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Rod Michalko launches into this book asking why disabled people are still feared, still regarded as useless or unfit to live, not yet welcome in society? Michalko challenges us to come to grips with the social meanings attached to disability and the body that is not "normal." Michalko's analysis draws from his own understanding of blindness and narratives by other disabled people. Connecting lived experience with social theory, he shows the consistent exclusion of disabled people from the common understandings of humanity and what constitutes the good life. He offers new insight into what suffering a disability means to individuals as well as to the polity as a whole. He shows how disability...
When Rod Michalko's sight finally became so limited that he no longer felt safe on busy city streets or traveling alone, he began a search for a guide. The Two-in-One is his account of how his search ended with Smokie, a guide dog, and a dramatically different sense of blindness. Few people who regularly encountered Michalko in his neighborhood shops and cafes realized that he was technically blind; like many people with physical disabilities, he had found ways of compensating for his impairment. Those who knew about his condition thought of him as a fully realized person who just happened to be blind. He thought so himself. Until Smokie changed all that. In this often moving, always compell...
The chapters in this book exemplify ways of questioning our collective relations to normalcy, as such relations affect the lives of both disabled and currently non-disabled people."--Pub. desc.
Disability and the Politics of Education: An International Reader is a rich resource that deals comprehensively with the many aspects of the complex topic of disability studies in education. For nearly two decades, global attention has been given to education as a human right through global initiatives such as Education for All (EFA) and the Salamanca Statement. Yet according to UNESCO, reaching the goals of EFA remains one of the most daunting challenges facing the global community. Today, millions of the world's disabled children cannot obtain a basic childhood education, particularly in countries with limited resources. Even in the wealthiest countries, many disabled children and youth ar...
Unravels the ways that blind persons come to understand and live their lives. It shows that blindness is a life worth living and that blind persons must grapple with the question of what kind of blind person they choose to be.
Leave it to a dog to put the “human” back in “humanities” In September 2020, Rod Michalko wrote to friend and colleague Dan Goodley, congratulating him on the release of his latest book, Disability and Other Human Questions. Joking that his late guide dog, Smokie, had taken offense to the suggestion that disability was purely a human question, Michalko shared a few thoughts on behalf of his dog. When Goodley wrote back—to Smokie—so began an epistolic exchange that would continue for the next seven months. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world and the realities of lockdown-imposed isolation set in, the Smokie letters provided the friends a space in which to come together...
These highly personal essays from a range of academic settings explore the palpable moments of discomfort, disempowerment, and/or enlightenment that emerge when we discard the fiction that the teacher has no body. Visible and/or invisible, the body can transform both the teacher's experience and classroom dynamics. When students think the teacher's body is clearly marked by ethnicity, race, disability, size, gender, sexuality, illness, age, pregnancy, class, linguistic and geographic origins, or some combination of these, both the mode and the content of education can change. Other, less visible aspects of a teacher's body, such as depression or a history of sexual assault, can have an equally powerful impact on how we teach and learn. The collection anatomizes these moments of embodied pedagogy as unexpected teaching opportunities and examines their apparent impact on teacher-student educational dynamics of power, authority, desire, friendship, open-mindedness, and resistance.
Like race, gender, and sexuality, disability is a social and cultural construction. Music, musicians, and music-making simultaneously embody and shape representations and narratives of disability. Disability -- culturally stigmatized minds and bodies -- is one of the things that music in all times and places can be said to be about.
A compact, pithy guide to the most popular form of life-writing, Memoir: An Introduction provides a primer to the ubiquitous literary form and its many subgenres.
Values such as ‘access’ and ‘inclusion’ are unquestioned in the contemporary educational landscape. But many methods of addressing these issues — installing signs, ramps, and accessible washrooms — frame disability only as a problem to be ‘fixed.’ The Question of Access investigates the social meanings of access in contemporary university life from the perspective of Cultural Disability Studies. Through narratives of struggle and analyses of policy and everyday practices, Tanya Titchkosky shows how interpretations of access reproduce conceptions of who belongs, where and when. Titchkosky examines how the bureaucratization of access issues has affected understandings of our lives together in social space. Representing ‘access’ as a beginning point for how disability can be rethought, rather than as a mere synonym for justice, The Question of Access allows readers to critically question their own implicit conceptions of disability, non-disability, and access.