1st Edition

Disability, Normalcy, and the Everyday

Edited By Gareth M. Thomas, Dikaios Sakellariou Copyright 2018
    228 Pages
    by Routledge

    228 Pages
    by Routledge

    Many critical analyses of disability address important ‘macro’ concerns, but are often far removed from an interactional and micro-level focus. Written by leading scholars in the field, and containing a range of theoretical and empirical contributions from around the world, this book focuses on the taken-for-granted, mundane human activities at the heart of how social life is reproduced, and how this impacts on the lives of those with a disability, family members, and other allies.





    It departs from earlier accounts by making sense of how disability is lived, mobilised, and enacted in everyday lives. Although broad in focus and navigating diverse social contexts, chapters are united by a concern with foregrounding micro, mundane moments for making sense of powerful discourses, practices, affects, relations, and world-making for disabled people and their allies. Using different examples – including learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, dementia, polio, and Parkinson’s disease – contributions move beyond a simplified narrow classification of disability which creates rigid categories of existence and denies bodily variation.





    Disability, Normalcy, and the Everyday should be considered essential reading for disability studies students and academics, as well as professionals involved in health and social care. With contributions located within new and familiar debates around embodiment, stigma, gender, identity, inequality, care, ethics, choice, materiality, youth, and representation, this book will be of interest to academics from different disciplinary backgrounds including sociology, anthropology, humanities, public health, allied health professions, science and technology studies, social work, and social policy.



    List of figures; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Part I. Disability, Normalcy, and the Everyday -Chapter 1. Introduction: disability, normalcy, and the everyday -Gareth M. Thomas and Dikaios Sakellariou; Chapter 2. Keeping up appearances: family carers and people with dementia negotiating normalcy through dress practice -Christina Buse and Julia Twigg; Part II: Youth, Normalcy, and Disability Futures Chapter 3. The everyday worlds of disabled children -Tillie Curran, Kirsty Liddiard, and Katherine Runswick-Cole; Chapter 4. Pursuit of ordinariness: dynamics of conforming and resisting in disabled young people’s embodied practices -Janice McLaughlin and Edmund Coleman-Fountain; Chapter 5. Worlding the ‘new normal’ for young adults with disabilities -Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp; Part III: Doing Care, Creating Living Chapter 6. Who’s disabled, Babe? Carving out a good life among the normal and everyday -Helen Errington, Karen Soldatic, and Louisa Smith; Chapter 7. ‘I employ a crew that can do life with me’: a young woman’s creative self-management of support workers -Nikki Wedgewood, Louisa Smith, and Russell Shuttleworth; Chapter 8. (Re)negotiating normal every day: phenomenological uncertainty in Parkinson’s disease -Narelle Warren and Darshini Ayton; Part IV: Global Disability Politics Chapter 9. Ethical (dis)enchantment, afflictive kinship, and Ebola exceptionalism -Maria Berghs; Chapter 10. Disability and healthcare in everyday life - Hannah Kuper, Goli Hashemi, and Mary Wickenden; Index

    Biography

    Gareth M. Thomas is a Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. He is a sociologist interested in medicine, disability, stigma, reproduction, and place. His first research monograph – Down's Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic – was published by Routledge in March 2017.





    Dikaios Sakellariou is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Healthcare Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. He is interested in health inequalities, experiences of disability and disablement, and the intersubjective nature of care practices. He has co-authored and co-edited the volumes A Political Practice of Occupational Therapy and Occupational Therapies without Borders (with Nick Pollard and Frank Kronenberg), and Politics of Occupation-Centred Practice (with Nick Pollard).

    'This is a ‘must read’ book that draws attention to everyday life with disability and disablism - across the globe. It crosses social science borders to enrich our understanding of disability diversity in original and informative ways.' - Carol Thomas, Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University

    ‘Sakellariou and Thomas' book is an important emergent approach to disability studies scholarship that is of translational relevance across the social sciences and the applied health professions. It is a fresh new approach that, at the same time, takes us back to disability studies’ very foundations in the critical social sciences engagement with disability. The authors reveal experiences -- toileting, dressing and other obscured but crucial moments of daily life — as both meaningful in highly individual ways and to have shared resonance for disabled people collectively.’ - Pamela Block, Professor and Director, Disability Studies Concentration, Stony Brook University