clara University and author of Embodiment in Qualitative Research
Redefining Disability brilliantly takes readers on a tour through disabled people's lives. It skillfully talks frankly and directly to readers through a delightful array of short and pithy chapters covering expansive topics such as disability and pets, the COVID-19 pandemic, disclosure in higher ed, and being chronically ill. There are photographs and poems, short essays and longer ones. It's at times emotionally raw and other times fun. To make this book extra-teachable, each chapter ends with discussion questions. A celebration of the act of telling disabled people's stories, Redefining Disability is a must-read. - Laura Mauldin, PhD, NIC, Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut and author of Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children
Redefining Disability is a collection 100% shaped by disabled people, not just through the individual chapters and the perspectives contained in the book, but all the way through editing and indexing. The book takes aim at ableism and discrimination against disabled people through critique, with humour, with powerful imagery and art, with indelible writing, and does so from a diverse range of perspectives. But the book, its authors and editors, are also very intentional about accessibility, modeling the values it promotes with a clear and engaging introduction, through plain language and careful explanations and definitions, and with terrific discussion questions. The result is a book that could be taught in high school, College or University, but also is distinctly non-academic in its appeal. Redefining Disability captures and conveys disability culture and community more successfully, accessibly, and compellingly than any other book you could pick up. - Jay Dolmage, PhD, Professor of English, University of Waterloo and author of Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education and the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies.