Making Rights a Reality? explores the way in which disability activists in the United Kingdom and Canada have transformed their aspirations into legal claims in their quest for equality. It unpacks ...shifting conceptualizations of the political identity of disability and the role of a rights discourse in these dynamics. In doing so, it delves into the diffusion of disability rights among grassroots organizations and the traditional disability charities. The book draws on a wealth of primary sources including court records and campaign documents and encompassing interviews with more than sixty activists and legal experts. While showing that the disability rights movement has had a significant impact on equality jurisprudence in two countries, the book also demonstrates that the act of mobilizing rights can have consequences, both intended and unintended, for social movements themselves.
No Right to Be Idle Rose, Sarah F
2017, 2017-02-13, 2017-09-21, 2017-04-03
eBook
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans with all sorts of disabilities came to be labeled as "unproductive citizens." Before that, disabled people had contributed as they ...were able in homes, on farms, and in the wage labor market, reflecting the fact that Americans had long viewed productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability. But as Sarah F. Rose explains in No Right to Be Idle, a perfect storm of public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to achieve "self-care" and "self-support." By tracing the experiences of policymakers, employers, reformers, and disabled people caught up in this epochal transition, Rose masterfully integrates disability history and labor history. She shows how people with disabilities lost access to paid work and the status of "worker--a shift that relegated them and their families to poverty and second-class economic and social citizenship. This has vast consequences for debates about disability, work, poverty, and welfare in the century to come.
Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture covers the entire scope of Germany's most tragic and tumultuous century—from the Weimar Republic to the current administration—revealing how central the ...notion of disability is to modern German cultural history. By examining a wide range of literary and visual depictions of disability, Carol Poore explores the contradictions of a nation renowned for its social services programs yet notorious for its history of compulsory sterilization and eugenic dogma. This comprehensive volume focuses particular attention on the horrors of the Nazi era, when those with disabilities were considered "unworthy of life," but also investigates other previously overlooked topics including the exile community's response to disability, socialism and disability in East Germany, current bioethical debates, and the rise and gains of Germany's disability rights movement. Richly illustrated, wide-ranging, and accessible, Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture gives all those interested in disability studies, German studies, visual culture, Nazi history, and bioethics the opportunity to explore controversial questions of individuality, normalcy, citizenship, and morality. The book concludes with a memoir of the author's experiences in Germany as a person with a disability.
Disability and Information Technology examines the extent to which regulatory frameworks for information and communication technologies (ICTs) safeguard the rights of persons with disabilities as ...citizenship rights. It adopts a comparative approach focused on four case studies: Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. It focuses on the tension between social and economic values in the regulation of ICTs and calls for a regulatory approach based on a framework of principles that reflects citizenship values. The analysis identifies challenges encountered in the jurisdictions examined and points toward the rights-based approach advanced by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a benchmark in protecting the rights of persons with disabilities to have equal access to information. The research draws on a wealth of resources, including legislation, cases, interviews, consultation documents and responses from organisations representing persons with disabilities.
Never before have the civil rights of people with disabilities aligned so well with developments in information and communication technology. The center of the technology revolution is the Internet's ...World Wide Web, which fosters unprecedented opportunities for engagement in democratic society. The Americans with Disabilities Act likewise is helping to ensure equal participation in society by people with disabilities. Globally, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities further affirms that persons with disabilities are entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of fundamental personal freedoms. This book is about the lived struggle for disability rights, with a focus on Web equality for people with cognitive disabilities, such as intellectual disabilities, autism, and print-related disabilities. The principles derived from the right to the Web - freedom of speech and individual dignity - are bound to lead toward full and meaningful involvement in society for persons with cognitive and other disabilities.
Disability Hate Crimes Sherry, Mark
2010, 20160523, 2016-05-23, 2010-06-01, 20100101
eBook
Disability hate crimes are a global problem. They are often violent and hyper-aggressive, with life-changing effects on victims, and they send consistent messages of intolerance and bigotry. This ...ground-breaking book shows that disability hate crimes do exist, that they have unique characteristics which distinguish them from other hate crimes, and that more effective policies and practices can and must be developed to respond and prevent them. With particular focus on the UK and USA's contrasting response to this issue, this book will help readers to define hate crimes as well as place them within their wider social context. It discusses the need for legislative recognition and essential improvements on the reporting of incidents and assistance for individual victims of these crimes, as well as the need to address the social exclusion of disabled people and the negative attitudes surrounding their condition.
Disability in Japan Stevens, Carolyn S
2013., 2013, 20130305, 2013-03-05
eBook
Disability and chronic illness represents a special kind of cultural diversity, the "other" to "normal" able-bodiedness. Most studies of disability consider disability in North American or European ...contexts; and studies of diversity in Japan consider ethnic and cultural diversity, but not the differences arising from disability. This book therefore breaks new ground, both for scholars of disability studies and for Japanese studies scholars. It charts the history and nature of disability in Japan, discusses policy and law relating to disability, examines caregiving and accessibility, and explores how disability is viewed in Japan. Throughout the book highlights the tension between individual responsibility and state intervention, the issues concerning how care for disability is paid for, and the special problem of how Japan is providing care for its large and increasing population of elderly people.
How communication technologies meant to empower people with speech disorders--to give voice to the voiceless--are still subject to disempowering structural inequalities.
Disability and New Media Ellis, Katie; Kent, Mike
2011, 20110511, 2010, 2014-05-14, 2011-05-11
eBook
Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of ...protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing.
Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.
Introduction I. At the Crossroads 1. Universal Design in a Digital World 2. iAccessbility from iTunes 1.0 to iPad 3. Building Digital Stairways: Nice View, But What About My Wheelchair? II. How Did We Get Here? 4. We Want You in Our Network: Universal Design V Retrofitting the Web 5. (Physical) Disability Is a Form of Social Oppression? 6. Does That Face-'Book' Come in Braille? Social Networking Sites and Disability III. Where to Next? 7. Avatars with Wheelchairs, But No Virtual Guide Dogs: Disability and Second Life 8. Challenges and Opportunities: The Road Ahead for Disability in a Digital World Conclusion
Katie Ellis is a lecturer in Media and Communications at Murdoch University. A film-critic and cultural commentator, she is the author of Disabling Diversity (VDM 2008). She has mentored filmmakers with disability and published a number of articles on cinema and new media addressing both issues of representation and active possibilities for social inclusion.
Mike Kent is a lecturer in Internet Studies at Curtin University. His current research is focused on disability and the internet. His articles have appeared in Fast Capitalism, Nebula, Online Opinion, AQ – Australian Quarterly and M/C Journal (Media Culture). Dr Kent has taught media studies, cultural studies and e-commerce at universities in Australia and the UK.
In this updated edition, Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames expand their encyclopedic history of the struggle for disability rights in the United States, to include the past ten years of ...disability rights activism.The book includes a new chapter on the evolving impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the continuing struggle for cross-disability civil and human rights, and the changing perceptions of disability.
The authors provide a probing analysis of such topics as deinstitutionalization, housing, health care, assisted suicide, employment, education, new technologies, disabled veterans, and disability culture.
Based on interviews with over one hundred activists,The Disability Rights Movementtells a complex and compelling story of an ongoing movement that seeks to create an equitable and diverse society, inclusive of people with disabilities.
