Disability Research Today

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.

Tom Shakespeare is Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology at the Medical School of the University of East Anglia, UK. Previously he worked for the World Health Organization, where he was an author and editor of the World Report on Disability (WHO, 2011), and International Perspectives on Spinal Cord Injury (WHO, 2013). His books include The Sexual Politics of Disability (Cassell, 1996) and Disability Rights and Wrongs (Routledge 2006, 2013). He has been involved in the disability movement since 1986.

1. Introduction Part 1: Illness and Impairment 2. Social Experiences of Physical Rehabilitation: The Role of the Family 3. Learning from Tojisha Kenkyu: Mental Health 'Patients' Studying Their Difficulties with Their Peers 4. The Psycho-Social Impact of Impairment: The Case of Motor Neurone Disease Part 2: Disabling Processes 5. Beyond the ICF: Italian Network Strategies for Job Placement of Persons with Disabilities 6. Sites of Oppression: Dominant Ideologies and Women with Disabilities in India 7. How to Understand Violence Against Disabled People 8. 'The Invisibles': Conceptualising the Intersectional Relationships Between Dyslexia, Social Exclusion and Homelessness Part 3: Care and Control 9. Spaces of indifference: bureaucratic governance and disability rights in Iceland 10. Mental Capacity and the Control of Sexuality of People with Intellectual Disabilites in England and Wales 11. 'My Sister Won't Let Me': Issues of Control Over One's Own Life as Experienced by Older Women with Intellectual Disabilities Part 4: Communication and Representation 12. Social Representations and Inclusive Practices for Disabled Students in Italian Higher Education: A Mixed-method Analysis of Multiple Perspectives 13. The Problem of the Supercrip: Representation and Misrepresentation of Disability 14. User, Client or Consumer? Construction of Roles in Video Interpreting Services 15. Reading Other Minds: Ethical Considerations on the Representation of Intellectual Disability in Fiction