Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability by Bolt, David;

Short description:

This book provides a multifaceted exploration of changing social attitudes toward disability. Adopting a tripartite approach to examining disability, the book looks at historical, cultural, and education studies, to break down some of the unhelpful boundaries between disciplines so that disability is recognised as an issue for all of us across all aspects of society.

Long description:

Whilst legislation may have progressed internationally and nationally for disabled people, barriers continue to exist, of which one of the most pervasive and ingrained is attitudinal. Social attitudes are often rooted in a lack of knowledge and are perpetuated through erroneous stereotypes, and ultimately these legal and policy changes are ineffectual without a corresponding attitudinal change.

This unique book provides a much needed, multifaceted exploration of changing social attitudes toward disability. Adopting a tripartite approach to examining disability, the book looks at historical, cultural, and education studies, broadly conceived, in order to provide a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the documentation and endorsement of changing social attitudes toward disability. Written by a selection of established and emerging scholars in the field, the book aims to break down some of the unhelpful boundaries between disciplines so that disability is recognised as an issue for all of us across all aspects of society, and to encourage readers to recognise disability in all its forms and within all its contexts.

This truly multidimensional approach to changing social attitudes will be important reading for students and researchers of disability from education, cultural and disability studies, and all those interested in the questions and issues surrounding attitudes toward disability.

'This lively, well-written book deserves a wide audience of students, academics, and professionals because it advances disability studies to the next level and is a reflection of the maturing scholarship of the discipline. ... Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries.' - P.A. Murphy, University of Toledo, in CHOICE, March 2015

"Changing Social Attitudes toward Disability is a fascinating edited volume with contributions from 15 authors, each presenting a well-written and thought-provoking insight into their academic world. The book’s greatest strength is giving an academic reader an opportunity to gain flashes of light and insights from multiple perspectives, all of which are relevant to the task of changing social attitudes toward disability." - Anne Collis, Barod Community Interest Company and School of Social Science, Bangor University, Bangor, UK

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives From Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies  David Bolt  Part 1: Disability, Attitudes, and History  1. Evolution and Human Uniqueness: Prehistory, Disability, and the Unexpected Anthropology of Charles Darwin  David Doat  2. Killer Consumptive in the Wild West: The Posthumous Decline of Doc Holliday  Alex Tankard  3. ‘Beings in Another Galaxy’: Historians, the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Programme, and the Question of Opposition  Emmeline Burdett  4. Disability and Photojournalism in the Age of the Image  Alice Hall  5. Mental Disability and Rhetoricity Retold: The Memoir on Drugs  Catherine Prendergast  Part 2: Disability, Attitudes, and Culture  6. The ‘Hunchback’: Across Cultures and Time  Tom Coogan  7. Altered Men: War, Body Trauma, and the Origins of the Cyborg Soldier in American Science Fiction  Sue Smith 8. The Cultural Work of Disability and Illness Memoirs: Schizophrenia as Collaborative Life Narrative  Stella Bolaki  9. Impaired or Empowered? Mapping Disability onto European Literature  Pauline Eyre  10. The Supremacy of Sight: Aesthetics, Representations, and Attitudes  David Bolt  Part 3: Disability, Attitudes, and Education  11. Ethnic Cleansing? Disability and the Colonisation of the Intranet  Alan Hodkinson  12. Creative Subjects? Critically Documenting Art Education and Disability  Claire Penketh  13. Dysrationalia: An Institutional Learning Disability? Owen Barden  14. 'Lexism' and the Temporal Problem of Defining 'Dyslexia'  Craig Collinson  15. Behaviour, Emotion, and Social Attitudes: The Education of ‘Challenging’ Pupils  Marie Caslin  Epilogue: Attitudes and Actions  David Bolt